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The Circle of Compassion:
A Search for the Soul of Kindness
by Marc Ian Barasch
Reprinted from Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness
by Marc Ian Barasch
"If one completes the journey to one's own heart, one will find oneself in the
heart of everyone else." -- Father Thomas Keating
 When I was in my twenties, my Buddhist teacher tricked me into taking
a vow of universal compassion. Using some spiritual sleight-of-hand I've yet to unravel,
he made it seem I could aspire to a tender concern for everybody, even putting their
welfare before my own.
Fat chance, I'd thought. But in his wily way, he had framed this vow -- the bodhisattva's
promise to live for others -- as a case of enlightened self-interest. It was not,
he told me, a matter of wearing a one-size-fits-all hair shirt. I was taking the
vow for my own good. It would give me some leverage to pry loose, finger by finger,
the claustrophobic monkey-grip of ego; give the heart a little breathing room. By
treating others generously, I might find them responding in kind. I felt I was being
made privy to an ancient secret: To attain your own human potential, be mindful of
everyone else's.
At some point in my vow ceremony, a deceptively casual affair held in a rocky field,
it had seemed as if my vision suddenly cleared. I'd glimpsed, like a sky swept clean
of clouds, everyone's innate okayness. Years later, I still marveled at the spiritual
chutzpah of the liturgy: However innumerable are beings, I vow to save them all.
It was vintage Buddhist bravado -- a pledge to empty all the world's oceans using
only an eyedropper. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I'd planted myself in a millenia-old
tradition that claims you can love all without preconditions, exclusionary clauses,
or bottom lines; that says life isn't quid pro quo, but quid pro bono.
To my surprise, the vow hadn't made me feel obligated, but liberated from my own
suffocating strictures, from the narrowness of my concerns. It was as if I'd been
waiting for a signal, a green light to step onto the crosswalk to the opposite curb;
some goad to be compassionate not out of blind craving for virtue, but because it
seemed the only genuinely interesting thing to do with my life.
Just forming the intention to make myself useful felt salutary, like some fast-acting
antivenin to my snakebit business-as-usual. I had assumed life was about magnifying
myself (for the greater good, of course), but now that seemed like the wrong end
of the telescope: It made everyone else look small. I soon took a job running a residential
therapeutic community in exchange for room and board, surprised at my ability to
care for the walking wounded. I stopped thinking so much about how others had let
me down, broken my heart, failed to anticipate my needs or take my oh-so-unique sensitivities
into account. I began striving to see--and even nourish--other people's possibilities,
receiving in return those surprise concoctions that the human spirit dishes out when
it feels accepted and at its ease.
But there came a point on my journey when I'd stumbled badly and fell far: a dire
illness, an interminable recovery, penury, loneliness, full-on despair. Friends clucked
in sympathy but stepped gingerly over the body. Family didn't do much better. I had
a soul-curdling realization: The people you love (and who ostensibly love you) may
not be there when you need them most. I got through it -- the kindness of strangers
and all -- but I was soon back to squinting at people through my cool fisheye, seeing
their preening vanity, their intellectual shortfalls, their ethical squishiness.
It took time to realize such shortsightedness takes a toll -- let alone that there
was anything I could do about it.
Finding my way back to meditation helped. Nothing like getting a good, long look
at myself (and funny how much I looked like everyone else). I noticed how often my
social trade-offs were more about getting than giving; how many of my thoughts revolved
in geosynchronous orbit around Planet Numero Uno. Inner work is a warts-and-all proposition;
it gets harder to kid yourself. Still, my teacher had insisted one thing was certain:
Despite seeing all the ego's pitfalls and pratfalls, real bodhisattvas make friends
with themselves. Everyone, he said, possessed some worth past quantifying or qualifying,
some value beyond judgment or fine-tuning -- and that included oneself.
To love our neighbor as ourselves, after all, is the great injunction of every religion.
But what does loving yourself mean? It's one thing to say it; another to know it
in your bones. Do I talk to the mirror, whispering sweet nothings? tenderly imagine
a little homunculus inside and pet it, tickle it, scratch it behind the ears? The
spiritual consensus seems to be it's like learning to love anyone: You start by getting
to know them. The side-benefit to this, compassionwise, is that to know yourself
is also to know the person sitting next to you, and the one halfway around the world.
"Read thyself," wrote philosopher Thomas Hobbes. "Whosoever looketh
into himself...shall know what are the thoughts and passions of all other men."
Still, having looketh'd into myself, I can't say I loveth all I see. I have read
myself, and there in oversize type it says: petty, suspicious, greedy, vain, jealous,
lazy, stingy, dull (and that's just on the page; there's more between the lines).
That I also reckon myself to be magnanimous, conscientious, loyal, thrifty, brave,
and intermittently humble is beside the point. It's not enough to offset scourging
self-judgment with a roll-call of compensatory pluses. We have to take ourselves
(and each other) whole. The Dalai Lama points out that the Tibetan term for compassion,
tsewa, generally means love of others, but "one can have that feeling toward
oneself as well. It is a state of mind where you extend how you relate to yourself
toward others." If it's true that what goes around comes around, compassion
is about nothing if not love's tendency to circulate.
And radiate. Alexander Pope (poet of the "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind")
envisioned compassion as a series of concentric circles rippling outward:
"...Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
...Friend, parent, neighbor, first it will embrace;
His country next; and next all human race."
It sounds great. It is great. But for many of us, there's a nagging doubt that this
whole compassion routine could edge into self-effacement -- into loving others instead
of ourselves, giving away the store until the shelves are bare. The usual formula
is first to stockpile some extra self-esteem--then you can afford to be generous.
That isn't quite how the nineteenth-century religious philosopher Søren Kierkegaard
saw it. The command to love thy neighbor, he wrote, had but one purpose: "as
with a pick, [to] wrench open the lock of self-love and wrest it away from a person."
(He said it approvingly, but...oh, great, now compassion will burglarize us.) What
about looking out for number one? Isn't it prudent to follow that flight attendant's
advisory: First place the mask over your own nose and mouth, tightening the straps
to begin the flow of oxygen? We're of no use to anyone if we're passed out in our
seat from hypoxia.
It's a hard balance to strike. If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only
for myself, what am I? There is a growing sense in our society, left, right, and
center, that the balance has woozily tipped; that our obsession with seamless self-contentment
("What I love about Subway is it's all about me!") has occluded our ability
to love each other. Our cultural default setting has become "get your own needs
met." Our psychosocial mean temperature, suggested one recent article, is "people-friendly
narcissism." Our therapeutic model focuses so much on strengthening the ego-self
that it omits what some dissident psychologists call the self-in-relation. One group
of mostly female psychologists has proposed "openness to mutual influence"
as a more reliable barometer of mental health than self-esteem.
But self-esteem remains our all-purpose buzzword, a stock phrase in therapists' offices,
corporate training modules, even elementary school curricula. This is fine on the
face of it: After all, what's the alternative -- self-loathing? Psychologist Abraham
Maslow coined the term itself in 1940 after observing a monkey colony in a Madison,
Wisc., zoo. He was fascinated by the cockiness of the troupe's dominant alphas and
the social benefits they accrued, so reminiscent of socially successful people. His
concept of self-esteem had its origin, then, not as simple self-affirmation, but
as the alpha's great cry of triumphal self-love: I Am Somebody -- and You're Not.
(Maslow's first stab at terminology was "dominance-feeling.") This self-esteem
was more akin to that sense of self that made Sinatra sing how swell it was to be
king of the hill.
What Maslow failed to stress was the social dimension. Even in a primate colony --
especially so -- no ape is an island: Modern primatologists point out that an alpha
animal, contrary to its reputation as solitary lord of all it surveys, is thickly
enmeshed in a social webbing, dependent on the reciprocities of group life. Maslow's
paragon of the "self-actualized" person ("authentic, individuated,
productive," with "a surprising amount of detachment from people in general")
begins to sound less like a social creature than a self-pollinating flower.
Taking potshots at Maslow may be a little unfair. At a time when psychology was obsessed
with what goes wrong in the psyche, Maslow championed the things that go right. He
was an exuberant advocate of human potential when most shrinks spent their 50-minute
hours chronicling pathology. And he did posit that self-actualization would inevitably
lead to responsibility for others. But his emphasis on personal growth as the be-all
helped spawn a national cottage industry devoted to building a better me, some enhanced
self-to-the-tenth-power with its full entitlement of psychospiritual fabulousness.
Not such an awful idea, I suppose, but as the song goes, "Is that all there
is?"
I dropped in on a human potential workshop recently. Plenty of talk about self-empowerment
and self-realization, self-efficacy and peak performance, but compassion didn't rate
a second billing on the marquee. It made me wonder what sort of selfhood we're seeking:
the self that "gets its needs met" but is never fufilled? or the self that
abundantly gives yet is never emptied? Instead of self-discovery, what about other-discovery,
our real terra incognita?
I wonder, too (as a pragmatic question, not a moral one), if this pedal-to-the-metal
pursuit of happiness really does make us any happier, or if we have the whole thing
backwards. "The American way is to first feel good about yourself, and then
feel good about others," notes the Benedictine monk Thomas Keating. "But
spiritual traditions say it's the other way around--that you develop a sense of goodness
by giving of yourself."
Copyright © 2005 Marc Ian Barasch. Permission granted by Rodale Inc. |
| March 2005 |
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