Cultivating Common Sense

Think of your favorite piece of music. Remember what it feels like when you hear that piece. Something deep within you starts resonating. Maybe there comes a moment when it becomes “music heard so deeply that it isn’t heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts” (as T. S. Eliot put it in The Four Quartets). Here you are attuning yourself to music through your sense of hearing; through common sense, you can attune yourself in a similar way to the harmony of the cosmos. Common sense is a sense — just like hearing, tasting, or smelling — and we can cultivate it just as we cultivate our other senses. There are people who have so refined their sense of taste that they can tell in what soil the grapes for a certain wine were grown. Through that sense we call “common,” you can “taste”—in everything you experience — the soil in which all of us are rooted. Every child is born with this sense. It is our birthright as humans.We need only cultivate it.

Cultivating common sense is a lifelong task. Here I will point out three aspects of the task: attuning ourselves to nature, developing a support system, and learning to question authority. But to cultivate common sense is not only a task— it is a lifelong joy. Nothing gives you more joy than when your heart grows wider and wider and your sense of belonging to the universe grows deeper and deeper. It is a healing process. Anyone can tell that our society must be sick by looking at what we are doing to nature: We make nature sick. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can tap into the living spring of still healthy nature and so heal ourselves and society again. By failing to use common sense, we humans have become cosmic outlaws. Our most urgent task is to recover our kinship with nature.

To expose ourselves to nature, it is not necessary to travel to the Grand Canyon or to some Pacific island. What we must change is not our geographic location but our inner attitude. With dulled hearts, we will merely bring noise and pollution to the most pristine environment; yet to alert inner eyes, trees in a pitiful city park or merely the weeds on the empty lots of slums can speak of patience, tenacity, and much that goes beyond words. Sparrows will come to you almost anywhere if you throw them a few breadcrumbs; if you open your heart to these little gray and brown sisters and brothers, they will tell you that you are not alone. Even the caged animals in a zoo, painful as it is to encounter them there, will speak to us if we learn to listen.

As a young man, I wandered one evening into a small zoo, mostly for children, at the southeast corner of Central Park in New York City. It must have been nearly closing time, because there were no other people around and even the animals seemed to be asleep in the recesses behind their cages. In one cage, however, an ancient gorilla was squatting. His forehead was deeply furrowed. Our eyes met. One look, and I stood under his spell. Our silent, motionless interview may have lasted an hour or more. I was too young then to fully appreciate the wisdom he unlocked for me. Now that I am old, I remember this encounter almost every day. Our communication

continues, and I think gratefully of this simian elder as one of my great teachers.

Televised nature programs can be great experiences, too. They can alert us to our kinship with all life, but they are usually fast paced and scientific rather than poetic in their approach. We need to cultivate a poetic, meditative openness to nature. Photographs from a nature calendar may help us learn a deep and quiet looking with the eyes of our heart.This practice attunes us to the cosmic current that pulsates in the depths of every mountain and forest, of the Milky Way, and of the humblest head of cabbage. Our most elevated thoughts and our grandest endeavors will be healthy only inasmuch as we are connected to the life we have in common with that cabbage and with all the rest of the cosmos.

The more exposure to nature makes us sense that we belong to a cosmic family, the more we are likely to feel ill at ease in mainstream society. We look at the forest and see it as a community to which we belong; most people look at the same woods as a commodity that belongs to us.To find at least a few people with whom we can communicate on a common-sense

level will be essential for our spiritual survival. If we are lucky, likeminded friends will strengthen us in taking a commonsense stand. Some of our strongest support may come from people we never meet in person — authors of books, commentators on public radio and television, people we meet via the Internet. We do need the support of others, because we can easily feel isolated in questioning prevailing opinions and policies.

Support does not always mean agreement. Friends also support us by challenging our opinions on the ground of common sense. We must learn to listen not only to the voice of common sense as we hear it, but to the voices of others who hear and interpret it differently. Only this twofold listening can save us from self-deception. How well I am listening with the ear of my heart can best be tested by finding out how well I am listening with the ears of my head. The best test for common sense is common deliberation. Only by producing consensus will common sense be truly common. There is no shortcut to consensus, but even a long and tedious road to it will be worth the effort. Decision by majority vote is to con sensus what marching in parade step is to waltzing. Dancers must listen to the same music; this is why we must question whether it is the same authority we obey.

I was twelve when Hitler invaded Austria, and my teens were overshadowed by the swastika. This taught me early in life to question authority, to ask, “Who says so?” It can still be a helpful habit to ask the question while you listen to the evening news. “Who says so?” In whose interest is it to tell us a particular piece of news in these words and with this perspective? Friends say to me, “If we had lived then, we too would have questioned authority.” Well, can you be sure you would have done it then unless you are questioning authority now? There is no time or place, no situation, in which we can afford to stop questioning to what extent we are in tune with common sense. Questioning basic assumptions is as essential to our safety as checking the launching pad of a rocket is for the safety of astronauts.

At any point in history, we are all like the crew of a spaceship at countdown. In times like our own, the countdown seems even more clearly audible. We are taking off for an unimaginable future. Everything is changing. Common sense had been steering the universe from change to change for vast stretches of time, before we humans ever arrived. We cannot stop change. But we can cultivate common sense so that the changes for which we and our society are responsible will be in tune with the creative force of the universe — call it the Tao, the Logos, or Dante’s “Love that moves the sun and all the stars.”