COMPASSION

The quote below comes from my Netherlands friend, the poet and psychiatric nurse Aad de Gides.  (He is not “English as a Second Language,” but maybe as Fourth or Fifth Language and I find the irregularities charming, so will not edit.)

ungraspable suffering rains through the human affairs.easily this could be a core
denominator for the human condition.maybe paradoxically we should say,where
we tend to think every diminishment of suffering is beneficial,we haven’t suffered
enough.maybe with this charging thought we approach the realms of belief.also
would i like to add that my aim of this text is to hold no boundaries to come to some kind of basic feeling for and understanding of,suffering.

My movie last night (a strange choice for Christmas Eve) was “Requiem for a Dream” which traces the trajectories of various addictions in a small group of people who live near Coney Island.  In an “extra” on the back of the disc the author, a thin, battered and hard-luck guy named Hubert Selby Jr., was interviewed by Ellen Burstyn   He explained:  “People have pain and the pain should make them pay attention.  That’s what it’s for.  But instead they deny it and ignore it and never do anything about it and then it begins to be suffering.  Terrible suffering.” 

The part of Aad’s poem that I’m after is the “aim . . . to hold no boundaries to come to some kind of basic feeling for and understanding of, suffering.”  It would seem to be a religious quest. 

One of the more interesting public figures who speaks about religion is Karen Armstrong.   She is a writer who often addresses  comparative religion, especially the current Christianity/Islam opposition.  You can see her on these vids.  http://knopf.knopfdoubleday.com/2010/06/17/a-compassionate-life-in-12-steps-a-vook-by-karen-armstrong/
http://vook.com/a-compassionate-life-in-12-steps.html

Her agenda in these specific vids is a little “pop,” kind of Hallmarkian, but I think that is fault of the book (or in this case “vook”) marketers rather than Karen, who was once a nun and has struggled with epilepsy, both of which pushed her to recognize her pain.  I wanted to hear more about the idea that “religious dogma” got so important in the 19th century when everyone was rushing around listing and defining and sorting life.  Why was that?  You won’t find it in these vids.

The point of my post here is that compassion is the one pressing reason to shift the crux of religion away from preserving the individual, or even the group, back to an autochthonous (derived from experience of the local land) consciousness of the interwovenness of all existence that is being rediscovered by cutting edge science.  Blackfeet took it for granted that everything was connected, unfolded out of everything else, always preserving the possibility of holy power in ordinary things. 

One does not find all that much compassion out of doing small favors for others or even from “doing unto others what would want done to oneself.”  I always remember Julian Huxley or Shaw -- one of those dry English types -- asking,  “What if you are a liver fluke?”  Or more simply, you might enjoy a nice fry-up of bacon and coffee, but what about your Mormon or Jewish friend?  What about your grannie whose doctor has forbidden both?  Compassion is not compassion unless it is accompanied by empathy, an ability to see through the eyes of the other.

But we don’t really want to do that.  Why?  Why are we so stubborn and crippled about understanding the “other” whether it is someone who looks different or speaks a different language or does things you would never do?  Why are we afraid of those who suffer?

The Abramic religions (descended from Abraham:  Judaism, Christianity and Islam) formed at a time when being tribal was a given and creating a walled city to protect prosperity was the very definition of the salvation of a tribe newly dependent on agriculture.  The group was what counted and to keep the group together, their “chosenness” was emphasized, conformity was important, and beliefs-in-common nearly defined them.  This was a time when newly domesticated animals were allowing species-jumping disease to spread things like smallpox and diseased people could only be guarded against by excluding them, since there was no treatment.

For Christians the idea was that going by the rules would get a person into the Kingdom of Heaven, through the Pearly Gates, admission monitored by that desk clerk, St. Peter, who indicated thumbs-up, thumbs-down Roman style.  Paul wrote letters about it all the time:  the ones the exclusionists quote today.

I’m not aware enough of the history of Asian society to understand how those people developed in a different way, just that somehow they concluded that suffering is everywhere, inevitable and deeply in the nature of life itself.  They connected suffering with longing and desire, and therefore concluded that the best strategy was acceptance of one’s lot and withdrawal from all desire.  Even as Karen Armstrong urges us to reach out to everyone else, Buddha was advising withdrawal into meditation, though he also endorsed a version of the Golden Rule.

Hubert Selby Jr. was on a slightly different path.  (He is gone now, without founding a religion, though he felt very spiritual.)  His idea was that if you recognize your own pain and extend it into an awareness of universal suffering, then you will break through the walls.  Modern science takes that even further.  All of existence is connected to everything else, even the past and future.  What seems like something new, even the birth of Jesus, is only a recurrence of something that has already happened again and again and will continue to do so always.  There is nothing new, only transformation, one thing coming out of everything else, molecule by molecule.

To many of us change is painful, even as we yearn for something different and suffer for lack of it.  But if we are aware of the suffering of others, we will not begrudge the changes that help them, perhaps something so simple as no longer buying long-stemmed red roses.  (Raising them industrially destroys the land, diverts it from growing food, and chemically injures the workers.)  No matter how pretty and traditional it is, we will always be stripping the conventional -- a bouquet of red roses for the diva or lover -- always raising our consciousness.  Do unto others what is best for all existence.  Whoever suffers is healed by understanding.  To deny suffering is to deny each other.