This is a topic that always fascinates me in a spiritual context, and I was interested to see that Andrew Cohen covers it very well in his regular email piece this week. If you want to sign up for his weekly emails, click the link below the quote:

A Deeper Care

Too often, we misinterpret the word “impersonal” as meaning inhuman or not caring. But what you discover when you go beyond the personal is actually a deeper sense of care, unlike anything that you previously had imagined. You realize that your own experience is part of a vast impersonal process that far transcends the personal dimension, and what you begin to care about starts to reflect that deeper and larger perspective, often in ways that conflict with your old way of seeing. Interestingly enough, whenever the experience of care or connection isn’t personal, the ego, which only sees through the filter of the personal, cannot relate to it. In fact, to the ego, this new, impersonal kind of care and connection can actually seem the opposite of what it is. It can appear cold, inhuman, unfeeling. But this is simply because when you have seen through the ego and the whole illusion of the personal dimension, you won’t be responding emotionally to so many of the issues that previously tied you (and everyone else) up in knots. Why? Because they are simply no longer real to you. It does not mean that you have become inhuman; it means that now you are seeing with different eyes and feeling with a different heart. Indeed, in the liberating revelation of impersonality, you discover a deeper and infinitely more authentic dimension of your own humanity.

Andrew Cohen