As much as I like to reiterate conversations that I have been a part of, especially the ones that float around in my brain for days, I am having difficulty with one I had recently. Try as I might I can't find a way to repeat the conversation. Well, first, it wasn't a conversation, it was an email, and secondly, the contents, being what they were, might harm others, even in paraphrase. So I am left with telling you where it cut off and you will have to imagine the back story. The words in the email that caught my attention were "summon compassion."
Jogging on the elliptical I found myself wondering what compassion was and how one would go about summoning it. That conversation you can hear, as it went something like this:
"It's a feeling. Well more like a shared feeling."
"But isn't that just empathy? Is empathy the same as compassion?"
"Right the co- is 'with' right? With passion."
"But isn't compassion more of an understanding?"
"So deeper than empathy, something that transcends the feeling?"
"Good. That makes sense. A profound understanding of.. of what? Feeling?"
"I suppose. Are we compassionate with the truly happy? Or just the sad?"
"The sad I suppose."
"So a compassionate person is one that has a profound understanding of another's sorrow."
"That seems to follow."
"Misery loves company."
"Birds of a feather."
(Pause)
"By that last one, do you mean to say that in order to have this shared feeling you have to have already experienced the feeling and are now sympathizing with another?"
"Hmmn. That doesn't sound right. But it does seem to follow that if you have had a bad experience, you might be more likely to be compassionate with those who are going through the same thing."
"Is that where the 'profound understanding' comes from?"
"Well, it might explain how someone is able to 'summon up' compassion. I mean, if they have had the experience, they would know what the ramification of the experience were."
"True. But , as the Buddha says 'Life is suffering' is it enough to extrapolate that the person is just 'suffering' regardless of why they are suffering and to thus have compassion for them without the intimate details of why they are suffering?"
"Well, would that meet the criteria for having a profound understanding of the feeling?"
"I suppose it depends on how one understands suffering. If you only understand suffering on a case by case basis, then you probably wouldn't have a profound understanding of someone else's suffering unless it immediately related to your own case. On the other hand, someone who has, well, thought a great deal about suffering..."
"You mean like the Buddha?"
"How about saying 'the examined life.'"
"I like that."
"Well if someone has in a thoughtful way come to the conclusion that suffering can be caused in many ways then perhaps they might be more easily swayed by compassion."
"So then, when you find it difficult to find compassion for another, it is because you have not made the connection between their situation and their suffering?"
"I think that is right."
"You make it sound so... intellectual. I think of compassion as sympathy whereas they way you describe it, one would really have to be detached to be compassionate."
"Well, I don't think you have to take on another's pain to know that they are suffering and feel compassion for them. I guess in that way there is a kind of detachment, but by detachment I don't mean distant or aloof, only... objective."
"So compassion is a profound understanding of another's sorrow arrived at by an objective discernment of the nature of suffering and the human condition."
"I think that is right."
"So summoning compassion is an objective discernment or actively thinking about another's situation in place of your own ?"
"Again, I think that is right."
"Well its a good start, but it sounds like a lot of work."
"It always is, it always is."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
"I suppose. Are we compassionate with the truly happy? Or just the sad?"
"The sad I suppose."
Well, there's mudita—it's another one of the four brahmaviharas (like compassion), usually translated as "sympathetic joy." Which can be, if you think about it, just as hard to engender sometimes (it's supposed to be the hardest one in fact). For, in the immortal words of Morrissey, "We hate it when our friends succeed."
Clearly I need access to an elliptical, which is a powerful tool for right thinking!
Okay, what about compassion with/for oneself? Is it possible with your definition?
I've been using the word so much without actively defining it for myself, more just aware of what it isn't for me, it's not patronizing like pity because it's recognizing a common human condition, I like that you got that. And it's forgiveness, though it's a useful step towards forgiveness. Also, I like the detachment part of it, and have this fundamental wish that more people could understand detachment not as something distant or cold, but, more like, seeing things with a kind of proper perspective?
Have I told you lately how awesome I think you are?
Some parenting book I read recently (can't remember which one, but I think it's Playful Parenting) talks about the importance of mirroring joy and exuberance for our children. I realize that mirroring is different than having compassion, but I remembering it sounding a lot like this mudita the un speaks of. And sure enough, it can be a lot harder to summon it up than it is to commiserate over a boo boo or some other kind of suffering. Imagine if, when Scout comes running up to one of us, showing us something she's excited about, instead of nodding our heads and saying, "that's nice sweetie," we started jumping up and down and yelling "That's fantastic!" and really meaning it. Clearly not something that's going to happen all the time, but I think about that passage a lot, and how deflating it must be for kids to hear the "that's nice sweetie" response. I hereby vow to bounce up and down with genuine exuberance more often with our kids. : )
I like that you have the same kinds of conversations with yourself that I do; only you are actually doing something more productive than just getting clean. Mine usually occur in the shower.
I think when I am able to truly feel compassion it is because I have been able to see, as you say, our essential similarity of condition. Existential condition, that is. And when I'm trying to feel compassion for someone I don't like, that's what I go straight to - reminders of the frailties, vulnerabilities, everyday sufferings of being that human person.
But you all have hit on something important about our culture, I think. Why DO we only think about compassion as necessary for the sad? Why aren't we more concerned about sympathetic joy?
Maybe we should all vow to share one another's exuberance more often this year
You know, it crossed my mind for about a second that I was somehow making a mistake by relegating compassion only to sorrow and not to joy, then I went ahead anyway and left sympathetic joy on the cutting room floor. Did I make this choice because I am hardwired culturally to do so? I don't know. When I read the unreliable narrators comments my first thoughts were something like "oh man!" like I had somehow just missed the mark. Oh well, that way it is fodder for another days ruminations...
On another note, To Oleoptene's question pertaining to compassion with/for oneself also deserves a whole entries single consideration. Why? Because I certainly believe that the "definition" fits this category, but compassion for oneself is a many petaled rose, and not, I think, altogether the same. I should say more, but then why would you read my later post, n'est pas?
Alas we come to tmy third and final thought for the morning hour. Compassion for one's enemies. Suffice it to say that I think there is a kind of abstraction that goes on when one begins to feel compassionate, removing the feeling from the context of the specific to a kind of general category that is then reapplied to yet another specific instance, I think that there can be a similar kind of abstraction that happens with people, i.e. you take them out of a specific category such as enemy and then put them in a more general context in which all are viewed sympathetically, such as man or woman or people or some such thing. However, this is merely a mechanical description of an act that I think is really spiritual in nature, really loving ones enemies, that is a whole other thing entirely.
So misery loves company but your happiness is insufferable?
I am going to try to restrain my comments so they don't get longer than the blog entry itself, but the funny thing is I think all of this compassion talk is may be another way of working at the problem of the barrier between internal experience and external experience.
I've been reading Nicole Krauss' lovely novel, Man Walks Into a Room and there is this lovely riff on loneliness, and how in the initial excitement of falling in love it goes away, and when it returns it is worse than it was before, when you at least had hope it would one day go away. So you either settle for that relationship that doesn't ease your loneliness or you flit from relationship to relationship, always searching. As hard as it is for my little optimistic self to admit, that is so completely my experience. And I think that the artistic impulse is a sort of attempt to bridge the barrier between selves, between the internal and external experience, but that compassion is also a bridge, albeit a fragile and ephemeral one.
The most peculiar thing is the exultant feeling I had on reading this riff on loneliness, this "Oh! That's what I've been experiencing!" recognition, not that I am so much more damaged than any other inhabitant of this tiny rock in the backwaters of the cosmos, that somehow it's because of the loneliness that I have to go on singing and dancing, not in hopes that it will magically go away, but as a sort of defiance of the condition, a raging against it to ensure that I never become resigned to it.
Yeah, bogarted your blog to put that out. Sorry for that...
You are all too wise for me today. I can only say that if I ever write a poem again (been saying that a lot lately), it will be called, "I left sympathetic joy on the cutting room floor."
Mostly because, in the midst of writing one of those multi-screen-pages-long blogposts you can't possibly post, I learned that a former student of mine, albeit not one I mentored in any significant way whatsoever, is an incoming Stegner Fellow.
So my eyes are bright green and my compassion reserves are hollowly dry. Add that to the fact that I helped Nicole Krauss get published...yeah, I'm not wise or kind enough to be commenting anywhere today. Love to everyone and happy birthday some more to you—
What is more interesting? That compassion is seldom defined in terms of oneself, or that it is seldom define in terms of sympathetic joy?
Just as compassion for others acknowledges their feelings and behavior, having compassion for ourselves means acknowledging the reasons for our own feelings and behaviors.
I suspect that compassion for oneself works a lot like compassion for another, to the extent that the self is other. I make this assumption based on the belief that the fears and false beliefs that we have absorbed from earlier experiences, earlier years creates a split in our ability to feel sorrow and joy w/o looking at them through the lens of those difficult, even painful (or joyful) feelings and our defensive behavior.
pozzo: The second is never as sweet.
But this is just the armchair view. I will have to think about it more later
Post a Comment