Connecting with Compassion

My last two posts were about a negative view and a positive view of choice and behavior. I find that I am extraordinarily drawn to the negative view. It seems to have quite a hold over me. I find myself feeling beaten down by the idea that there is some innate badness at my core that spoils any "good" I might do and makes my every action "bad." Therefore, it is best that I find an isolated niche in this world where I can do as little harm as possible. As fear-based, as life-destroying, as nuts as this view is, I find it quite gripping.

Now, let us apply Karen Armstrong's idea about the neocortex to this. I discussed Karen Armstrong's idea about the neocortex in my previous post.

First, I would like to consider the progression of creation. We have non-animate entities: the mineral kingdom, if you will. We have the elements: earth, air, fire, water. I think of rocks, particularly - very much there, enduring, being. All four elements are beautiful, all are powerful. This speaks of something important at the heart of God - beauty, power, endurance, being - and the capacity to support and provide a home for life.

Then, we have the non-sentient life forms: one-celled organisms, plants, insects. And we have life-forms where I am not sure how sentient the creatures are: reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds. Here, I would add to the heart of God abundance, diversity, proliferation, and more beauty - a sort of divine extravagance.

Hmmmm - God is creative, extravagant, beautiful, and joyful.

Next, we arrive at the mammals, particularly the higher intelligent mammals: horses, whales, dogs, cats, chimpanzees, and others. These animals, it seems, do not have the capacity of self-reflection, but do they perhaps have the beginnings of compassion? I know that rhesus monkeys who are deprived of food and made to see that they will receive food as a reward for giving a painful electric shock to another rhesus monkey, will refuse to give the shock (especially if they have previously experienced such a shock) even though this means enduring hunger. These monkeys will refuse to cause pain to another monkey, even though this means that they won't be fed. Here we can add to the heart of God love and loyalty.

And then we arrive at human beings with our neocortex - self-reflection, reason, compassion. Karen Armstrong says that the precarious situation of today's world comes from the use of our reasoning powers (our neocortex) in the service of our selfish survival instincts (our hypothalamus). This gives us weapons of mass destruction (created with the reasoning power of our neocortex) to use in keeping ourselves on top (a survival goal of our hypothalamus). Nonetheless, we also have the capacity to align ourselves consciously with the compassionate heart of God.

God - compassionate, creative, extravagant, beautiful, joyful.

SO - here is a solution to my impulse toward the innate badness view. The solution is to acknowledge the impulse, to recognize it, to stand aside from it, and to choose something else. To choose compassion for myself. To choose to act for good in the world, knowing that I make a difference, whether that difference is immediately apparent or not. Every compassionate thought, word, or act makes a difference.

Choices and Our Brains: A Positive View

In my last post, I wrote about a view which would say that some people are innately bad so that even their "good" choices become "bad" by virtue of their innate bad nature. In this post, I will present a much more positive view as expressed by Karen Armstrong in her latest book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.

First, I would like to mention that Karen has studied the religions of the world, and has found at the core of each an understanding that the heart of God or the Transcendent or the Universe is compassion. Karen has so many wonderful and right-on things to say about compassion.

Let me begin with Karen's definition of compassion. I will quote her definition from page 9 below, with the addition of bullet points to make the elements of compassion stand out:

But "compassion" derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning "to suffer, undergo, or experience." So "compassion" means

• "to endure [something] with another person,"
• to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes,
• to feel her pain as though it were our own,
• and to enter generously into his point of view.

Karen explains that compassion is natural to human beings. We feel good when we behave compassionately, and life flows more smoothly and positively when we treat each other with compassion.

Karen also explains the uneasy co-existence of two parts of our brain:

• The hypothalamus (a very ancient part of our brain located at its base and stemming from our reptilian ancestors)
• The neocortex (a more recently evolved area of the brain)

Karen says that the hypothalamus is concerned with feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing - in other words, with survival. It is ruthlessly selfish. It strongly pulls us to consider ourselves and our own safety and well-being first. It also evolved to handle conditions of scarcity, so the hypothalamus will prompt us to continue hoarding even when we already have more than enough.

The neocortex, on the other hand, says Karen, allows us to reason, to think about the world and ourselves, to stand aside from and consider the instinctive reactions of our hypothalamus, to make choices about our behavior. The neocortex allows us to align ourselves consciously with the Heart of God, of the Transcendent, of the Universe - which is a Heart of Compassion.

What this means, says Karen Armstrong, is that we have a choice: to behave at the level of our hypothalamus, that is, instinctively and selfishly with concern for our own survival, or to behave at the level of our neocortex, that is, compassionately. Karen stresses that the pull of our survival-oriented hypothalamus is strong, so we would do well not to castigate ourselves for our feelings of fear and anger and our impulses to selfish behavior, but rather to accept them with compassion for ourselves, realizing from whence they stem. We do not, however, have to choose selfish behavior. We can calmly acknowledge selfish impulses, stand aside from them, and choose compassionate behavior.

In other words, IT IS NOT A QUESTION OF BEING INNATELY BAD. It is a question of choosing instinctive and selfish behavior associated with the hypothalamus, or choosing conscious and compassionate behavior associated with the neocortex. This is very hopeful!

Choices versus Nature: A Negative View

Recently I watched a film about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer made two statements that struck me deeply. First, he said that it was worse to be a liar and to tell the truth than it was to be a lover of truth and to tell a lie. Second, he said it was worse to be evil than to do evil. I find these statements extremely discouraging. I imagine a liar who decides to behave differently, to tell the truth. The liar does so. But it doesn't count. The liar's decision to tell the truth is still bad because the liar's innate badness makes the liar's every action bad. Whatever "good" the liar may do becomes "bad" by virtue of the fact that a "bad" person has done it. The liar has, therefore, no hope. The liar simply cannot do good. This is horrible.

I have had several experiences in my life that put me in the position of this liar, or bad person. I'd like to look now at three of them.

The first one happened in the 1980s. I was engaging in some Christian work that I was considering devoting my life to. I will keep the nature of this work vague; I don't want to be specific about it here. At one point early on, one of the leaders of this work told me that I had a number of faults that I needed to correct. I took what she said very seriously and made strong efforts over the next weeks to do things differently. I made many very specific and deliberate behavioral choices to follow the pointers this leader had given me. I don't think I could have been more dedicated to making the desired changes.

Nonetheless, when this leader spoke to me again after several weeks, she told me that I was worse than ever. She said that I stuck out like a sore thumb - that everything I did, even the way I walked and sat and carried myself, showed glaringly that I was not 100% for Jesus.

In other words, the good things I had done absolutely did not count. They were worthless. Actually, they were worse than worthless - they were actively bad. The good things I had done were bad because I was innately bad. So I simply could not do anything good. Anything "good" I might do became bad by virtue of the fact that I, a bad person, had done it. My badness automatically made my every action bad.

I want to stress that the leader in question was known as a good judge of character, as a deeply spiritual person, and as a dedicated leader in this work - not a mean or spiteful person. What could I conclude other than that she saw through to an innate bad core within me that poisoned everything I did and made it bad.

The second incident happened in the early 1990s. Again, I will be intentionally vague about the nature of this event. What I will say is that I made some mistakes in trying to become friends with a person whom I will call X. X became upset with me. As I listened to X and considered my behavior, I saw how I had been thoughtless and even self-serving. I acknowledged this to X and asked her forgiveness. I mistakenly assumed that we could then resume building a friendship, but I was wrong. My efforts toward this goal seemed pushy to X. Finally, I "got it" that I needed to back away, which I did with apologies. Yet X was really, really angry with me and did not seem able to forgive me for a long time.

X is a committed Christian, a woman of prayer, and a spiritual person. It is highly important to X to live according to Jesus's teachings. Yet X did not forgive me for about a year. She remained actively angry with me. What I concluded from this was that I was so bad that I fell outside the scope of Jesus's teachings, at least as far as X was concerned. Jesus says that we are to forgive - but I was an exception. My badness was so ingrained that even a deeply committed Christian like X could not be expected to forgive me. And I am really serious about X's commitment to Jesus - she truly is committed to Jesus and to her Christian faith, and I respect and admire her very much. I could not take lightly the fact that such a person had so much trouble forgiving me.

The third incident has its origins in something that happened in the early 1990s with a person who is very important in my life and whom I will call Y. Y and I worked together on an activity that places people into certain categories which reveal elements of their character. In my case, one of the elements of the category into which this activity placed me was a tendency to lie. There was also much more to my category than that one element, and I actually forgot about it after some time. But Y did not.

Years later, recently in fact, Y and I had some discussions about truth and lies. I mentioned that there are some select situations in which I would not tell the truth. Y and I also had some conversations in which she doubted what I told her and I doubted what she told me. In the course of all this, Y told me that ever since the above activity of the early 1990s, she has known that when she is with me she is dealing with someone who tends not to tell the truth.

Y and I have talked more about all this and have resolved the difficulties we were having in believing each other, but I am concerned that Y may still keep in her mind a caution about me because the above activity put me in the category of liar.

This third incident is a little different from the first two incidents. The leader of incident one and X of incident two are people who aspire to and live out very high standards and whose opinion about my badness I could not lightly dismiss. While Y is very important to me, I do not put Y into that same very high category. I guess I've had the opportunity to see more of Y's faults - and Y has certainly had the opportunity to see my faults as well. Also, it seems that the leader and X saw a core badness in me, while Y labeled me as a liar based on a category that an activity had placed me into. In other words, the leader and X were evaluating me themselves, while Y was relying on an external means of evaluation.

The similarity among the three incidents lies in the fact that there seemed no escape from what each evaluation said about me. In the first incident, I simply could not do anything good because my core badness made everything I did bad; the leader could look into me and see this. In the second incident, my core badness placed me outside Jesus's teaching about forgiveness - even a close follower of Jesus could not be expected to forgive the likes of me. In the third incident, my placement into the category of liar was a done deal and whatever I said forevermore was suspect because I could not be counted upon to tell the truth - at least in Y's mind.

When you think that you are or may be innately bad, you need to decide what to do about it. It seems to me that you want to diminish the effect of your badness. How to do this? Well, the ultimate way is to kill yourself. If my innate badness makes everything I do bad so that I simply cannot produce any good, then it does seem that I should remove myself from the world.

Barring suicide, one might try to live as isolated as one can from others. There are two ways in which I have actually done this. One is that I have never inflicted myself as a spouse upon anyone nor have I inflicted myself as a parent upon anyone. I live alone - I am not part of a family. The other is that I have stayed out of visible leadership roles at any church or any religious or spiritual group. Suppose that I were to become, say, a reader on Sunday mornings. And suppose that I were to behave in a way that hurt someone else. What if I were to snap at someone or speak impatiently to someone. That person might be even more hurt because he or she had been spoken to in this unkind way by someone who had a church leadership role as a reader. I absolutely would not want to risk this.

My next post will present a more positive view on this issue.