I find conceptual exercises useful. Too static and concepts risk ideological anchoring, but allowed to come and go, they can illuminate valuable insights. Concepts are not experience—they are only brokers to experience. Here, I'll share a caveat: I am going to use a concept to elucidate (as best I can) the membranous nature of concepts.

Forgive the circular logic. 

This morning, I was on the back of a Grab motorbike heading to Yev's wonderful upper body workout class. (Grab is Southeast Asia's Uber.) Out of nowhere, a cat darted out onto the road in front of us. We were close enough that the driver had to swerve to avoid hitting her. I presume that the driver has never met this cat before. He didn't appear to have personal feelings for her in any meaningful way. My guess is that, on the whole, the driver was probably rather indifferent to the cat and her experiences. Yet he swerved to avoid hitting her anyway.

To be clear, I don't know his motivation for swerving. For the sake of this exercise, though, let's set aside lofty notions and keep it as unembellished as possible. A collision might have killed the cat, injured the humans, and damaged the bike. Swerving also might have damaged the bike and caused injury, but, in that outcome, the cat likely would have remained unscathed. The last outcome is that swerving produces no injuries and everyone goes about their day as usual. The likelihood of each outcome varies according to the motorbike's speed and distance to the cat. As he approaches the cat, the driver consciously and subconsciously considers the variables and predicts, in a split-second, which outcome will yield the smallest disruption to his particular accounting system. What if the cat had been closer to us, though? The driver might have made a different decision, up to and including running over the cat, if it meant a smaller likelihood of catastrophic injury to the humans. What if the cat had been a snake? A human baby? Likewise different scenarios in which the conditions for a favorable outcome change.

It is important to say that this exercise is not an appeal to value life in all its forms. Instead, I am suggesting that indifference may not be the bad guy we think it is. Moral accounting system aside, indifference tends not to seek disruption. An indifferent person can push a kid out from the path of a car simply because the outcome bears less disruption; a person conceptually entrenched in their own morality or emotions might be less levelheaded. Indifference, as I am using it, does not necessarily imply inaction or someone uncaring about the world, but rather someone not preoccupied with their own conceptual veil. We can use the word detached if it suits better. A detached perspective allows us to engage with a circumstance without the heavy filter of interpretative preference, which may or may not reflect what is actually happening. It's true that swerving to miss the cat could have originated from an emotional outpouring on behalf of the driver toward the cat. It also could have arisen as a simple strategy to prevent unnecessary upheaval in the shared realm of organisms. We can trust this strategy without embellishing it. Indeed, it can be a fairly reliable way to actualize compassion (if that's your thing), perhaps even more so than goodness. Goodness, after all, is relative, manipulable, and seductive. Sometimes, when we think we are being good, we are actually just playing out an idea of what we think is good. How often have you thought that you knew what was best for someone, only to later learn that you didn't? As a concept, goodness can be quantified, which can in turn lead to concepts of moral superiority or moral deficiency in ourselves or others. You can easily see how this can become a recipe for disaster.

I would like to take this exercise a step further and posit that what we perceive to be love or hate often is not love or hate at all, but rather concepts of love and hate. When one organism encounters another in the shared realm, feelings arise. The more time these organisms spend together, the more opportunities there are for feelings to arise. Concepts about feelings invariably follow ("post-processing of sense experience", as I recently heard one teacher describe). Because we tend to regard our concepts as gospel, we often mistake them for static reality rather than seeing them for what they are—partially informed brokers who, unsupervised, tend to stick around past their expiration date. Too invested in concepts, and the ego nets itself a control room—complete with levers and buttons—where it endeavors to finesse experience to its whims. How rigid or malleable a given concept is seems to correlate with how thoroughly it is believed. I'm sure you've heard the adage that love will save the world. It's a good one. We like love. But do have direct evidence that this adage is true? For whom, after all, do we typically reserve our most abhorrent behaviors? If abhorrent behaviors are frequent between two organisms, is it the sensation of "love" that engenders them? Is it the sensation of "love" that "saves" the organisms from whatever damage is wrought? 

This exercise is not a suggestion to abandon concepts, emotions, or anything of the sort. That would be another concept. Concepts are what the human mind does because evolution selected complex thinking as a strategy to maximize survival in Homo sapiens. A mind's thinking-ness is as much an autopilot function as a nose's smelling-ness. Meditation shows you this. The mind is something of a border collie: it wants to be a good girl and it benefits from having a very important job. For less disruption, it helps to learn which job produces which outcome.