On becoming more compassionate — practical guidelines

During a recent TED talk delivered a couple of weeks from the Charter for Compassion launch, religious scholar Karen Armstrong reminds us of a fact that regrettably is still not entirely obvious to all of us: the centrality of compassion in all the major world faiths, and ultimately as the basis of all morality.

For getting us all back in touch with compassion, she urges us to revive the Golden Rule: Always treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.

For years I’ve been feeling frustrated because as a religious historian, I’ve become acutely aware of the centrality of compassion in all the major world faiths. Every single one of them has evolved their own version of what’s being called the Golden Rule.

Sometimes it comes in a positive version — “Always treat all others as you’d like to be treated yourself.” And equally important is the negative version — “Don’t do to others what you would not like them to do to you.”

How we got to where we are

But before we go into the practical issues of how to revive the Golden Rule in our personal lives and our global community, it’s important to understand how we got into our modern mess of moral confusion.

According to Armstrong, part of the problem is human nature:

But… you’d never know that [compassion] was so central to the religious life. Because with a few wonderful exceptions, very often when religious people come together… they’re arguing about abstruse doctrines or uttering a council of hatred or inveying against homosexuality…

Often people don’t really want to be compassionate. I sometimes see when I’m speaking to a congregation of religious people a mutinous expression crossing their faces because people often want to be right instead. And that of course defeats the object of the exercise.

As discussed in my previous post, wanting to be right all the time is simply inevitable for human beings.

We’re biologically wired for it. It’s an instinct that helped us survive back in the days when we were subject to the forces of natural selection; but in modern life, it creates more problems than it solves.

There are also deep cultural reasons that led religion to loose its focus on compassion and the Golden Rule.

In her earlier TED Prize wish talk where Armstrong argues for the creation of the Charter for Compassion, she points out that

To my astonishment, when I began seriously studying other [religious] traditions, I began to realize that … the word “belief” itself originally meant to love, to prize, to hold dear. In the 17th century, it narrowed its focus… to mean an intellectual ascent to a set of propositions: a credo.

“I believe” — it did no mean “I accept certain creedal articles of faith.” It meant: “I commit myself. I engage myself.” In the Qur’an, religious opinion — religious orthodoxy — is dismissed as “zanna”: self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of… but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian.

In this light, religion is not about believing things. It’s about behaving in a certain way:

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… religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action; you only understand them when you put them into practice.

How to become more compassionate

Just doing it

Action is then the key that will revive our emotional connection with the Golden Rule.

Practicing diligently, compassion will slowly but surely produce its transcendental magic on our character:

People have found that when they have implemented the Golden Rule as Confucius said, “all day and every day,” not just doing your good deed for the day and then returning to a life of greed and egotism… you dethrone yourself from the center of your world, put another there, and you transcend yourself.

And it brings you into the presence of what’s being called God, Nirvana, Rama, Tao.

In a related talk recorded at the Chautauqua institution for the Charter of Compassion, Swami Dayananda Saraswati agrees with Armstrong, and urges us to act compassionately even if at first it doesn’t feel much natural:

To discover compassion, you need to be compassionate… You cannot learn swimming on a foam mattress and enter into water. You learn swimming by swimming…You learn cooking by cooking, having some sympathetic people around you to eat what you cook.

And, therefore, what I say, you have to fake it and make it. (Laughter) You have to act it out. You have to act compassionately.

Expanding our moral imagination

Relying on willpower alone for becoming truly compassionate is not enough. We need techniques that act against our subconscious resistance to compassion, which unfortunately, happens to be as much a part of human nature as judgmentalism and our obsession with being right.

Also during a TED talk, Robert Wright explores the the biological roots of compassion and the Golden Rule.

First off, compassion is built in our genes through the principle of kin selection:

…. the basic idea of kin selection is that, if an animal feels compassion for a close relative, and this compassion leads the animal to help the relative, then… compassion actually winds up helping the genes underlying the compassion itself.

So, from a biologist’s point of view, compassion is actually a gene’s way of helping itself.

So while it is good news that compassion is in our genes, the bad news is that kin selected compassion is naturally confined to the family.

Fortunately, we’re endowed with a second kind of evolutionary trait that biologists call reciprocal altruism: compassion leads you to do good things for people who then will return the favor.

And while reciprocal altruism is ultimately self-serving and doesn’t bring universal compassion by itself, it has given people an intuitive appreciation of the golden rule:

… you can go to a hunter gatherer society that has had no exposure to any of the great religious traditions, to ethical philosophy, and you’ll find… that they believe that one good turn deserves another, and that bad deeds should be punished.

And evolutionary psychologists think that these intuitions have a basis in the genes… That’s close to being a kind of built in intuition.

But not even something quite close to a built in intuition makes us fully compassionate beings:

…in everyday life, the way we decide who we’re not going to extend the Golden Rule to… is through a rough and ready formula: if you’re my enemy, if you’re my rival… if you’re not my friend, if you’re not in my family, I’m much less inclined to apply the Golden Rule to you.

We all do that… For example, people from Gaza wouldn’t want to have missiles fired at them, but they say, “Well, but the Israelis, or some of them have done things that put them in a special category.”

The Israelis would not want to have an economic blockade imposed on them, but they impose one on Gaza, and they say, “Well, the Palestinians, or some of them, have brought this on themselves.”

But moral imagination is also part of human nature. And religious leaders have the power of helping people expand their moral imagination to places where it doesn’t naturally go:

… religious leaders are good at reframing issues for people, at harnessing the emotional centers of the brain to get people to alter their awareness and reframe the way they think… They are in the inspiration business.

It’s their great calling to get people all around the world better at expanding their moral imaginations, appreciating that in so many ways they’re in the same boat.

Expanding our moral imaginations is not the work of religious leaders alone.

Karen Armstrong points out that reflecting deeply upon the negative version of the Golden Rule, “Don’t do to others what you would like them to do to you,” should help us do the trick:

Look into your own heart. Discover what it is that gives you pain. And then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever to inflict that pain on anybody else.

This sounds like material for a five-minute reflection exercise similar to the one I propose for becoming less judgmental in my previous post.

Meditation

Meditation also can help us expand our moral instincts out of the confines of family, friends and allies.

Many people swear by the power of guided meditations that focus on compassionate visualizations, but in my experience mindfulness meditation, and even more traditional approaches that seek to empty the mind of all thoughts, have a profound effect of calming the never-ending demands of the ego, of removing the self from its central place in our psyche, and therefore facilitate the emergence of compassion.

I have been practicing traditional Taoist meditation for about a year now — no wonder I all of a sudden went through a consciousness explosion of sorts that boosted my sensibility towards meaning, truthfulness, and ultimately compassion; and triggered my fascination towards these subjects.

Physical exercise

The Eastern traditions also embrace the idea that physical exercise, specially in the form of the martial arts, Yoga, etc., have an impact on our character.

These are in part considered as forms of meditation, but in my experience with practicing Tai Chi Chuan for as long as I have been meditating, there is a subtle difference between the two activities.

In the West, we also have a strong intuition that physical exercise is not only healthy, but that it makes us better persons. It boosts our moods and energizes us.

We glorify the Olympics and the Soccer World Cup as major events that celebrate our common humanity — even if the underlying sports are very competitive, they unite us in a quasi-religious, transcendent experience.

Actually, Argentines swear they have seen The Hand of God intervene in one of the best goals in the history of Soccer

This idea fits nicely with Karen Armstrong’s view that action is the most important requirement for learning how to be compassionate: we become more compassionate not only by performing acts of compassion, but also indirectly through doing meaningful work — such as invigorating, health-enhancing physical exercise.

Build an appetite for knowledge

Karen Armstrong also advocates during her TED talk for education that teaches students how to expand their moral imaginations:

[Educators] are crucial in helping to dissolve some of the stereotypical views we have of other people… I’d like youth to get a sense of the dynamism and challenge of a compassionate lifestyle. And also see that it demands acute intelligence, not just a gooey feeling.

In my opinion there is yet another sense in which education can helps us become more compassionate. There is a great need to rescue the value of philosophy, the great works of literature, and other subjects that are not immediately practical and therefore tend to be under-represented in basic education programs.

But these are the subjects that are truly inspiring, that have the power of imbuing people with a sense of awe and fascination with knowledge for the sake of knowledge that has an impact on personal development.

As Bertrand Russell put it in his short but powerful classic “The Problems of Philosphy”:

…philosophy has a value (perhaps its chief value) through the greatness of the objects which it contemplates, and the freedom from narrow and personal aims resulting from this contemplation… The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action and emotion.

The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable.

Travel

Traveling has a tremendous capacity to change us for the better, not least because it forces us to embrace the otherness of people foreign to our culture, to put ourselves in their shoes and understand their world.

And putting ourselves in other people’s shoes is the first step towards empathy, kindness and compassion.

I’ll never forget an incident that had a huge impact on me while visiting my dentist in Jordan, where I was living during the 2006 Lebanon war.

There was a TV in the room switched on an Arab news channel that suddenly started transmitting the raw images of the latest Israeli bombings. My conversation with the dentist stopped abruptly, and we both fixed our attention on the monitor.

Watching for 30 minutes the gut-wrenching images that usually don’t make it to Western news channels would have probably been enough.

But what truly changed forever my interest and views on the whole Arab-Israeli conflict in a way that no amount of news, books or lectures could have, was the expression of pain, of deep anguish, on my dentist’s face.

He became a sort of transfixed automaton whose hands were still doing the dentist’s job, but whose whole being was in Lebanon with the children, the mothers and the elderly assassinated by the bombs.

I couldn’t understand his incessant mumbling in Arabic. But I definitely felt his anger and his pain.

Advocating globalization

Wright encourages us in his TED talk to see the globalization glass half full and appreciate that there are very real reasons why it can be a force towards international harmony, and ultimately towards compassion:

Any form of interdependent, non-zero sum relationship forces you to acknowledge the humanity of people. And the world is full of non-zero sum dynamics. Environmental problems, in many ways, put us all in the same boat.

I think there’s evidence that this non-zero sum connection can expand the moral compass… if you look at the American attitudes toward Japanese during World War II… at the depictions of Japanese in the American media as just about subhuman, and look at the fact that we dropped atomic bombs… without giving it much of a thought. And you compare that to the attitude now, I think part of that is due to a kind of economic interdependence.

Rabbi Jackie Tabick, the first woman in the UK to be ordained in the Jewish faith, is also optimistic about this effect of globalization:

…in the mdern world, with the environmental movement, we’re becoming even more aware of the connectivity of things, that something I do here actually does matter in Africa… And… that my needs sometimes have to be sublimated to other needs.

[Compassion] entails understanding the pain of the other. But even more than that, it means understanding one’s connection to the whole of creation… that there is a unity that underlies all that we see… hear, and feel. I call that unity God.

Affirming the charter for compassion

A very first, basic step you can take for the sake of compassion is to visit the Charter for Compassion’s website, launched by Karen Armstrong and TED, and join the thousands of people around the world who have affirmed the charter.

I just did. And it definitely felt good.

Tagged as: Compassion, Globalization, Happiness, Personal development, Religion, Spirituality