Marc Ian Barasch's Articles on Lions Roar

Call it love, kindness, compassion for all beings—it's the real elixir, the only one that truly transforms life for ourselves and others. We all know that—every religion says it—but where do we find it? Marc Ian Barasch searches our society for compassion in action, compassionate people, and ways to find the compassion inside himself that Buddhism says is a natural part of our being. I am thankful that thorns have roses. —Alphonse Karr Every now and then, I’ll meet an escapee, someone who has broken free of self-centeredness and lit out for the territory of compassion. You’ve met them, too, those people who seem to emit a steady stream of, for want of a better word, love-vibes. As soon as you come within range, you feel embraced, accepted for who you are. For those of us who suspect that you rarely get something for nothing, such geniality can be discomfiting: They don’t even know me. It’s just generic cornflakes. But it feels so good to be around them. They stand there, radiating photons of goodwill, and despite yourself, you beam back, and the world, in a twinkling, changes. I appreciate these compassion-mongers, even marvel at them. I rarely think that I could be like them. Sure, I’ve tried to live a benign life, putting my shoulder to the wheel for peace, justice and Mother Earth (mostly churning out words on a page, bouncing signals off the satellites). I doubt that it’s made me much less egotistical (maybe a bit more so). I still have that too-cool objectivity that can suck away my sympathies like an outgoing tide. But I want to be good. Not that cramped, chiding Moral Majority good (I’ll keep my minority status, thanks). Not sticky-sweet, watch-your-insulin-level good. Just deep-down, unfailingly kind. The fact that I’m not, when the world could use so much more kindness, frankly vexes my spirit. Oh, I’m a nice enough guy. Like most people, I adore my offspring, even when they drive me crazy; love my parents, despite the corkscrew of childhood; dote on my siblings (though there is that scrapbook of old slights); treasure my friends (even if they sometimes let me down). Conventional wisdom wouldn’t fault me for saving the best stuff for my nearest and dearest and giving the rest of humanity the leftovers. Thus it is, say the sages, that the harvest of kindness—of kindredness—is winnowed down to a precious few grains. For at the center of all spiritual traditions is the beacon of a truly radical proposal: Open your heart to everybody. Everybody. What is compassion, that x-factor that every faith (the founders, if not the followers) exalts as a supreme virtue? When the Dalai Lama says, “My only religion is kindness,” and the Pope calls for a “civilization of love,” it can’t be just mealy-mouthed piety. Kindness and love are powers unto themselves, able to transmute even the most relentless enmity. Nelson Mandela once remarked he befriended his jailers, those grim, khaki-clad overseers of his decades of hard labor in a limestone quarry, by “exploiting their good qualities.” Asked if he believed all people were kind at their core, he responded, “There is no doubt whatsoever, provided you are able to arouse their inherent goodness.” If that sounds like wishful thinking, well, he actually did it. When I was in my twenties, my Buddhist teacher tricked me into taking a vow of universal compassion. Using some spiritual sleight-of-hand I’ve yet to unravel, he made it seem I could aspire to a tender concern for everybody, even putting their welfare before my own. Fat chance, I’d thought. But in his wily way, he had framed this vow—the bodhisattva’s promise to live for others—as a case of enlightened self-interest. It was not, he told me, a matter of wearing a one-size-fits-all hair shirt. I was taking the vow for my own good. It would give me some leverage to pry loose, finger by finger, the claustrophobic monkey-grip of ego; give the heart a little breathing room. By treating others generously, I might find them responding in kind. I felt I was being made privy to an ancient secret: To attain your own human potential, be mindful of everyone else’s. At some point in my vow ceremony, a deceptively casual affair held in a rocky field, it had felt as if my vision suddenly cleared. I’d glimpsed, like a sky swept clean of clouds, everyone’s innate okayness. Years later, I still marveled at the spiritual chutzpah of the liturgy: However innumerable are beings, I vow to save them all. It was vintage Buddhist bravado—a pledge to empty all the world’s oceans using only an eyedropper. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I had planted myself in a millennia-old tradition that claims you can love all without preconditions, exclusionary clauses or bottom lines; that says life isn’t quid pro quo, but quid pro bono. To my surprise, the vow hadn’t made me feel obligated, but liberated from my own suffocating strictures, from the narrowness of my concerns. It was as if I’d been waiting for a signal, a green light to step onto the crosswalk to the opposite curb; some goad to be compassionate not out of blind craving for virtue, but because it seemed the only genuinely interesting thing to do with my life. Just forming the intention to make myself useful felt salutary, like some fast-acting antivenin to my snakebit business-as-usual. I had assumed life was about magnifying myself (for the greater good, of course), but now that seemed like the wrong end of the telescope: It made everyone else look small. I soon took a job running a residential therapeutic community in exchange for room and board, surprised at my ability to care for the walking wounded. I stopped thinking so much about how others had let me down, broken my heart, failed to anticipate my needs or take my oh-so-unique sensitivities into account. I began striving to see—and even nourish—other people’s possibilities, receiving in return those surprise concoctions that the human spirit dishes out when it feels accepted and at its ease. But there came a point on my journey when I’d stumbled badly and fell far: a dire illness, an interminable recovery, penury, loneliness, full-on despair. Friends clucked in sympathy but stepped gingerly over the body. Family didn’t do much better. I had a soul-curdling realization: the people you love (and who ostensibly love you) may not be there when you need them most. I got through it—the kindness of strangers and all—but I was soon back to squinting at people through my cool fisheye, seeing their preening vanity, their intellectual shortfalls, their ethical squishiness. It took time until I realized such shortsightedness takes a toll—let alone that there was anything I could do about it. Finding my way back to meditation helped. Nothing like getting a good, long look at myself (and funny how much I looked like everyone else). I noticed how often my social trade-offs were more about getting than giving; how many of my thoughts revolved in geosynchronous orbit around Planet Numero Uno. Inner work is a warts-and-all proposition; it gets harder to kid yourself. Still, my teacher had insisted one thing was certain: despite seeing all the ego’s pitfalls and pratfalls, real bodhisattvas make friends with themselves. Everyone, he said, possessed some worth past quantifying or qualifying, some value beyond judgment or fine-tuning—and that included oneself. To love our neighbor as ourselves, after all, is the great injunction of every religion. But what does loving yourself mean? It’s one thing to say it; another to know it in your bones. Do I talk to the mirror, whispering sweet nothings? tenderly imagine a little homunculus inside me and pet it, tickle it, scratch it behind the ears? The spiritual consensus seems to be that it’s like learning to love anyone: you start by getting to know them. The side-benefit to this is that to know yourself is also to know the person sitting next to you and the one halfway around the world. “Read thyself,” wrote philosopher Thomas Hobbes. “Whosoever looketh into himself...shall know what are the thoughts and passions of other men.” Still, having looketh’d into myself, I can’t say I loveth all I see. I have read myself, and there in oversize type it says: petty, suspicious, greedy, vain, jealous, lazy, stingy, dull (and that’s just on the page; there’s more between the lines). That I also reckon myself to be magnanimous, conscientious, loyal, thrifty, brave and intermittently humble is beside the point. It’s not enough to offset scourging self-judgment with a roll-call of compensating pluses. We have to take ourselves (and each other) whole. The Dalai Lama points out that the Tibetan term for compassion, tsewa, generally means love of others, but “one can have that feeling toward oneself as well. It is a state of mind where you extend how you relate to yourself toward others.” If it’s true that what goes around comes around, compassion is about nothing if not love’s tendency to circulate. And radiate. Alexander Pope (poet of the “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”) envisioned compassion as a series of concentric circles rippling outward: ... Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake; ... Friend, parent, neighbor, first it will embrace; His country next; and next all human race. It sounds great. It is great. But for many of us, there’s a nagging doubt that this whole compassion routine could edge into self-effacement—into loving others instead of ourselves, giving away the store until our shelves are bare. The usual formula is first to stockpile some extra self-esteem—then you can afford to be generous. That isn’t quite how the nineteenth-century religious philosopher Soren Kierkegaard saw it. The command to love thy neighbor, he wrote, had but one purpose: “as with a pick, [to] wrench open the lock of self-love and wrest it away from a person.” (He said it approvingly, but...oh, great, now compassion will burglarize us.) What about looking out for number...

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