Compassion as Foundation
Compassion is under assault in our media, entertainment, and politics. Meanwhile the faceless nature of the internet often encourages even greater levels of meanness and vitriol than would normally occur in human interactions, and this negativity unavoidably spills into other parts of our lives. It is easy to see that compassion and empathy are greatly needed today.
But compassion means something different to every person. It also means something a little different within every tradition, religion, or philosophy. It should be no surprise, then, that compassion have a particular meaning in Spiritual Naturalism or the Mulberry Path.
What is Compassion?
Thomas Merton wrote that compassion is, “the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things”.1 Called Rahmah in Islam, compassion is considered a major trait of God, who they call “the merciful and compassionate”. Hinduism has a principle of doing no harm called Ahimsa and their word for compassion is Daya. In Buddhism there is the notion of wishing a release from suffering in others, called Karuna, and wishing happiness for others – loving kindness – called Metta. The life of Jesus exemplifies the very essence of compassion to Christians. Judaism lists 13 attributes of compassion and leading Rabbi Hillel the Elder in the 1st Century stated that the whole Torah could be summed up as, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow” adding that all the rest is merely commentary on that principle.2
Many people think of compassion as "being nice" or a kind of sentimentality - a gushy feel-good emotional outpouring. Or perhaps they think of compassion as an altruistic sacrifice we make to others at our own expense. People also commonly think calls for compassion means some outward action that gives someone what they want, regardless of any other concerns. This view of compassion means there would be times and places for it, and times or people for whom it shouldn't exist, lest we end up being naive or unjust. But this is not the correct understanding of compassion.
I’d like to invite you to unlearn a bit. Let’s wipe the slate clean of preconceptions about compassion for a moment.
The etymology of the word from Latin is, strictly speaking, “co-suffering”. But more broadly it means “feeling for another” or feeling as someone else feels. To many, compassion means love, concern and caring for all beings. We recognize that compassion is natural to our healthy development as social animals. When we nurture our compassion, we live more fulfilled and meaningful lives because we act in accordance with our best nature as human beings.
But what is the real nature of compassion? Common ideas often include a kind of pathos – a deep suffering that disturbs our equanimity. Yet, the aim of a non-attachment practice is to disassociate our sense of happiness from the ups and downs of our material circumstances. While empathy and compassion are central to development of a character that makes this possible, we will be no better off if we are likewise drug into deep despair by the ups and downs of the material circumstances of others.
Instead, enlightened compassion is an association of others with ourselves, along with a wish to help others just as we act to help ourselves – but without unhealthy attachments, dependencies, clinging, and the suffering that accompanies them. But how to get to this point?
Compassion involves a certain subset of feelings. Feelings are not emotions per se, but a wider group of motivating responses or impulses. Merely knowing something is one thing. But feeling the truth of it is a way of making it intuitive. It is the difference between reading about how to ride a bicycle and the visceral experience of riding, getting your balance, building muscle memory, and feeling first hand what the book describes. It is this skillful means in facing the challenges of the world and our lives which many ancient practices seek to help us develop. And so, getting into this kind of compassion requires cultivating a perception, or keen awareness, to subtleties in and between human beings.
This is not wishy-washy emotionalism. This is more like agape - an unconditional love that has no exceptions or exemptions. It is honing, over time, our perception and natural inclination to respond to the conditions of others as though it were our own.
Why Compassion Makes Sense
1) We are Social Animals:
Human beings, like dolphins or wolves, are social animals, and social animals tend to harbor instincts and proclivities which encourage them to form relationships with others. When these are strained, damaged, or absent, it creates feelings of guilt, anger, jealousy, loneliness and so on.3
Empathy, as the core of compassion, is one of those inclinations we harbor. It can be suppressed through an unhealthy upbringing, or it can be nurtured through a loving supportive upbringing. Even adults, through determined effort, can nurture and improve their sense of empathy. But the vast majority of us do have it. This is the reason why we can all go to the movies and experience emotional sways along with the emotional experiences of the characters on the screen. The fact that these are strangers, and fictional events, make no difference to our simple, automatic empathic responses.
2) Our Physiology:
Neuroscientists have discovered a system of neurons in the brain that allow us to empathize with others by ‘walking in their shoes’ so to speak. These are called mirror neurons.
When we make a certain movement, some of our mirror neurons activate, but also activate in the same pattern when we merely see others make the same movement. Mirror neurons are said to be involved in our ability to “really feel what [we perceive the other] person is feeling”.4
3) The Logistics of Survival:
But is all of this just a silly biological quirk we’ve picked up through happenstance? While we do have our appendix and other vestigial traits, many complexity theorists have been running computer simulations in an effort to understand more about the development of our cooperative behaviors.
In these simulations, various sub units interact and are allowed to evolve different algorithms for dealing with one another. Over time, the more successful behavioral inclinations rise to the top. Similar analyses have been conducted by game theorists many decades before that. Those behaviors that rise to the top tend to include many we might recognize as forgiveness, nicety, and other aspects of compassion.5 In our case, ‘survival of the fittest’ meant ‘survival of the compassionate’.
4) Its Importance to Reason:
There are also aspects of compassion that interact directly with reason. In that regard, objectivity may be the nexus between reason and compassion. As I’m sure many will agree, objectivity is essential to good reasoning and the unbiased handling of information. But objectivity involves the ability to see things from outside our own point of view, and this is where empathy may help provide that wider view. For example, neuroscience has recently suspected that autism may be linked to a problem with mirror neurons.4
Why Compassion is the Foundation of Spiritual Practice
Many naturalists and their organizations have often focused on reason and rationality as the starting point or foundation. Reason is an important virtue and natural faculty, but it is primarily a tool. The ends for which that tool is used depend on our underlying motivations – and that is where the foundation of a philosophy is to be found. Reason and logic are means to an end. There is nothing more or less logical about living or dying; a thriving planet or a smoldering one. These are just different arrangements of atoms, and we can use reason to guide us in whatever our goal is. Reason cannot, by itself, establish any goal. Yet, simply as a matter of fact, living beings seek to survive and flourish.
Rationality leads to a better understanding of our world, but regardless of what is true or false about reality – the simple fact of our coexistence here and now, and the benefits of compassion here and now, are true. The reason we promote rationality is precisely because of its ability to improve the lives of others and ourselves. This reveals that the true foundation of our philosophy is compassion.
As we seen, an emphasis on compassion as key to a healthy life and happiness is supported by the latest science in the fields of psychology, sociology, and neurology. Even computer science has discovered the role of forgiveness, empathy, and mercy in its simulation studies of which behavioral rules seem to rise to the top in naturally selective environments. Clearly, compassion is so central to humanity that it has found its way into the great streams of wisdom throughout history and across the globe. All wisdom begins with compassion, all reason requires it, and all healthy discipline serves it. All other principles of natural spirituality – the application of reason, the pursuit of a flourishing life, the function of ethics, and our role in society – spring from this foundation and serve its ends.
Compassion is not just a nice bit of icing on the cake. It is foundational to spiritual practice in the sense that it is at the core of all efforts to become wiser, to flourish, and to be more conscious. In short, compassion is not just something enlightened people will tend to be. Compassion is the key to enlightenment. That is because it is the natural result of seeing clearly the interconnectedness of all things. The lack of compassion is a blindness - a clear indication that enlightened view is also lacking.
To know we are all connected is simply an intellectual idea. But to feel it and to naturally think of, and respond to, the world in that way requires a deeper kind of shift. As we make progress, how we respond emotionally to our own needs and concerns becomes less and less divided from how we respond emotionally to those of all beings.
How Compassion Works in Spiritual Practice
When we look at the wisdom teachings in those traditions where there is a great degree of useful insights relevant to naturalists, we see some common themes. Often, they seek to remind us of the things we overlook or forget about the world. We forget things like, what is in our control and what is not. When asked, we can tell you, but we don’t actually think and feel that it is so. As such, our inner responses, emotions, and actions don’t therefore produce wise output naturally and without effort. That is something we must mold over time.
Other examples include forgetting about how interconnected and entangled people and events can be to one another; how things that seem permanent are not; how fleeting the present moment is; how short life is; and so on. The vast majority of humans do not actually live as though these things are true, either in the long term or moment to moment. We therefore worry about things we can’t affect, are concerned about what people think about us, and so on.
How, then, do we move from teaching (from mere intellectual assent) to deep intuitive knowledge of these things? Inner transformation of this kind is not only possible, but extremely powerful. One way is through practice. Getting a very internalized, intuitive, grasp on this whole life thing is at the core of such practice. And, by “this whole life thing”, I mean that vast tapestry of causally interconnected, interdependent, ever-changing, impermanent, system. As we get to know it and feel the balance of it in our hands, put our feet on the pedals, and learn to trust our balance, real motion begins.
But the important part is that, as we learn to balance and learn to go further and further, we literally raise our consciousness – we become more conscious of subtle truths about the world. This is why wisdom, understanding, enlightenment, and compassion are all intricately interlinked and necessarily include that enveloping and growing identification of self with the larger community and the cosmos with which it is interdependent. As we make that journey, the outward actions of compassion become less like a ‘do-gooder checklist’ or ethical prescription. They instead appear more and more to us as simply the only natural and sane response. There is great flourishing and joy on such a journey of connection because it includes the shedding away of so many sources of our own internal strife. This too is compassion.
But beware that such an increasingly-perceptive person may indeed become emotionally crippled as the suffering of others becomes too much. But the world doesn’t need our sobbing – it needs our sober help6. This is why such empathy must be matched with the ability deeply understand the source of pathos, be able to watch unconscious micro-judgments arise, and recognize how misjudgments lead to unhealthy emotion. As we get better at having wise and healthy emotional responses, that skill will work both for ourselves and on behalf of those who enter into the category of our expanded self. This is why and how working on our own equanimity will equate to working for the betterment of others. When 'others' and 'me' become one - truly the same thing - then those same techniques for equanimity during my own suffering, will allow me to help others who are suffering without becoming overwhelmed.
Loving Enemies
Is it true that love and compassion can be unconditional? Or is that impractical or even irresponsible nonsense? Sometimes when I speak or write of unconditional love and compassion for all beings I get questions. Some have asked, what about a soldier on the battlefield, or a police officer who must act to protect someone? The reader is often incredulous and suggests having love in one's heart for the opponent in that instance would make assertive action against them problematic. Sometimes they imagine I am suggesting we not act against wrongdoers or seek to protect the innocent.
The miscommunication here comes from a notion of compassion that depends too heavily on, or is measured too much by, external action (or inaction). Further, if one views compassion as a kind of mushy emotionalism, it is easy to see why one might think this would dampen or infringe upon the adrenaline and energy that virtue might demand of us for the sake of the innocent.
I have said before, that we are all family. But some family members can be problematic, untrustworthy, or dangerous. Just as a loving mother may need to call the authorities on a drug addicted son who is endangering the rest of the family, so to may we be called by fate and virtue at any time to act against another of our human family; even harshly or vigorously, and even possibly resulting in harm to them if necessary. Compassion does not demand our naivety or passivity. Therefore, these instances do not represent an 'exception to' or 'suspension of' compassion.
And indeed, we find that the best training of police, soldiers, and pilots is more similar to the methods of the samurai than to an approach of dredging up hateful rage. Such passion is seen as unprofessional, and leads to either abuses or nonstrategic missteps. This is why ancient Stoicism is still taught in military academies to this day. Acting with vigor, keeping calm and focused, and doing what needs to be done without hesitation is one thing - and it is very different from the feeling of using hate as a driving force. There is also a big difference after the fact, between having a solemn approach of doing one's sacred duty, and gleefully delighting in the suffering of one's opponent.
Another root of this kind of question can be an undervaluing of the subjective. People who ask these questions about unconditional compassion may often think, what matters is what you do or don't do. What you are thinking or how you feel as you do it, or what motivated what you do are seen as some kind of personal, private issue that isn't important to the world. This is a consequentialist approach to ethics that is at odds with our approach. As described, subjective experience matters. Even with the same outward actions, the difference between one inner experience and another not only affects the conditioning of our character and our ability to experience True Happiness; but can literally be a matter of life and death.7
The Folly of Selective Compassion
It’s easy to have compassion for those we care about or feel sorry for. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we can be compassionate to one, and not to another. This is because we mistakenly think of compassion as an action - an action that can be dealt out when specific circumstances and people call for it, rather than as an internal and habitual character trait.
Those mirror neurons don’t care whether or not the person on the movie screen is fictional. Instinctive traits aren’t that fine tuned. A person who is cruel to animals can be cruel to people. By the same token, a person who is cruel to enemies can be cruel to friends. Empathy is a habit and every choice we make further shapes that habitual nature - and either nurtures or diminishes a compassionate character.
It’s like a muscle. Being compassionate to friends and loved ones is like using your muscles everyday as you hang around the house. Being compassionate to those who don’t seem to deserve it, is like lifting heavy weights. Those who are happiest tend to be the ‘body builders’ of compassion.
It’s not just about our instinctive emotions and impulses. Compassion is more than just empathy, but also includes a conscious rational commitment based on the logic of compassion. Imagine, if you will, a world in which compassion is dispensed only when it is received and considered deserved. In addition, take note of the fact that human beings are imperfect - imperfect in their knowledge, imperfect in their self control, and imperfect in their fortitude.
It stands to reason that, a decent percentage of the time, a human being will not do what they are supposed to do. They may forget to say “thank you”, they may take out their frustrations on the wrong person, or they might even harbor ill will out of a lack of information, wisdom, or misunderstanding. Of course, there are also hateful people with conscious malintent but the bulk are simply imperfect everyday people.
By a strict justice (eye for an eye) calculus, each time someone acted inappropriately they would be undeserving of compassion. The reactions of others toward them would cause them to deem those others undeserving in return. The total number of incidents in which compassion was transferred between individuals would begin to decrease. In such a case, what we would have is a hole in our boat. Like Hawking radiation quietly leaking out of a black hole, the total mass of our collective compassion would enter into a downward spiral.
So mere quid pro quo is not a workable formula for our mutual well-being. In fact, the computer simulations described earlier show that forgiveness, mercy, and trust are essential algorithms for a sustainable system of cooperation. In other words, we must face up to the fact that there are times when compassion should be given when it is not deserved.
When we combine that logical fact with the fact that our own empathic character can’t be switched on and off but must be nurtured, this should be a well grounded argument for the principle of “love thy enemy”.
I’m not suggesting every bad person out there is simply confused and 'doing the best they can'. Some are as conscious as any of us of the facts and yet harbor ill will, hate, lust for control, etc. In these cases we must resist them however we need to in order to protect the innocent, including sometimes them from themselves. But none of these actions require inner pathos.
In the process of maintaining our defense, we should not become sadistic or cruel in our actions. If we must use aggressive actions, we should do it without taking glee, without blood lust, and without relishing in it or glorifying it afterwards. The very same acts, done in this mindset, will damage our humanity. Rather, these incidents should be taken solemnly and with regret for those who left us no option. When Nature calls us to play a role in birth or death, these are sacred and profound moments. Whether taken swiftly with great force, or gently with great patience - always the right act for the right moment, and always maintaining our love and compassion rather than being driven by hate.
Yes, if anything, it is the police officer and the soldier above all who must learn how to keep compassion even during such actions. This can help maintain professionalism and avoid becoming monstrous. As an added bonus, actions that are not driven by hate or rage are actually more balanced and strategically effective in the heat of the moment.
We should always be looking for opportunities to be compassionate where least expected. This will not only nurture our compassionate natures, but will give us opportunities to reverse downward spirals of cruelty.
External Benefits of Compassion
As I’ve described so far: first, compassion is in our physical build. Second, that build is not incidental, as we are benefited by our own compassion in the logistical sense of survival. Third, it seems that the empathic foundation of compassion may be a necessary element in our ability to think rationally. And these facts work together to justify compassion even when we wouldn’t normally consider it deserved.
In addition to these points, there are also external benefits to compassion toward enemies. Nearly anyone who works with the sick or the needy will tell us that when we help other people, it puts our problems in perspective. We get a better, more existential, conception of our problems – and the good feelings don’t hurt much either. Obviously, when we are compassionate, we might engender the same behavior in others. When we are extraordinarily compassionate, or when we are compassionate when no one would expect us to be, the effects on others toward us can be profound.
Sometimes even small acts of unexpected compassion can be an inspiration to others. To those who haven’t been so compassionate, these acts often serve as abrupt wake-up calls, leading them to reflect on their own character and actions. In either case, we tend to personally benefit from the improved relations.
Consider this:
1) The most profound effects on others often come when acts of compassion are unexpected.
2) Friends and loved ones often exchange compassion so this is expected. The least expected acts of compassion are those toward strangers and enemies.
3) Strangers, even if improved, will usually be gone from our presence and never seen again. Meanwhile, enemies are usually considered such because we encounter them frequently.
Therefore:
The greatest external gains we stand to make, individually,
come from acts of compassion toward enemies.
Many times being compassionate will not engender the same in others. These external benefits require courage and some degree of confidence, since they are by no means guaranteed. Some might call it a “leap of faith” in humanity. I would say, however, that logic, reason, the facts, and even history are on the side of compassion. The odds-makers might be inclined to calculate compassion as the “favored horse” – and it takes no faith to bet on the favored horse.
This isn’t to say that we should make ourselves a sacrifice to others. This would be a misunderstanding of compassion. In fact, it would be an under-utilization of compassion. That same universality of compassion that suggests it be applied to enemies and friends alike, also means that we ourselves are included. This is why I prefer the phrase "compassion for all beings" over "compassion for others". "All beings" includes yourself, as there are no 'others'.
But wherever we are compassionate, the personal benefits to us can be great. Our personal lives are improved by our better relations, as well as the good feelings we experience as fulfilled social beings. In general, a compassionate person lives a happier, more content, life than a person consumed with animosity, bitterness, and hatred – regardless of whether or others deserve it.
Compassion, then, would seem to be an important component of the good life, eudaimonia, or flourishing. Secular Humanist Paul Kurtz would call it achieving excellence.8 There are many other terms.
This may seem a selfish way to look at compassion. But, indeed, all ethics eventually come down to self interest on some level. If not, then there would be no reason for individuals to concern themselves with them. But there’s selfishness, and then there’s selfishness. Many philosophers refer to it as “enlightened self interest” – not to be confused with the shallow vice of selfishness.
Instead, this sort of notion comes out of a profound realization. The realization that being compassionate and ethical is good for us. Compassion is beneficial to its user’s emotions, psyche, rationality, network of allies, and world. It is not an obligation or a commandment, so much as it is an opportunity for wise practice. Compassion is good medicine.