"The Charter of Compassion is a cooperative effort to restore not only compassionate thinking but, more importantly, compassionate action to the center of religious, moral and political life. Compassion is the principled determination to put ourselves in the shoes of the other, and lies at the heart of all religious and ethical systems. One of the most urgent tasks of our generation is to build a global community where men and women of all races, nations and ideologies can live together in peace. In our globalized world, everybody has become our neighbor, and the Golden Rule has become an urgent necessity."
And here it is, in its entirety:
"The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.
It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others - even our enemies - is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.
We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings, even those regarded as enemies.
We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community."
Thanks so much to Aimee Mullins who clued me in to the upcoming launch of the Charter for Compassion. The Charter was wished for by religious scholar Karen Armstrong, as her Ted Prize, in 2008. It comes out of Armstrong's observation that every religion, without exception, shares a central tenet:
"The Charter will proclaim a principle embraced by every faith, and by every moral code. It is often referred to as The Golden Rule....The Golden Rule requires that we use empathy -- moral imagination -- to put ourselves in others' shoes. We should act toward them as we would want them to act toward us. We should refuse, under any circumstance, to carry out actions which would cause them harm."
Check out Armstrong's speech wherein she made her wish:
Here are a few highlights from her speech:
'What I've found, across the board, is that religion is about behaving differently. Instead of deciding whether or not you believe in God, first you to do something. You behave in a committed way, And then you begin to understand the truths of religion. And religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action; you only understand them when you put them into practice.
Now, pride of place in this practice is given to compassion. And it is an arresting fact that right across the board, in every single one of the major world faiths, compassion -- the ability to feel with the other in the way we've been thinking about this evening -- is not only the test of any true religiosity, it is also what will bring us into the presence of what Jews, Christians and Muslims call "God" or the "Divine." It is compassion, says the Buddha, which brings you to Nirvana. Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. And once we get rid of ego, then we're ready to see the Divine.
So the traditions also insisted -- and this is an important point, I think -- that you could not and must not confine your compassion to your own group: your own nation, your own co-religionists, your own fellow countrymen. You must have what one of the Chinese sages called "jian ai": concern for everybody. Love your enemies. Honor the stranger. We formed you, says the Qur'an, into tribes and nations so that you may know one another.'
And here's an extraordinary video teaching us about the Charter:
Please go to http://charterforcompassion.org/ to learn more about the Charter, and to find out how you can get involved in spreading compassion throughout the world.
*
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.
How cool is Aimee Mullins? I've gotten to know her just a little bit lately, and she's completely blown me away with her artistry, her strength, and particularly, her compassion.
Check this out from her recent TED talk:
I was speaking to a group of about 300 kids, ages six to eight, at a children's museum, and I brought with me a bag full of legs, similar to the kinds of things you see up here, and had them laid out on a table, for the kids. And, from my experience, you know, kids are naturally curious about what they don't know, or don't understand, or what is foreign to them. They only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way, and maybe censors that natural curiosity, or you know, reins in the question-asking in the hopes of them being polite little kids. So, I just pictured a first grade teacher out in the lobby with these unruly kids, saying, "Now, whatever you do, don't stare at her legs." But, of course, that's the point. That's why I was there, I wanted to invite them to look and explore. So I made a deal with the adults that the kids could come in, without any adults, for two minutes, on their own. The doors open, the kids descend on this table of legs, and they are poking and prodding, and they're wiggling toes, and they're trying to put their full weight on the sprinting leg to see what happens with that. And I said, "Kids, really quickly -- I woke up this morning, I decided I wanted to be able to jump over a house -- nothing too big, two or three stories -- but, if you could think of any animal, any superhero, any cartoon character, anything you can dream up right now, what kind of legs would you build me?"
And immediately a voice shouted, "Kangaroo!" "No, no, no! Should be a frog!" "No. It should be Go Go Gadget!" "No, no, no! It should be The Incredibles." And other things that I don't -- aren't familiar with. And then, one eight-year-old said, "Hey, why wouldn't you want to fly too?" And the whole room, including me, was like, "Yeah." (Laughter) And just like that, I went from being a woman that these kids would have been trained to see as "disabled" to somebody that had potential that their bodies didn't have yet. Somebody that might even be super-abled. Interesting....
...the conversation with society has changed profoundly in this last decade. It is no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency. It's a conversation about augmentation. It's a conversation about potential. A prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore. It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space. So people that society once considered to be disabled can now become the architects of their own identities and indeed continue to change those identities by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment. And what is exciting to me so much right now is that by combining cutting-edge technology -- robotics, bionics -- with the age-old poetry, we are moving closer to understanding our collective humanity. I think that if we want to discover the full potential in our humanity, we need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths and those glorious disabilities that we all have. I think of Shakespeare's Shylock: "If you prick us, do we not bleed, and if you tickle us, do we not laugh?" It is our humanity, and all the potential within it, that makes us beautiful.
For commentary we go to the amazing Zanders, Rosamund and Benjamin, talking about "being with the way things are" and "speaking in possibility" in their spectacular, amazing, thrilling, and uplifting book The Art of Possibility:
"Often, the person in the group who articulates the possible is dismissed as a dreamer or as a Pollyanna persisting in a simplistic 'glass half-full' kind of optimism. The naysayers pride themselves on their supposed realism. However, it is actually the people who see the glass as 'half-empty' who are the ones wedded to a fiction, for 'emptiness' and 'lack'... are abstractions of the mind, whereas 'half-full' is a measure of the physical reality under discussion. The so-called optimist, then, is the only one attending to real things, the only one describing a substance that is actually in the glass.
The practice of being with the way things are can break the unseen grip of abstractions created as a hedge against danger in a world of survival, and allow us to make conscious distinctions that take us in to the realm of possibility––dreams, for instance, and visions. Imagine if we were to faithfully whisper the immortal words of Martin Luther King, Jr. 'I have a dream....,' as a preface to our every next remark. Speaking in possibility springs from the appreciation that what we say creates a reality; how we define things sets a framework for things to unfold."
Why do I bring this up? Because Aimee's description of the kids' reactions to her many pairs of legs was 1) simply a reaction to the way things are as opposed to a story about how things are i.e. there is a problem here, there is a shortcoming. And, 2) the kids were easily coached by Aimee in to speaking in possibility. She did so by getting two minutes alone with the kids before the adults were able to come in and "censor their natural curiosity" and asking them a question that immediately sparked their imaginations.
Aimee enrolled the kids, which the Zanders talk about later in the book:
"Enrollment is the art and practice of generating a spark of possibility for others to share.... we have at our fingertips an infinite capacity to light a spark of possibility. Passion, rather than fear, is the igniting force. Abundance, rather than scarcity, is the context."
Again, what does this have to do with compassion?
A whole let, let me tell you.
Compassion makes one able to see the limitless possibility in anyone. The Zanders talk about Michaelangelo having said that "inside every block of stone or marble dwells a beautiful statue; one need only remove the excess material to reveal the work of art within." By being truly compassionate, by refusing to judge, by paying attention to what is rather than our story about it––there's something wrong here––we're able to notice what's actually possible for another, whether physically, or in the words and thoughts they have to offer.
So film, for example, gives us an opportunity to notice this, to dwell in possibility rather than in limitation. Watching a historical account of a small time lawyer who rises to free India, for example, in Gandhi, or an aging professor who's played the field for his entire life and suddenly, unexpectedly, finds himself in love in Elegy, or in films starring actors other than Ben Kingsley, one realizes the humanity of others as we see their journeys on screen.
In Elegy, for example, Kingsley's character David Kepesh is utterly sure of himself and his game. When he begins to seduce Consuela (the ridiculously beautiful Penélope Cruz) we immediately understand that the moves he's putting on her are moves he's put on a thousand others. It'd be easy to judge him, but the film––Kingsley's acting along with Cruz, Clarkson, Hopper, Sarsgaard, the wonderful script and direction––allows us to join him on his journey, and gives us an opportunity to understand someone who's been sure of himself his whole life, and then finds himself questioning the whole thing. We see the possibility in Kepesh, we want him to have love and happiness, we know it can be true for him if he'd only allow it to happen. We, as an audience, want to chip away the marble hiding the work of art within.
"Within all of us there is the capacity to be anyone or anything... There is an Iago and a Romeo within all of us, there is that lover, and there is that sociopath."
Benjamin Zander recently gave a TED talk on music, passion, leadership, and possibility:
"I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people.And of course, I wanted to know whether I was doing that.And you know how you find out? You look at their eyes.If their eyes are shining, you know you're doing it... So if the eyes are shining, you know you're doing it.If the eyes are not shining, you get to ask a question.And this is the question:Who am I being that my players' eyes are not shining?We can do that with our children too.Who am I being that my children's eyes are not shining?That's a totally different world.
Now, we're all about to end this magical, on-the-mountain week,and we're going back into the world.And I say, it's appropriate for us to ask the question:Who are we being as we go back out into the world?And you know, I have a definition of success.For me it's very simple. It's not about wealth and fame and power.It's about how many shining eyes I have around me."
So maybe it's a good opportunity to ask yourself: who am I being that my children's eyes are not shining? Who am I being that my clients' eyes are not shining? Who am I being that my audience's eyes are not shining? Consider that everything you do, say, or even think has an impact, and creates an opportunity to awaken possibility in others.
By focusing your work, and your life on compassion, you create an opportunity to awaken possibility in others. Perhaps, to imagine themselves in love, in spite of the stories they've told themselves. To imagine hope, happiness, and humanity where they'd previously thought none. To imagine themselves having something to contribute, when they might have previously considered themselves worthless.
And by refusing to focus on compassion, by mindlessly ignoring it, you're costing the world something huge.
Aimee Mullins, and the Zanders, are awakening opportunity, and creating shining eyes all around them through their tremendous compassion.
Edoardo Ballerini recently shared his thoughts with us on listening; this was part of a longer conversation that we cut into bits separated by topic. I thought Edoardo's point-of-view on listening made a whole lotta sense, so much so that I've taken some pretty dramatic steps to improve my own listening which I'll share in a moment.
Renny Gleeson recently shared his his point-of-view on our culture of availability during a very funny TED talk this year.
Renny talked about the tactics and strategies we use to furtively check our emails and texts while in various social contexts. Check out the video, it really makes a point. My favorite tactic shows up at about 1:35 - the "love you, mean it."
Renny says that when we're standing with someone and looking at our BlackBerry or iPhone, we're saying, "you are not as important as literally almost anything that could come to me through this device."
It's the exact opposite of being present, and without genuinely being present to another, it's impossible to imagine being compassionate to them. How can you be compassionate when you're not listening? When you're saying, as Gleeson says, "what's happening here, now, isn't as important to me as what could be happening anywhere else."
So this has everything to do with Edoardo's talk about listening. Edoardo said:
"We spend most of our lives and days I believe with assumptions about the world around us... especially as the years go by you get a little older, you think you know how things work, you think you know what somebody's going to say to you or what they mean by something, and we stop listening. We stop listening to our friends, our partners, the people we work with, the random person walking down the street, we just kinda shut everything out. The skill of listening... allows you to let go of yourself, understand where somebody else is coming from."
In thinking about Gleeson's talk, and Jon Kabat-Zinn's work, and my daily doses of Thich Nhat Hanh, and with the help of a few of my friends, I'm cutting down my email, instant message, and Facebooking dramatically. How can I be compassionate if I'm not paying attention? If you've been on the phone with me, you know what I'm talking about. We're in the middle of talking about something, and then I pause... maybe respond with a noncommittal uh-huh, and then come back to our conversation as though nothing has happened. But what you probably intuited was that I was taking a brief peek at an email or an IM, and for that moment, I wasn't there with you, I was somewhere else. Doing something else.
Something that was apparently more important than actually talking to you.
So for the past two weeks I've shut down my email except for specific times of day, when that's all I'm doing. I'm not talking on the phone, I'm not in a meeting. I'm just catching up on and responding to emails. I've abolished IM'ing entirely. In the past, when I was on the phone, one of our assistants would alert me to an incoming call, and I'd tell them what to do via IM, while I remained on the original call. I don't know how I never noticed before that this requires a significant amount of brain energy, that while I'm iChatting, I'm not actually in the original conversation!
The same thing applies to when I'm at home: specific times of day for email, no furtive BlackBerry usage. Do I really want to send my wife and kids the message that anything coming through this device is more important than being here, right now, with you?
Wish me luck. All in the name of cultivating compassion.
Moving on to Edoardo's second video, which we actually recorded at the same time as the first. Don here kindly cut the videos to pieces so that we could discuss them by topic.
Edoardo talks about compassion, and how "art, in general, is rooted in compassion."
"As an audience member I think the things that fail, be it a painting or a movie... or whatever it may be, are the ones that you walk away from thinking that didn't actually say anything to me, it didn't actually mean anything to me, it didn't try to understand me, it didn't try to explain the world that might be helpful to me."
Again, fundamentally, Edoardo's pointing out the obvious: that without compassion, which requires listening, it's hard to imagine how an artist would be able to connect with an audience.
I recently visited the Navajo Nation in Arizona as part of a trip organized by Save the Children. The areas we visited were extremely poor and remote. We were told the average family income there was well below $20,000 annually, and the unemployment rate was currently 56%. One of the Save the Children staffers traveling with us told me the landscape in some of the dusty towns we visited reminded her of trips she'd taken to the poorest regions of Africa.
This was a trip connected to my work as a manager; I was traveling with a client who's involved with Save the Children as a supporter and spokesperson. So, naturally, I started to think about what I experienced there and how it related to compassion in the arts.
Of course, having a celebrity publicly bring attention to a cause is a powerful way to make a difference for that cause. And I'm thrilled that we were able to bring attention to the amazing work Save the Children is doing in the Navajo Nation and worldwide.
But how did this visit directly inform what we've been discussing here: compassion, as it relates to work in the arts, and how it helps to create the most extraordinary work possible, the work with the greatest impact, and how it helps to give one the happiest life possible?
In that respect, I was particularly struck by two observations. The first was very simple:
• The families we visited were fundamentally no different from my own. I was profoundly and immediately present to the fact that the parents we visited wanted their children to thrive, the same way I want my children to thrive.
“Whether people are beautiful and friendly or unattractive and disruptive, ultimately they are human beings, just like oneself. Like oneself, they want happiness and do not want suffering. Furthermore, their right to overcome suffering and be happy is equal to one's own. Now, when you recognize that all beings are equal in both their desire for happiness and their right to obtain it, you automatically feel empathy and closeness for them. Through accustoming your mind to this sense of universal altruism, you develop a feeling of responsibility for others: the wish to help them actively overcome their problems. Nor is this wish selective; it applies equally to all. As long as they are human beings experiencing pleasure and pain just as you do, there is no logical basis to discriminate between them or to alter your concern for them if they behave negatively..... Because we all share an identical need for love, it is possible to feel that anybody we meet, in whatever circumstances, is a brother or sister. No matter how new the face or how different the dress and behavior, there is no significant division between us and other people. It is foolish to dwell on external differences, because our basic natures are the same."
These people we encountered were beautiful and friendly, but the lives they live are very different from the life I live, and the life I share with my family. And what was clear to me, and present in an extraordinary was was just that: they want what I want. We are the same.
This may seem obvious, but for me, personally, I'm not always 100% aware of this fact. I would venture to guess that's how most of us exist, with occasional flashes of awareness. Here's author and psychologist Daniel Goleman from a recent TED talk:
“The new thinking about compassion from social neuroscience is that our default wiring is to help, that is to say, if we attend the other person we automatically empathize, we automatically feel with them. They're these newly identified neurons, mirror neurons, that act like a neural WiFi, activating in our brain exactly the areas activated in theirs. We feel with automatically. And if that person is in need, if that person is suffering, we're automatically prepared to help.... but then the question is, why don't we? The simple fact is that if we're focused on ourselves, if we're preoccupied as we so often are throughout the day, we don't really fully notice the other.”
We don't really fully notice the other. So by being present to the fact that the people I was meeting were fundamentally no different from my own family, no different from me, I was momentarily shaken out of my fog, and I briefly understood the necessity for compassion. I am often and ordinarily preoccupied, but being in this unique circumstance shifted my awareness. Context is decisive.
Shantideva said, in The Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life:
"When happiness is equally dear to others and myself, then what is so special about me that I strive after happiness for myself alone?"
So how do we create this awareness in our day-to-day lives? This sense of compassion for every living being we encounter? As Goleman says, we're preoccupied, we don't notice it when it's right in front of our faces. How many times has each of us stepped past a homeless person on the street, someone stricken with tears on the subway?
This awareness is exactly what the arts can provide. That each of us is fundamentally the same as each and every human being on the planet, each wanting happiness, each wanting to avoid suffering. And, as Goleman says, this is our natural way of being; we're hardwired to be compassionate. Maybe that's why it feels good, maybe it's a product of evolution, the same way we naturally think puppies and children are cute and we instinctively want to take care of them.
And it's our natural inclination to compassion, to connectedness, to humanity, that attracts us to this work in the arts. When we see work that comes from a place of compassion, we're naturally brought to that awareness, of our essential human "sameness," and it feels good.
To clarify:
The arts can break through our usual fog and provide access to our natural tendency towards compassion,
We are attracted to work with a foundation in compassion, because it feels right. We share our inherent needs with everyone else on the planet, and seeing that recognized on screen, on stage, or on paper makes us feel with automatically.
The second observation I had on this trip was this:
• There is a cost to inaction.
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.
This is what I said in an earlier posting, talking about work that was mercenary, uninspired, and bereft of compassion:
"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.
And where does that lead us? To a world full of entertainment created by the uninspired. Sure, there are exceptions, but in a world where artists are being told to focus on business strategy, those exceptions are sure to become rarer and rarer."
So here it is, the call to action. Taking on compassion in your work, in the arts or in your daily life, is the key to the most extraordinary career possible, the most extraordinary life possible, it allows you to make the most extraordinary impact possible, and it's the key to the happiest life possible.
"When you begin to understand the suffering of the other person, compassion will arise in you, and the language you use will have the power of healing. Compassion is the only energy that can help us connect with another person."
"Ultimately, the reason why love and compassion bring the greatest happiness is simply that our nature cherishes them above all else. The need for love lies at the very foundation of human existence. It results from the profound interdependence we all share with one another. However capable and skillful an individual may be, left alone, he or she will not survive. However vigorous and independent one may feel during the most prosperous periods of life, when one is sick or very young or very old, one must depend on the support of others...
...It is because our own human existence is so dependent on the help of others that our need for love lies at the very foundation of our existence. Therefore we need a genuine sense of responsibility and a sincere concern for the welfare of others."
I thought it might be helpful to have an expert's opinion on what compassion is before I start showing you all the different ways it manifests in the arts. So here's the brilliant Dr. Robert Thurman from a TED talk, on compassion––it really fits with what we're talking about here:
Where compassion comes is where you surprisingly discover you lose yourself in some way, through art, through meditation, through understanding, through knowledge, actually... knowing your interconnectedness with other beings, you can experience yourself as the other beings, when you see through the delusion of being separated from them. And when you do that, you're forced to feel what they feel.
the Dalai Lama says that "when you give birth in your mind to the idea of compassion, because you realize that you yourself and your pains and pleasures are finally too small a theatre for your intelligence, it's really too boring...."
Today, the Charter for Compassion launched, as the fulfillment of Karen Armstrong's 2008 Ted prize. Here's why it was created:
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