STEP TWO:

COMPASSION FOR OTHERS
 

The Buddha defines compassion with such clarity. Compassion, he says, is sympathetic joy and sympathetic sorrow – sorrow over another’s sorrow and delight over another’s delight.  

  This is the stuff of profound teaching. It is sacred for its homely truth.   

   These ancient understandings can seem abstract but when we live by them they are vivid, warm, sometimes intimate.  

 "How far you go in this life," writes George Washington Carver, "depends on you being  tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and   tolerant of the weak and the strong, because one day you will have been all of these."   

  Sympathy is grounded in the fact that we, or someone we love, did or will experience the same thing as those we take care of. It’s just a matter of time before you or a loved one is ill, perhaps hospitalized. One out of two men and one in three women will die of cancer. We know, don’t we, it’s just a matter of time before you or someone you dearly loves dies.  

  We diminish our own hearts if we deny the jeopardy that is the common truth of being human and mortal.   

     Sorrow and joy are the fabric of the everyday, renewed with each new life experience.   "Joy and woe are woven fine / A clothing for the soul divine" writes William Blake. They are the raw material out of which a compassionate life is discovered and lived.  

    If we live our lives consciously – that is to say with the intent of extending compassion to ourselves and everyone we meet – then all that we are and do is the act of weaving.  

    This weaving is an act of joy as is opening to another’s sorrow. 

Meeting sorrow we are freed from our self-preoccupation  which is where our suffering renews itself.  

    Compassion is, in fact, joy.  

    We hold our experiences of sorrow and joy as stories and these stories  instruct our souls in the range of experience that makes every human life a common and blessed thing.   

    The work of anyone who seeks to awaken compassion  involves gathering his or her own stories like seeds. They hold the possibility of sprouting and in time perhaps bear fruit for nourishment or flowers for beauty.     

    We all know sympathetic joy.   

    Your friends HIV test comes back clean, your sister had her first child and she’s a doll, the lump in your aunt’s breast turns out to be benign, your cousin finally got out of a very bad marriage and she’s starting to smile again.  

    I emphasize suffering not to deny the sheer blessed fact of being alive but because we would rather deny suffering. But the denial of suffering is a machine that itself generates such suffering!   

    Joy that relies on the denial of suffering is a superficial and fragile fiction. Eventually it will be undone. Misery can be hidden away in the shadow of an overly optimistic culture, but when it is brought out into the open as the common ground of suffering, it  can awaken  compassion.   

    In this sense, linking your personal suffering to that of others becomes a gift to you and through you, a gift to them.  

    A few examples.  

    Roland has AIDS, and will likely die soon. He’s only thirty-five.   

    I lost my friend Charlie, a Vietnam vet who worked with the criminally insane, to AIDS when he was the same age. My friend Alberto had AIDS too. A month before Alberto died I did a Tarot reading for him and of course he picked up the Death card. He  was so relieved to talk about it openly. All of his friends in his large gay community had lost loved ones and it was unbearable to them that it was Albertos turn. "It’s time," he said.   

    When I bathe Roland, I think of Charlie and Alberto.  

My youngest  brother, Paul, was psychotic. Mad, he wandered off into the New Mexico mountains and died there. Every young psychotic could be my brother.   

    Carl is homeless, in his early thirties, an addict and diabetic, cellulitis oozing on his left foot, soon to be an amputee. What broke him so? I was homeless for three years as a  teenager. I’ll know how to love him remembering how fierce and cold it can get.  

  Each of these stories of my friends and loved ones is intimately real to me, but when linked to another’s suffering it is no longer mine.  They are now not a burden but an opportunity for connection, which offers a kind of freedom. A naïve individualism infects the Western world, so much so that we imagine freedom to be a lonely, even alienated thing. The kind of freedom I speak of here is not independence but interdependence, the vibrant community of we who sustain one another and sometimes set one another free beyond the edge of our own precious but small life.   

    Clutching at personal suffering amplifies and distorts it.  

    Sympathetic joy and sorrow delivers us into a lived understanding of living in the human community.  

We walk through the life that we’ve lived even as we walk through whatever comes our way, the two meeting each other in a field of sympathetic sorrow and joy. Here we can see sorrow and joy as the possibility of compassion that lives within the stories of our lives and the lives we bear witness to.  

    The spirit of kindness is deathless. Perhaps you’ve met it in moments but it existed long before your birth and will persist long after your gone. It is the bedrock from which we all spring, the

God that is love and the love that is God.  

Those who can meet another’s joy with joy, those who have transformed a portion of their suffering into compassion are walking a very old path. 

  Many have walked this way.    

Below is a video of sympathetic joy, a common story of the reconciliation between loved ones after a long separation. All of us have experienced this and because of that we participate in the joy of compassion.  

STEP THREE:

RADICAL EMPATHY

     John Howard Griffin’s book, Black Like Me, exemplifies what Tibetans call  dakshen nyamje :"equalizing and exchanging self and other."  I call dakshen nyamje radical empathy.  Griffin, a white man, had his skin color changed with a pharmaceutical,  shaved his head and arms and traveled through the deep south as a black man during the height of the civil rights movement.  I write of Griffin as metaphor. There is a profound education of the heart when one slides from ones own point of view to the perspective of another.  

     In my early twenties, a passionate and earnest feminist, I became a housewife.  My first wife, Marsha, was a speech therapist with elementary school children and I was a high school dropout.   

When we had our daughter it was most sensible that I stay at home  with Nicole and learn the arts of bottle, diapers, potty training, the terrible twos and getting a meal on the table.   While Nicole napped I’d read feminist literature and was disciplined in my efforts to understand the mind of the "other half."  

Dakshen nyamje  rhymes with the Cherokee proverb that you can’t understand another until you’ve walked three moons in their moccasins.  

Radical empathy follows through on the question, "what if it were I or someone  close to me who is suffering so?"  

Amber is twenty-five and has leukemia. She loves the theater and at her bedside there is a photo of her in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For the moment she’s undone by a stem cell transplant, her gums bleeding, asleep on ativan. My daughter is Amber’s age and I whisper this to her father when I bring him a cup of coffee. A swift, silent understanding.  

   Nothing more need be said.  

   This is radical empathy.  

Mrs. Brown just had a mastectomy, as did my wife, and she is painfully self-conscious of her flat left side. Such was the rapport between us that I borrowed from my love of my wife’s beauty.

I laughed, "The running joke with my wife is that women with two breasts have come to look a little unnatural to me." Mrs. Brown confessed that she seemed to have more trouble with her mastectomy than her husband.  

"Borrowing from my wife’s beauty" was radical empathy.  

  Radical empathy: equalizing and exchanging self and other,  Ones own story is not privileged over another’s.    

Professor Glen Hougan of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design created an "empathy suit" that vividly allows the wearer the experience of radical empathy with the elderly as movement, sight, hearing and breathing becomes impaired. Watching this video I couldn’t help remembering walking the streets with my 90 year old friend, John Seeley, those years I was gifted with the tailor made empathy suit of multiple sclerosis. I recall being the ‘gimp,’ crazed with steroids and walking slowly to a counter to rent a video. There were half a dozen people behind me and the teller was most impatient, rude actually, as I slowly, slowly looked for my ID and more slowly counted my change. The spirit of  radical empathy was with me – for those debilitated as I was but also for the teller.  I recalled the many times as a hospital nurse with a person newly diagnosed with a stroke and suffering from expressive aphasia.  I was then the ‘teller’ – impatient, suffering not to ‘appear’ rude, having half a dozen other patients to attend to – all being easily understood. 

STEP FOUR:

LIVING COMPASSION

"No self and no other" is how Glaser explains the mysterium, the (non) vision that is living compassion.  I will try to describe it though  the lived truth is outside of language. Glaser merely says,

"The self-other axis cannot be separated from the no-self – no-  other axis if our compassion is to achieve full expression. Both are equally true, but taken alone, each is false. Self and other, and no-  self and no-other, must be understood as co-existing and inter-  dependent realities if we hope to find the grail of compassion."  

    Just as self-compassion done for real slips into compassion for others, radical empathy can give way into the spaciousness and clarity of living compassion.  

     "To study Zen is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things," says Dogen Zenji.  

     Across cultures living compassion reverberates from "not I but Christ in me," and the Muslim fatiya of forgetting oneself in God’s will. I and Thou  momentarily drops away and one is amidst the forever plural truth of living beings, loving them unconditionally.   

     Unconditional love is another way of expressing living compassion.  

     In this, one is enlightened by all things. You are no longer self-  consciously kind towards another – you step forth as compassion   un-self-consciously. You are fully identified with the process of compassionate activity.   

     You know when you have entered into living compassion when the profound gift nature of the loving act reveals itself.  You are not compassion if you are expecting anything in return.   

     Living compassion  is the essential nature of human freedom.  

     And living compassion is itself pure gift.  Zadie Smith describes it precisely: "The moment when the ego disappears and you’re able to offer up your love as a gift without expectation of reward. At this moment the gift hangs, between the one who sends and the one who receives, and reveals itself as belonging to neither."            

      Compassion as a presence – as presence – is most relevant here. The person  who meets this or that situation compassionately is vehicle for this quality that the bottom line of which is not personal. The spiritual practice of living compassion requires that the self step aside. It is radically and blessedly simple, and its experience extraordinarily ordinary. Compassion is the environment that one is in.  One is alert to its presence, available to being its vehicle but one doesn’t for a moment  possess compassion.  

The imp in me writes in the margins: "Bodhisattvas are numberless I vow to recognize them."  

    When I met Lewis I was not well. I’d just returned from Africa and my body and soul were in the African time of my friends – which is to say a slowness not at all compatible with what is required to endure a twelve-hour shift as a hospital nurse. I took to the poison of course – half a dozen cups of coffee – thinking it would help me meet the tasks at hand.  

      No go. 

      I was in a dream, agitated, the other staff members spinning around me like so many drunken dervishes. And so when I was told at 3 a.m. that I had an admit,  I was less than enthused.

Nonetheless, when I came to the door of his room I took a deep   breath and sighed a hopeless, exhausted prayer, "Make use of me."  

    Lewis was fifty-five years old with Downs syndrome. His head was a lopsided melon bulging in front, his hands and feet curled up and a wheelchair at his bedside because he couldn’t walk.  

His elderly mother had brought him to the hospital because he had a nasty infected abscess in his left foot.  

     Admitting Lewis, I got a little of his story – very little, very sparse. His father had died recently and it was not altogether clear how long his mother would live. And then? An institution, I suppose, but it wasn’t the content of his story that touched me so much as his inscrutable manner. The lack of self-pity or melodrama could certainly be read as a "cognitive deficit" but the indefinable nature of our interaction left me stranded between  interpretations.   

      An imbecile? A holy one? Neither or both? I simply could not read him.  

     "You are a remarkable man," I told him later as I cleaned his

wound, laid strips of wet saline gauze across it, and wrapped it in Kerlix dressing.  

     "Thank you," he replied.  

     Did he understand what I meant? I left his room feeling put back together again, grateful and humbled by a humble soul.  

     Where was the spirit of kindness with Lewis? In him? In me?       

Or hovering between us in the neon glare as he told of his father’s death while I tended his wound? It was my meeting with Lewis that convinced me that the spirit of kindness is indeed a spirit, for I  could not locate it but was nonetheless healed by it. The closest I can get is to say that the meeting itself healed me of my fragmentation. Lewis’s story carries light, gentle, and  lucid, and through the simplicity of two men meeting across worlds I learned that compassionate activity itself is medicine. I was incoherent before we met, and was rendered whole. I could not find the thread until we received one another.  

     Lewis drew something out of me that was new and unanticipated, and I’ve tried to fold the lessons into the day-to-day life of living compassion inside and outside the hospital.  

     To approach another person, each interaction with quietly stated intent, hopeful, hopeless but reaching towards being available to kindness. Yes – to keep the faith with the intent.  

     And then we meet – I to Thou.   

     In this life the spirit of kindness "bloweth where it listeth." One can be responsive to  its presence but cannot control it. One can only be hospitable to it, alert to its movement in oneself and others in whatever situation.  

     And one can be attentive to the crazy discipline of being available as its vehicle. This is a fierce and glorious path. Fortunately, there are many teachers and, as they say, "a  teacher touches infinity." It is for us to recognize them, discern their teachings, and live by what we learn.  

______________________________  

      With Lewis the self-other axis was illuminated up by a third – the spirit of kindness – and with that there was an aware self-  forgetting. The thought of me being compassionate toward him would be simply false. He and I met in the environment of compassion, radiant and fresh.  

     My time with Lewis adds a twist of paradox to Shakespeare:  

     The quality of mercy is not strained.   

     It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven  

     Upon the place beneath, it is twice bless’d  

     It blesses him that gives and him that takes  

     Lewis and I were thrice blessed because the spirit of kindness allowed us for a few moments to extend and receive mercy from each other.  

     Self and other are not abolished by living compassion. They are contained within selflessness but they also lend body and ground to selflessness. They are necessary to one another, interdependent truths.   

     The sacred nature of plurality is honored  but in the meeting of two, the Hasidic Jews say, an angel is born.    

 The mysterium of living compassion is in this light of presense which I tried to express with the story of Lewis.

In this light love is made visible. 

With the craft of compassion, for we forever return to loving this peculiar self made in Gods image and love him or her unconditionally.  True love does not divide self from other and the mandate of living love sees no one unworthy of love.

Living compassion is loving the self and the other selflessly.

The opportunity to love is always now, the place this very place.

From now and from exactly where you are – withhold nothing.

Follow the contours of this arc (of your heart) --  loving yourself and daring to love all you meet, dare even to live compassion --then the craft of generosity will become the vibrant truth that you live for.

T.S. Eliot writes: 

We shall never cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time. 

And what possible video to complete this video essay?

No image of the Imageless God, no name of the Nameless One, can possibly complete what is without end.

I leave instead this post script for those who know this familiar place "for the first time."  

No man or woman is an island.  Islands themselves don’t float hither and thither on the ocean disconnected from the submerged landscape at the bottom of the sea.

Self-compassion likewise relies on the submerged ground of our common humanity and this submerged ground is what links self-kindness with kindness for all we meet.