Ornoth

First, two operative assumptions:

Every human being experiences some degree of suffering during their lives.

Every human being wants their suffering to be heard and met with compassion.

Given those two truths, the logical inference is that all compassion comes from beings who are experiencing suffering of their own.

Think about that for a moment. The beauty of compassion isn’t just that one person cares about the wellbeing of another; rather, it’s that one person cares about it so much that they are willing to set aside their own suffering and (completely justified) need for compassion in order to provide it for someone else.

This is the built-in irony of compassion: you cannot express compassion to others without first overcoming your own immediate desire to receive compassion for your own suffering.

In our modern society, many individuals, when presented with another person’s suffering, cannot see past their own problems. Their response to a plea for help might be: “I know what you mean because I hurt too, and since my suffering is so much greater than yours, I deserve compassion more than you do.” These people treat compassion as if it were a zero-sum game based around moral debt. They are so encased in self-concern that they are blinded to others, going through life unknowingly causing great harm to the people around them.

I’m not saying that we should neglect our own suffering. There are, of course, times when our need for compassion is acute, and we need to know how to skillfully balance letting our friends and family meet our emotional needs without imposing on them unduly.

Bottom line? When you are able to see beyond your own suffering and offer compassion to others, that is a moment to be celebrated and a true state of grace. And when you need help to deal with the suffering in your own life, gracefully accept compassion when it is offered, because it comes from people who have willingly chosen put their own problems aside to care for and empathize with you.

Back in October 2009, I kicked off a planned year of intensive metta (lovingkindness) meditation practice (start, finish). Metta is one of the four Brahmaviharas, also known as the Divine Abodes or the Immeasurables. These are four key virtues that are absolutely central to Buddhism.

About halfway through that year of practice, two things happened. The first was that I decided that upon the conclusion of my year of metta, I would then proceed to the next Brahmavihara, devoting another year of practice to karuna, or compassion.

The second thing that happened was that I learned of a document called the Charter For Compassion. Given that I was already planning to devote a year to cultivating compassion, that title immediately got my attention.

The charter was initiated by a writer in comparative religion named Karen Armstrong. She had won the TED Prize, which is given to someone who has a particular vision of how the world might be changed for the better. Armstrong’s goal was to craft a document based around compassion and the Golden Rule which all major religions could support, and use that universal agreement as a springboard for the growth of compassion worldwide.

Six months later, shortly after I began my karuna practice, I learned that Karen Armstrong was about to release a new book, entitled “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”. She also planned to stop in Boston on her book tour, so of course I reserved a ticket.

This post is mostly my review of that book, plus my reaction to her local appearance.

The title is an intentional reference to the “Twelve Step” program of Alcoholics Anonymous. While I don’t consider that a particularly auspicious linkage to make, it makes some sense. Armstrong asserts that the root of the problem is our preoccupation with our own ego, something that provides short-term gratification but is a long-term poison, and that letting go of our small selves is akin to recovery from an addiction.

Unfortunately, where I think the parallel fails is that the development of compassion doesn’t naturally lend itself to that specific number of steps. So the steps, which should be logical and flow from one to another, come across a bit muddled and not very clear.

One thing I was particularly interested in was her methodology for cultivating compassion. This is, after all, her how-to book, and I thought it would be fascinating to compare her approach to the Buddhist techniques I was already practicing in my metta and karuna practices.

Well, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of her methodology is Brahmavihara practice! The essence of the book is simply a description of these popular Buddhist techniques, with the few expressly Buddhist bits secularized. There was surprisingly little material drawn from other religions, other than historical corroboration. On one hand, that made me feel a bit of pride about the Buddhist approach, but it also disappointed me, in that it offered me few new insights.

Still, if it helps other folks cultivate compassion and introduces them to Brahmavihara practice, I’m all for it! Unfortunately, this is where the book seems to fall down.

My impression is that the book was written for an audience of highly self-motivated intellectuals. It reminds me of a yoga book that shows pictures of the asana poses, but doesn’t describe them or go into any detail about how to achieve them. For example, the entire chapter on mindfulness—Step 5—is only seven paragraphs long! In no way is that sufficient for a layman to master a technique that meditators spend years developing.

Armstrong’s descriptions of the steps are not very clear, and are described en passant. The call to action isn’t clear, and the more expansive background material that’s provided is mostly of historical interest rather than practical instructions. So it feels like the Cliff Notes version of a book that should offer much more, and more practical, instruction.

What would such a book look like? Imagine if this book were put out by Wiley Publishing, and entitled “Compassion For Dummies”. It would take the reader through clear, basic, step-by step instructions. It would be succinct, but provide all the information needed for an uneducated person to understand what to do at every step of the way. In short, it would read much more like a how-to guide than an historical treatise meant to prove that compassion is a part of all the world’s religions.

On one hand, I couldn’t be more supportive of any effort to promote compassion in our modern society. But on the other hand, in order to successfully bring about substantive change, this needs to be a very practically-focused how-to book—one that speaks equally to lawyers, nurses, florists, and cabbies—and I think even well-intentioned people will find it doesn’t support and guide them as much as they need.

One final bit of surreal synchronicity before I close the book.

The twelfth and final step in Armstrong’s book is “Step 12: Love Your Enemies”. Two pages before the end of that chapter, Armstrong tells the story of Aeschylus’s drama “The Persians”. The play, which was staged only eight years after the Greeks defeated the Persians, surprisingly treats the Persian leaders as tragic, sympathetic figures. Armstrong uses this story to show the Greeks’ attribute of honoring their enemies. The central Persian characters are King Darius, Queen Atossa, and their son Xerxes.

In my previous blog post, I reviewed a very different book, one which depicts the history of cancer. Forty pages into the book, the author describes the world’s second earliest mention of cancer: the description of a Persian noblewoman who, after hiding due to the perceived stigma of a bleeding lump on her breast, had a Greek slave cut her breast off. The noblewoman is Atossa, years earlier. She humored the slave who had excised her tumor thus: although the King Darius was planning a westward campaign, Atossa convinced him to turn east, against Greece, so that the Greek slave might return to his homeland. This is what subsequently precipitates the Persian defeat related in Aeschylus’ play, that is cited by Armstrong. How bizarre that both these books—one on cancer and another on compassion, two of the larger themes in my life at the moment—would mention the same obscure Persian rulers!

Turning this review back to the positive, one thing I can say is that Armstrong is much more engaging and persuasive as a speaker than she is as a writer. Her talk was interesting, confident, and pointed. It also featured a clear call to action: her response to critics who said that the focus on compassion was “preaching to the choir” was that she “doesn’t mind preaching to the choir because the choir aren’t singing”, implying that although most people give lip service to the Golden Rule, they do not personify it in their daily lives. It was a very enjoyable talk, and quite inspiring.

I was accompanied by my dhamma friend Kaela, who also seemed to enjoy the talk. It was held at a synogogue in Brookline: the first time I’d been in a synagogue in many, many years. To my utter frustration, the first three topics that were brought up in the Q&A period were, in order: circumcision, Hitler, and the Holocaust. While I’m sure these are sensitive issues in the Jewish community, that degree of preoccupation reinforces stereotypes of Jews which I consider unfortunate.

If you are interested in the topic of compassion, I’d recommend taking a look at Armstrong’s Charter For Compassion. Feel free to read her “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”, although I suspect it won’t be of immense practical use. Instead, I’d suggest looking into the original Brahmavihara practices, and one of the best books I can recommend for laypeople in that regard is Sharon Salzberg’s “Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness”.

This year’s birthday wasn’t the greatest piece of work I’ve ever experienced. Woke up with a sore throat that presaged the cold I’d deal with for the following weeks. Made the usual pilgrimage to Foxwoods (where I lost for the first time in three years) and visit to Purgatory Chasm, which was cold and grey but pleasant enough, then a big grocery run, since I had free time and a rental car. Got myself Thai takeout from Montien, which was nice, but it outta be, at $21 for an app and one entree. Then watched some anime on Hulu. Woo-hoo.

The following morning I was in full-on head cold, and off at 8am for the first day of my annual “Sandwich Retreat” at CIMC. The “sandwich” means 12-hour meditation sessions on both Saturday and Sunday of two consecutive weekends, with 3-hour evening sessions on the five weekdays “sandwiched” in-between.

Sudafed FTW, baby. That’s the only way I got through those nine days of head cold hell. I was a coughing, drooling, snotting, sneezing, gagging, nose-blowing, mouth-breathing ball of unhappy. Highly recommended way to spend a long meditation retreat.

In the middle of the week I somehow managed to convince myself that it’d be a good idea if I biked 20 miles out to the Pan-Mass Challenge office to pick up the sneakers that were this year’s premium for people who reached the $6,300 Heavy Hitter fundraising level. The next day (Thursday) I had such a massive relapse of sinus pressure and headache that I skipped that evening’s retreat session, which was actually okay, since there were no group discussions that night, only sittings.

This was my fourth Sandwich Retreat, but it was the first time I stayed at CIMC the whole time. In previous years, I spent periods of walking meditation roaming the streets near the center, whereas this year I stayed indoors and stuck with the formal walking practice. I also spent this year’s 90-minute lunch breaks napping in CIMC’s lower meditation hall, rather than going out and sitting on the steps of Cambridge City Hall.

In fact, the only time I went outside I just sat on a bench in the yard, captivated by the bizarre moire patterns made by passing cars’ hubcaps, viewed through the gaps in CIMC’s slatted wooden fence.

And unlike prior years, when I’d pick up food from outside, this year I actually stayed and ate the vegetarian meals CIMC provided. Depressingly, all four lunches were some form of vegetarian stew, but they were paired with brown rice and bread, which I was able to fill up on. And please, people: raw green beans aren’t tasty or elegant; for chrissake cook those suckers!

The biggest challenge I had was with my “yogi job”. This year I was again assigned to end of day cleanup. It’s a two-person job, and my good buddy Mark signed up to be my parter. Except on the first day, he didn’t show up for it. And the second day, he left early. Then he didn’t even show up for the second Saturday and Sunday. I was kind of stunned that he’d stiff me like that, but some of it was misunderstandings that were later clarified, and thankfully other yogis stepped up and helped me out.

One of the things that makes the Sandwich Retreat unique is the “homework” we are given: something to practice with throughout our regular weekdays, which we can then share with others during the evening sessions. This year we were asked to notice when we were feeling resistance to life as it is, note what conditions caused it, what emotions and mind states it manifested as, and how it evolved and changed once we noticed it.

What almost no one (including me) realized was that this was the exact same homework as last year’s Sandwich Retreat! Ironically, I think a lot of what I observed during the week this year was nearly the same as things I’d observed last year!

Being unemployed and living alone, I wasn’t interacting with a lot of other people, which limited the number of opportunities I had for resistance to come up. The ones I did notice were subtle and ephemeral, like the briefest irritation when I had to wait for a line of cars to pass before I could walk across the street. Such irritations arose and disappeared so fast that I couldn’t really examine them. In the end, I decided that the source of my irritation was some kind of unmet expectation, followed by an immediate reset of my expectations. “Oh! There’s a line of cars. I guess I have to wait.” As soon as I adjusted my expectations, the resistance passed and I was much more patient with the situations.

Naturally, my cold provided me with an opportunity to practice with resistance. On Monday, when I described how acknowledging my irritation lessened its power over me, Larry commented that stopping those problematic mental proliferations actually leaves more energy for the body to fight off infection (or other maladies). Sadly, that didn’t help me during Thursday’s relapse, when mindfulness of my irritation did absolutely nothing to alleviate my physical symptoms and the misery that came with them.

During our sitting meditation periods, I spent most of my time doing karuna practice: the compassion work that I began last month and plan to continue for a full year, similar to the metta practice I did last year. I feel like it is both more meaningful to me and a more productive practice than metta, so I’m really enjoying it so far.

As if exploring resistance and developing compassion weren’t enough to work with, I spent my two teacher interviews grilling Narayan and Michael about my felt sense of anatta (non-self), free will, and the nature of the observer.

I think a lot of it revolves around whether the act of observing life as it plays out is something undertaken by some independent entity within, or whether it’s just another thought process. Because that determines who is in control.

Basically, if everything (including my feelings, thoughts, and actions) is purely conditioned, then I don’t see myself as having the western idea of free will. And that, in turn, causes the Buddhist concept of “non-self” to make more sense to me. If there’s no free will, there’s no independent actor making choices, and if there’s no independent actor making choices, how can there be such a thing as free will?

That was my basic thought process, and I wanted to run it by our guiding teachers to see if they thought it was (a) a useful line of inquiry, and (b) a reasonable understanding of the Buddhist view of reality. However, as is typical in these situations, their responses left me with many more questions than answers.

I first talked with Narayan, who said it was a meaningful line of inquiry, because it relates directly to Wise View: the first and foundational element of the Noble Eightfold Path. She also agreed that all thoughts and feelings are conditioned, but disagreed with the idea that the observer is just another thought.

She asserted that there is something within us that allows us to influence our actions, to alter the conditions that are the input to our decisionmaking process, but she described it in terms of a process, an action, a “mystery”, and a way of “be-ing”. She even described it as our innate “Buddha nature”, that seed of the unconditioned within us all.

She also didn’t think that “free will” was necessarily the best way of thinking about it, since there’s no way of definitively knowing whether we have free will or whether it’s just an illusion. Thus, the question of the degree to which we are able to make free and conscious choices is similar to the questions the Buddha described as “not useful” in the Cula-Malunkya Sutta.

Narayan acknowledged that there was a seeming contradiction in the idea that all thought, feeling, and actions are conditioned, while man still has the freedom to influence his thought patterns, make decisions, and take independent action. After the interview, I felt that contradiction was something I would have to sit with and examine at length.

I also felt it might be useful to spend some time trying out the idea that everything is conditioned and there is no such thing as free will, just to see how it differs from our default and predominant world view that we are independent actors.

After that, I really wanted to talk to Michael about it, since Narayan seemed to have directly contradicted something I’d heard from him, that the observer really was just another (conditioned) thought process. So a week later, I talked to him.

Rather than answer my question directly, Michael came back with an alternate question. For him, it isn’t the question that’s important, but what is driving the question. Why does the question need to be answered? Does it tell us something about the person asking the question? As a parting shot, Michael suggested that universal questions like this can tell us a lot about the individual’s relationship with the unknown. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but it was definitely more food for thought.

So when the time came for the final day’s feedback session, I talked a little bit about the scattered nature of examining three things at once: the karuna/compassion practice I was doing during the sitting periods; the homework, which concerned itself with resistance and aversion; and my teacher interviews, where I grilled them about non-self, the nature of awareness, and my relationship to it. I didn’t even mention our homework from the Long-Term Yogi group, which has to deal with interpersonal connection and Wise Speech. Still, I felt like I made progress on all those fronts.

Despite being sick, I wasn’t as mentally fatigued this year as in previous years, when I was absolutely exhausted. Part of that is attributable to being unemployed, but I also made a conscious effort to be more relaxed in my practice during the sittings, which I’m sure helped. The only day I felt truly wrung out was the final day, which was okay with me.