What Is Common Sense?

You have heard the old saying, “Common sense is anything but common,” and there is some truth to it. We don’t have to look far to find ample proof: Much of what is said and done in our world is certainly not based on common sense.Yet, how do we become aware of this — except by using the common sense we have? We do have it; we just fail to follow it.The language we use shows that we know this. A friend may grab you by the shoulders and exclaim in exasperation, “For heaven’s sake, use common sense!” Doesn’t this imply that you’d have all the common sense you needed, if only you would use it? What is uncommon is not common sense, but willingness to live by it.

Why is this so? What is our problem? Well, when we talk about using common sense it sounds as if we need only apply

our mind to it the way we apply a wrench to a leaking pipe; this puts us on the wrong track. Truly to have common sense means no less than living by it, breathing it as we breathe the air shared by all living beings.We must sense what is common before we can think common-sense thoughts. Can we expect common sense to get into our heads unless we open our hearts, breathe deeply, and get a sense of what we all have in common?

To witness life-in-common you need only look at some little stretch of hedgerow or woods: how the trees share their bark with mosses and lichens; how the bushes, herbs, and flowers interact with one another; what a complex give-andtake connects them with the soil, its mulch, minerals, and micro-organisms — with insects, spiders, worms, and other creeping creatures, with birds and animals, with wind and rain and sunlight and mist. A vibrant common sense animates the whole.

Let’s not make this image too romantic, though. The harmony we find in nature is different from our wishful thinking; the lion is not about to lie down with the lamb — not even the robin with the earthworm, or the cat with the robin. “Food chain” is too antiseptic; it makes us forget the stark facts: living creatures live by killing and eating each other. Nature is one big eat-and-be-eaten. But why not call it a banquet— a wedding banquet,if you will.While creatures feast on others, they mate with their own kind. Every single flower in the meadow is a lavish display of innocent sex in its naked glory — before a cow eats it up. The hum and buzz of it all is the music of one great wedding feast. A common harmony guides the steps of each creature in this fierce but joyful dance of all with all.

All, except us humans. We are the only awkward ones, the wallflowers at this dance. We are unique in nature, and this is a great gift, but it becomes our downfall. We tend to confuse the truth that we are different with the illusion of being sepa- rate.This dulls our sense of the common rhythm and makes us fall out of step in the great dance.

Simple people have less of a problem here. I am not referring to simpletons; someone like His Holiness the Dalai Lama provides an example of genuine simplicity that is quite compatible with a high degree of sophistication. What gets in the way of simplicity is not sophistication but self-importance, with all the complications it creates. The more lightly we take ourselves, the more we leave the narrow confines of our little egos behind and enter the wide-open spaces of our true selves. Men and women who expand themselves in this way find common ground and great inner freedom. Rid of pretense, they seem to breathe more easily.They radiate a sense of being at home in the universe and everybody feels at home with them.They speak a universal language; anyone can understand them. A Swiss proverb even claims, “If you have common sense, you can talk to cattle.”

It is a gift to meet people who are fluent in the language of common sense. I remember one of them from my childhood: our hunchback neighbor, Frau Schliffsteiner. She certainly could talk to cattle; she could talk to goats and dogs and cats, to pigeons and sparrows, to toads and to the potted geranium plants on her windowsill, to the seedlings in her garden bed. Above all, she could talk to people of any kind — from the village bum to the schoolmaster of our two-room school (and he

was far above everyone; he could even play the piano). In her simplicity, she treated all people as family members, and her family quite naturally included the animals and plants. She seemed to know their secrets. She knew which herbs made the right tea against a bellyache and which leaves made your finger heal quickly when you had cut yourself. In olden times, they might have called her a witch, but surely she was a good witch — and a sensible one.

Her neighbors would sip coffee with her and talk and talk about all that weighed on their hearts and minds.They always felt lighter afterwards — and it wasn’t because of her coffee; that was a sorry brew out of the few coffee beans she could afford.What she gave to those who came to her was a sense of belonging: she let them breathe the healing air of common sense. After all, healing on any level — mind, body, soul, spirit— is, as a Tamil proverb puts it, “Medicine one-fourth, common sense three-fourth.”

Common sense brings about healing because it is more than a way of thinking; it is a way of living, a way of acting, a way of doing what makes sense — of doing it spontaneously, unselfconsciously, effortlessly.You experience a glimpse of this when you “hit the sweet spot” in jogging, typing, dancing, or whatever the activity may be: suddenly you are “in the flow” and everything happens smoothly in the right way and at the right moment. Now imagine being able to stay “in the flow,” to maintain this attitude of self-forgetful spontaneity.Wouldn’t the vigor and ease of “the sweet spot” continually keep your spirit aglow, your soul at peace, your mind alert, and your body healthy? Few may be able to attain so high a goal, but all of us can strive for it.

A lifetime may not be long enough to attune ourselves fully to the harmony of the universe. But just to become aware that we can resonate with it — that alone can be like waking up from a dream. At the dawn of Western thought, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus recognized this: “The waking have one world in common,” he wrote, “sleepers have each a private world of their own. We should not act or speak as if we were asleep.” The African Bantu say it with more zest in a proverb: “There are forty kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense.”

“Although the Logos is common to all, most people live as if they had each their own private intelligence,” Heraclitus lamented. And he added: “We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all.” Lao Tsu used the word Tao for this guiding principle “that brings the people of the world into harmony of heart.” We need our own term and we do have an excellent English phrase for it: common sense — the inner guidance we have in common with all and that alone enables us to act in ways that make sense.