The amazing and inspring Lama Marut very kindly did a video, expressly for Adventures in Compassion (in the Screen Trade), on a few topics that are near and dear to my heart. Lama Marut recently featured this blog in his newsletter, and it was really exciting for me to hear of his approval of this work, but this interview (with his associate Cindy Lee) is particularly thrilling and informative.
Here are a few highlights - though you should really watch the video to see him deliver his own responses in the way that only he can. So much of what he teaches here is about intention––what do we intend to communicate when we're creating a piece of entertainment?
Cindy asks him if he thinks entertainment can be "Right Livelihood."
"Of course it could. Totally dependent on the intention. What is the intention of the product? Is the product meant to edify or to titillate? Or to exploit?"
"Of course it's possible to use the media responsibly, and a way of helping people, as a way of teaching people compassion, teaching people how to live better lives... teaching people how to relate to others. The entertainment industry has a great possibility of being able to represent other people's lives... which could result in the viewers of those representations having more and more empathy for other people and their lives, getting themselves out of their own skin and feeling what it would be like to be another person."But he warns us of the danger of the portrayal of characters in movies as two-dimensional, like "action figures... with no real lives, no background, no feelings, no family... just stick figures. And then when their heads are blown off we don't feel anything about it because we don't understand that they're human beings."
"If it's just a fancy version of a cartoon there's no compassion, there's no possibility of compassion, no empathy. You have to have a representation of a real person with all the background that we all have as real people to have any empathy for a character."
Cindy goes on to ask him about impermanence, and if portrayal of impermanence in entertainment is useful.
"To represent change as a source of empathy or compassion, that's one thing. To represent change just as change, is no big deal. How else would there be a narrative? ...it depends on what the purpose of the representation of change is.... what's the intention? What's the purpose of the media representation? Is the purpose to titillate, or is the purpose to bring some compassion to the viewer, to bring some sense that what they're watching is another human being just like them?"
So you might think that Marut's tastes tend toward the serious, the sorrowful, or the morose. Not so!
"We have to keep a sense of humor about things, a sense of lightness, otherwise it's just boring and dull and too serious, and that's not helpful.... it's possible to deliver a very very good message, a compassionate message, an empathetic message, in a package that's entertaining, that's interesting, that's funny..."
So what's your favorite show, Lama Marut?
"I like this television show, My Name is Earl, which all about this guy who's just trying to be a good person, he's trying to make amends for the wrongs that he's committed in his life, and it's very entertaining, it's very funny, it's very light, but every episode has a very very strong kind of moral to the story... very useful to be broadcasting a show like that which is teaching people responsibility... that their actions have consquences, that their actions effect other people... the virtue of forgiveness, the virtue of compassion, the virtue of gratitude. These virtues are all packaged up in a very very entertaining form. That's, I think a model."
Marut goes on to point out that we in entertainment have a tremendous responsibility, that the effects of our work go way beyond what we might imagine:
"The entertainment business is hugely influential and should be responsible... what Jon is suggesting, what he's encouraging people to think about is very very important. How can we entertain responsibly without exploiting, without being inured to the violence... the violence on television is awful. I suggest to the people who are watching this that we would not be able to tolerate six, seven, eight years of war, unbroken, had we not been inured to violence because of television. It's just another TV show for us. The Iraq war... the Afghanistan war.. these are just televison shows for us.... because we have been inured to violence, we have hardened our hearts about the suffering of other people who are on the other side of violence. When we're the subject of violence, then we understand it.... that it's not a pleasant thing, that it's an awful things. But when we're the perpetrator of it, or the viewer of it... we become just inured to it. We don't think about it. We don't think that there's another human being on the other side of our violent actions. So to bring some compassion and some intelligence into... the entertainment business, is very important.
Thank you so much Lama Marut, and thank you Cindy Lee!
*
So there I was, not actually giving a crap about anyone else but myself.... worrying about how compassionate I was being instead of cultivating it and practicing it in real life.
Here's the thing: I'm reading Marc Ian Barasch's Field Notes on the Compassionate Life, and there's this whole section on people who give their spare kidneys to strangers. People like Harold Mintz, Joyce Roush and Steve Aman, and hundreds of others, who decide one day that they can save a life by giving away a kidney, and so they do.
I've given blood plenty of times––and it's needed, they tell me––but I have plenty of blood. And when I give away a pint, it replenishes within a short time. But I can't imagine giving away my kidney. Even though, in fact, I have a spare.
I'm not going to get into a deep discussion here about whether or not I should give my kidney away, but I will discuss it further at some point; Barasch's conversations with the kidney donors are inspiring, to say the least.
Barasch also mentions researchers who study Holocaust rescuers, who hid Jews at great danger to themselves and their families, and Barasch draws the conclusion that Living Anonymous Donors have something in common with the rescuers:
"...I began to wonder if the LADs were not the same sort of people. LADs and rescuers alike claimed their performed their altruistic deeds almost choicelessly, because it seemed to them, beyond any risk-benefit calculus or even moral deliberation, the only thing they could do."
So of course, instead of looking at this as inspiring, I started looking at it as proof of my inadequacy. Why am I not one of those people? I don't know if I could give away my kidney! I don't know if I could protect Jews from the Nazis! I kept reading the book and found myself getting more and more frustrated, until I happened upon a bit about Matthieu Ricard, which reminded me what compassion actually is and how it can be cultivated.
If you're not familiar with him, Ricard is sometimes called "The Happiest Man in the World." Though I've also heard Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche called the same thing. Maybe they should fight it out for the title. In a steel cage. Ricard is a former scientist turned Buddhist monk and author, and he's the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama. He's also an astounding photographer; you can read more about him on his website, http://www.matthieuricard.org/.
So Ricard gave this wonderful Ted talk in 2007 about happiness, and what it takes to be happy.
"Now, what then, will be happiness? And happiness, of course, is such a vague word, so let's say well-being. And so, I think the best definition, according to the Buddhist view, is that well-being is not just a mere pleasurable sensation. It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment, a state that actually pervades and underlies all emotional states and all the joys and sorrows that can come one's way. For you, that might be surprising. Can we have this kind of well-being while being sad? In a way, why not? Because we are speaking of a different level.
Look at the waves coming here to shore. When you are at the bottom of the wave, you hit the bottom. You hit the solid rock. When you are surfing on the top, you are all elated. So you go from elation to depression, there's no depth. Now, if you look at the high sea, there might be beautiful, calm ocean like a mirror. There might be storms, but the depth of the ocean is still there, unchanged. So now, how is that? It can only be a state of being, not just a fleeting emotion, sensation. Even joy, that can be the spring of happiness. But there's also wicked joy, you can rejoice in someone's suffering. "
Ricard goes on to discuss how we generally look for happiness in the external and how impossible that quest is, and where the real potential for happiness lies:
"So how do we proceed in our quest for happiness? Very often we look outside. We think that if we could gather this and that, all the conditions, something that we say, everything to be happy. To have everything, to be happy. That very sentence already reveals the doom of destruction of happiness. To have everything. If we miss something, it collapses. And also, when things go wrong we try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often, illusory. So now, look at inner conditions. Aren't they stronger? Isn't it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering? And isn't that stronger? We know, by experience, that we can be what we call in little paradise and yet, be completely unhappy within."
"So now, at the opposite, we know a lot of people who are in very difficult circumstances manage to keep serenity, inner strength, inner freedom, confidence. So now, if the inner conditions are stronger -- of course, the outer conditions do influence, and it's wonderful to live longer, healthier, to have access to information, education, to be able to travel, to have freedom, it's highly desirable. However, this is not enough; those are just auxiliary help, conditions. The experience that translates everything is within the mind. So then, when we ask oneself how to nurture the condition for happiness, the inner conditions, and which are those which will undermine happiness. So then, this needs to have some experience.
We have to know from ourself, there are certain states of mind that are conducive to this flourishing, to this well-being, what the Greeks called eudaimonia, flourishing. There are some which are adverse to this well-being. And so, if we look from our own experience -- anger, hatred, jealousy, arrogance, obsessive desire, strong grasping -- they don't leave us in such a good state after we have experienced it. And also, they are detrimental to others' happiness. So we may consider that the more those are invading our mind, and, like a chain reaction, the more we feel miserable, we feel tormented. At the opposite, everyone knows deep within that an act of selfless generosity, if from the distance, without anyone knowing anything about it, we could save a child's life, make someone happy. We don't need the recognition. We don't need any gratitude. Just the mere fact of doing that, fills such a sense of adequation with our deep nature. And we would like to be like that all the time."
"To imagine happiness as the achievement of all our desires and passions, is to confuse the legitimate aspiration to inner fulfillment with an utopia that inevitably leads to frustration.
Among all the clumsy, blind, and extreme ways we go about building happiness, the most sterile is selfishness.
Even if we display every outward sign of happiness, we can never be truly happy if we dissociate ourselves from the happiness of others."
He says, in a separate entry:
"Usually, we all experience thoughts of loving kindness, generosity, inner peace and freedom from conflicts. But these thoughts are fleeting and will soon be replaced by other thoughts, including afflictive ones such as anger and jealousy. To fully integrate altruism and compassion in our midstream, we need to do more than that. We need to cultivate them over longer periods of time. We need to bring them to our minds and then nurture them, repeat them, preserve them, enhance them, so that they gradually fill our mental landscape in a more durable way.
To arouse loving kindness, one might imagine, for instance, a young child, and feel nothing but benevolence toward that child. When that mental state has clearly arisen in one’s mind, one let it grow and sustain it until if fills one’s whole mental landscape. Then one will simply nurture this state, keeping it present, full and vast. If one does so regularly, the mind will become more easily and naturally filled with benevolence and loving kindness for all, and compassion for those who suffer."
So happiness comes from cultivating some states and not others. Loving kindness, generosity, compassion, inner peace. So what was I doing? Surely not that. I was focusing on comparing my compassion to others. Upset because mine isn't as "good" as someone else's! I think Chögyam Trungpa would have called this "spiritual materialism," which he describes in his amazing book... Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. From Wikipedia, describing this particular brand of spiritual materialism: "psychological materialism."
"Psychological materialism is the belief that a particular philosophy, belief system, or point of view will bring release from suffering. So seeking refuge by strongly identifying with a particular religion, philosophy, political party or viewpoint, for example, would be psychological materialism. From this the conventional usage of spiritual materialism arises, by identifying oneself as Buddhist or some other label, or by collecting initiations and spiritual accomplishments, one further constructs a solidified view of ego."
So instead of actually focusing on compassion and cultivating compassion, I was worried that my compassion wasn't good enough. I was worried about my status, my ranking on the compassion scoreboard, as surely as I would be concerned about my car being nicer than someone else's, or having a bigger TV, or a nicer house. And while I was doing that, nothing was getting done! No children were being fed, no peace was being made, no one was being healed, or educated, or cared for. Because I was busy worrying about my status. Maybe someday I'll get to be "The World's Most Compassionate Man."
Therein lies the challenge, for me at least, and I hope you take something from this too. This is not a race. We're not here to try and prove how compassionate we are. We don't get a badge or a medal or a trophy. Stop keeping score, and focus on cultivating compassion, through whatever means you choose. I meditate. I read. I try hard to wrap my head around the lives of others, and try to understand their unique suffering, which is as real to them as mine is to me.
And then, we do something about it. Meditating isn't enough. Scorekeeping isn't enough. Create something that makes a difference, for someone, somewhere.
Hiya! Sorry for the long delay in posting anything. I'm on vacation with my family in Vermont, and every morning so far, I've been determined to write something. Alas, it hasn't happened until now. I acknowledge that I've been out of integrity; even though I never explicitly promised to write more than once every two weeks, I know that I should be writing more often than I have been. I could blame it on the poor internet connection here, etc. but it's really just my doing. So I apologize, and I'm committed to sharing my thoughts with you at least once a week, if not more.
Besides all the swimming, eating, Monopoly playing, horsey riding, and wine drinking, I've been doing a lot of reading on this trip. Anyone who's been in my office knows I always have a pile of books on my desk that I'm getting to, and I've had a great opportunity while here to catch up.
When the book The Three Laws of Performance by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan came out earlier this year, I read it immediately. As many of you know, I'm a big fan of Landmark Education, and since Steve is one of the head guys there, I knew the book would be full of great insights. So I took the book with me on this trip to reread. I knew there'd be new insights for me personally, but I was also hoping to find a thing or two for the blog.
And lo and behold! Steve and Dave's book is primarily a business book, and the Three Laws are mainly described as they relate to business situations. But one of the foundations of the book is the concept of how things occur to us.
“Consider that when we do something, it always makes complete sense to us. On the other hand, when others do something, we often question, 'Why are they doing that? It doesn't make any sense!' But if we got into the world of that person, and looked at how the situation occurred to him, we would experience that the same actions that we were questioning were completely and absolutely the perfect and correct thing for him to do, given how the situation is occurring to the person. Each person assumes that the way things occur or him or her is how they are occurring for another. But situations occur differently for each person. Not realizing this can make another's actions seem out of place.... Given the different positions that well-informed, intelligent people often take on a situation, there is a significant difference between the objective facts of the matter and the way those facts occur to each of us... we are not saying that there isn't a 'real world.' We are merely pointing out that our actions relate to how the world occurs to us, not to the way it actually is.”
Steve and Dave go on to say that we relate to each other as if “each is dealing with the same set of facts” when in fact we're really dealing with how the facts occur to us.
I recently took a Landmark course on communication, and the course leader led us through exercises to deeply and directly understand this concept. She reminded us that when we believe something to be a fact, it ain't necessarily so.
This way of understanding human behavior isn't new; it's surely at the heart of Landmark's work, and it's a common theme in Buddhist teachings. And this is the heart of compassion; suffering with, deeply understanding another's point-of-view. Psychologist Piero Ferrucci says in his book The Power of Kindness:
“...empathy––which is at first only a simple instinctual capacity to resonate––develops and becomes the capacity to understand other people's feelings and points of view, to identify with them.” [emphasis added]
“However varied and vast our inner world may be, it is still a closed system, ultimately narrow and oppressive. Our thoughts, worries, desires: Is that all there is? Sometimes it seems so. But to step out of this world and enter other ones––the passions, fears, hopes, and suffering of other human beings––is akin to an interplanetary voyage. Yet it is a feat far simpler to accomplish. Closing ourselves to other people makes us imbalanced, whereas participating in their lives makes us healthier and happier. Self-attention of self-focus is correlated with greater depression and anxiety. We know this much for sure: People who are most concerned with themselves and less with others are more likely to feel fearful or unhappy.”
This might seem like a matter of personal choice: Who are you, Jon, to tell me to be compassionate, to cultivate empathy? Who are you to tell me that the world isn't necessarily how it occurs to me? If my facts are right, at worst it seems you might be more anxious, and less happy. That's surely not mine to dictate. But the stakes are higher than you might imagine. Ferrucci continues:
“Training in empathy is perhaps one of the most urgent needs in our educational programs at all levels. Yehudi Menuhin, the great violinist, once made an extraordinary statement in an interview: If German youth had been brought up not only to appreciate the music of Beethoven, but to sing and dance traditional Jewish music, the Holocaust would not have happened.”
And so here's where the arts come in. You, as an artist, or as someone who contributes to the arts, has an opportunity to cultivate empathy with your work. Is it likely that doing so could prevent another Holocaust? Hard to imagine. But we can imagine the effect cultivating compassion can have on an audience and extrapolate.
In a world where there is so much suffering, then, your contribution to the arts suddenly gains urgency. Think for a moment, about where there is suffering in the world, and how the arts––specifically, your work in the arts can contribute, and make a difference.
Signing off for now from beautiful Vermont... stay tuned for an amazing video from Fuse Entertainment manager Richard Demato, speaking on what's possible when an artist comes from a place of true inspiration, having courage in the face of fear.
*
"Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue individual victims whose needy plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become numbly indifferent to the plight of individuals who are 'one of many' in a much greater problem. Why does this occur? The answer to this question will help us answer a related question that is the topic of this paper: Why, over the past century, have good people repeatedly ignored mass murder and genocide?"
Slovic goes on to describe affect, "the positive and negative feelings that combine with reasoned analysis to guide our judgements, decisions, and actions." Affect is simply the "sense (not necessarily conscious) that something is good or bad." It's automatic, and it's fast. And even though we're faced with facts that might lead us in another direction, we mostly make our decisions via "intuitive, automatic, natural, non-verbal, narrative, and experiential" means. That sometimes leads to us making choices that, in the clear light of day, don't seem to make sense. He describes studies that show consistently, that donors are more likely to make a donation that helps a single child, rather than donations that might help many children.
I'm not going to get into great detail about Slovic's work, but it's a great paper and I urge you to take a look for yourself. What's clear from the paper, though, is that our emotional, automatic responses to situations are what drive many of our decisions. In fact, we're likely to use logic and facts (our "analytic" system) simply to support the conclusions we've already made through our "experiental" system.
So what does that have to do with compassion and acting, writing, and directing?
You guessed it––plenty!
While Slovic points out that simple statistics, no matter how enormous, ultimately do not inspire people to take action, "images often strike us more powerfully, more deeply than numbers... we quickly grow numb to the facts and the math." "When it comes to eliciting compassion, the identified individual victim, with a face and a name, has no peer," Slovic says, and he points out many examples thereof including Baby Jessica, who fell into a well in the late 1980's; her rescue was the subject of massive media attention and her rescue caused nationwide celebration.
And this is where we intersect with acting, with writing, with directing. It's tough to convince billions of people to make their decisions in a different way; much of what we do is automatic. Slovic references Barbara Kingsolver, who wrote:
"The power of fiction is to create empathy. It lifts you away from your chair and stuffs you gently down inside someone else's point of view... A newspaper could tell you that one hundred people, say, in an airplane, or in Israel, or in Iraq, have died today. And you can think to yourself, 'How very sad,' then turn the page and see how the Wildcats fared. But a novel could take just one of those hundred lives and show you exactly how it felt to be that person rising from bed in the morning, watching the desert light on the tile of her doorway and on the curve of her daughter's cheek. You could taste that person's breakfast, and love her family, and sort through her worries as your own, and know that a death in that household will be the end of the only life that someone will ever have. As important as yours. As important as mine."
Slovic claims that relying on experiential systems, by using "powerful affective imagery such as that associated with Katrina and the South Asian tsunami" is hopeless. He points out that relying on this method creates the possibility of sensationalism, and requires consistent and powerful action on the part of the media. Slovic advocates clear attention to the facts, to compel governments to take action––in this case, against genocide.
But he himself points out how difficult it is to get anyone to pay attention to facts, to numbers. It is exactly these mechanisms, imagery, narrative, personalization, that artists must wield. And by doing so mindfully, their power is enormous!
By creating real characters, human stories that audiences identify with, we become compelled to take action on their behalf. Save the Children has known this for a long time: we're more likely to sponsor a real child with a real face, than to give money to a general fund for the well-being of children, even though the benefit might be greater.
I often say that in my work as a manager, I'm working my clients to create the world that I want to live in. So many artists want to make an impact with their work, and one surefire way to do it is to create real human beings that audiences automatically feel compassion for. This doesn't mean artists can only work on "issues," films about world tragedies, plays about human suffering. But it does mean that each time a story is told, there's an opportunity to create a space where an audience identifies with another human being's suffering, and is compelled to take action on it.
This might be on the scale of genocide, or it might be on the scale of family dynamics and relationships, or anywhere in between. Reading a paper about the American Dream, man's fear of failure and dreams of success, and family dysfunction doesn't inspire us to look inward. Watching a production of Death of a Salesman might. Hearing facts about addiction and how it can destroy a family is sad, but to watch Long Day's Journey into Night makes us look at our own families with compassion. To hear about 800,000 deaths in Rwanda is horrifying, but to watch Hotel Rwanda hits us in the gut, and inspires us to take action. To hear about millions of deaths in the Holocaust is gut-wrenching, but to read The Diary of Anne Frank, or to watch Schindler's List, or to learn any human Holocaust story through a human narrative makes us want to keep it from happening again.
*
The great mindfulness teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn talks extensively about our relationship to our true nature, and how that relates to creativity, in his book Coming to Our Senses.
"...perhaps you have noticed that the sense of self is telling us all the time that we are not complete. It tells us that we have to get someplace else, attain what needs to be achieved, become whole, become happy, make a difference, get on with it, all of which may indeed be partially true and relatively true, and to that degree, we need to honor those intuitions. But it forgets to remind us that, on a deeper level, beyond appearances and time, whatever needs to be attained is already here, now -- that there is no improving the self -- only knowing its true nature as both empty and full, and therefore profoundly useful.
Knowing that in the deepest of ways, knowing it with the entirety of our being, we can then rest in the knowing itself and act much less self-centeredly in the world, potentially in amazingly creative ways for the benefit of other beings and with an attitude of non-harming and non-forcing. We can do this because we know on some fundamental level, not merely intellectually, that 'them' is always 'us.' This interconnectedness is primary. It is the birthplace of empathy and compassion, of our feeling for the other, our impulse and tendency to put ourself in the place of the other, to feel with the other. This is the foundation for ethics and morality, for becoming fully human -- beyond the potential nihilism and groundless relativism stemming from a merely mechanistic and reductionist view of the mind and of life.
From this perspective, in a very real sense you are not who or what you think you are. And neither is anybody else. We are all much larger, and more mysterious. Once we know this, our possibilities for creativity expand enormously, because we understand something about how we get in our own way and are diminished through our obsessive self-involvement and self-centeredness, our preoccupation with what we think is important but really isn't fundamental."
As I read this, it occurs to me that what Kabat-Zinn saying is something we already implicitly know but rarely acknowledge, and this is the root of what draws us to arts with compassion at their core. That "...we know on some fundamental level, not merely intellectually, that 'them' is always 'us.' This interconnectedness is primary."
The fact that interconnectedness is primary, and that we all implicitly understand that, means that when we see it acknowledged in the arts in different ways, it automatically rings as true to us. It's common sense. How often do we see a character going through something we personally relate to, and find that it moves us.
I watched part of a movie with my wife this weekend. The woman in the film was going through an enormous emotional upheaval, adjusting to her new life as a mother and the shift that caused in her life and in her marriage. And my wife turned to me and said, "here's how I know X is not doing a good job. This is a woman going through something I've gone through myself, almost identically, and I don't feel one bit for her. She's going through the motions."
When I pressed her further about it, later on, Amy said, "It didn't seem real to me and maybe that's because she's not a terribly good actress and she doesn't have anything to draw from. Maybe if you were a good actress you could draw on something else that made you feel powerless in that way and conjure up those feelings in a different situation. But she's never been through that and she's not adept enough at channeling her existing emotions to make it feel real. I don't think you have to be somebody who's done that specific thing in order to portray it but this actress just didn't have the ability to pull it off."
Obviously Amy doesn't speak for the whole world as an audience, but I was surprised to see such a specific example in a major film and to see how this lack of connection was directly by felt by Amy as an audience member. She had a direct relationship to the subject matter but felt nary a whiff of empathy, based on a performance that she perceived as lacking depth.
"There's a deep cost to the world that comes from this kind of behavior. We're suffering, and we're being deprived of the things that bind us, that show us what we have in common, that give us hope."
Imagine someone somewhere watching this film. Possibly a woman in a similar situation, facing a new stage in her life, a shift in her relationship to her husband, maybe coming to grips with what it feels like to be a mother and what that means to her. Or maybe it's something else entirely––maybe it's a man watching the film, who might be affected by a theme of feeling powerless in a family situation, or a teenager watching the performance, who might see his or her own mother or father in this performance, might understand them just a little bit.
Except it doesn't happen. The woman, the man, the teenager, they're all being robbed of the opportunity for connection. Not seeing, or even more importantly, feeling, any real connection to the person on screen, the moment passes, and an opportunity is wasted. The person goes on with their life, not knowing they might've been affected––however slightly or profoundly––and their life continues, untouched.
As I said earlier, when talking about my trip with Save the Children to the Navajo Nation, there is a cost to inaction. When you have an opportunity to make a difference in another's life, and you don't, there is an impact.
"There have been plenty of times when I've thought, I don't have the time, I'm tired, I'm busy, someone else will do it. And on this trip I saw the direct impact of the work Save the Children was doing, on real kids. Just like my own kids. And this relates to the arts in the same way. We can choose to remain in a fog, and rob the world of the real impact we have to offer. Or we can take on compassion in our lives and careers and make a difference."
The amazing and inspring Lama Marut very kindly did a video, expressly for Adventures in Compassion (in the Screen Trade), on a few topics that are near and dear to my heart. Lama Marut recently featured this blog in his newsletter, and it was really exciting for me to hear of his approval of this work, but this interview (with his associate Cindy Lee) is particularly thrilling and informative.which is teaching people responsibility... that their actions have consquences, that their actions effect other people... the virtue of forgiveness, the virtue of compassion, the virtue of gratitude. These virtues are all packaged up in a very very entertaining form. That's, I think a model."
Posts
