This is where the Dalai Lama will be coming in shortly (I kind of told you he was coming!). If mutability, adaptability, and creativity are three of our core characteristics and potentials as a species, the fourth is compassion, or to be more specific, joy in the positive participation in other people’s lives and a joy in gaining and maintaining an awareness of other people’s lives. These are the core concordive potentials that can bring us forward into a newer and better world, the kind of world where Miranda’s awestruck words in The Tempest will ring true: “Oh, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Oh, brave new world / That has such people in’t !” Yet I feel I must defend the notion of our compassion as a universal concordive potential, much as I must attack the myth of permanence. Of all the concordive potentials I have discussed, compassion has fallen most into doubt in our times. And where there is doubt without the antidote of belief, there is darkness. There is a reckless flailing about. There is abandonment. There is cunning without justice. There is power without balance, mind without measure. None of which are very promising advents for our future – and all of which are now regular and widespread phenomena in our society. Compassion is now seen (or at least portrayed) by many as an optional extra in life; an aspect that those with free time or resources or “a good heart” readily engage in, much like artistic expression is now seen as the pleasure and kingdom of the chosen few, but not the many who must live in the real world. Just think of the heartlessness of the characters in Seinfeld – it may have been a running joke, but it was a dark joke and a successful one because of the deep grain of truth that poked us hard in our conscience as well as our funny bone. We act as if compassion, like art, can and perhaps should be indulged in privately, in small moments, with our family and loved ones when the world is not bearing down on us with all its ponderous weight – but that it does not have a serious role to play in the crafting of our lives. Unless we are monks, of course! 

  

            It will be helpful here to compare and contrast the Dalai Lama’s concept of compassion as something which we should develop to the state of universal compassion for our own benefits as well as others’ (Ethics 123-124) with two other concepts of compassion: Christ’s famous formulation (and its context) and Mengzi’s ideas about compassion. I want to do this briefly in order to show that between three continents and two millennia there has existed a stable nexus of compatible ideas and observations on compassion that demonstrates the universal existence of compassion. For if it is true that man is highly mutable in how he expresses his essence, how he dwells in this world, then it will also be true that man’s expressions of the universal instinct for compassion will be highly variable and highly dependent on social norms and theories (yes, theories!) for the expression of compassion. And to put it mildly, our current social norms completely suck. But they don’t have to suck – and neither do we! Yet I also want to compare these three theories of compassion in order to more fully integrate and express my thoughts on our potentials, and to prepare the reader for my discussion afterwards on how external conditions play such a pivotal role in the actualization of our potentials and how we can control those external conditions.   

            So here I summon the Dalai Lama: in Ethics for the New Millennium, the Dalai Lama vigorously defends the necessary and ubiquitous role of compassion in our lives, and not merely in a wistful sense. He writes

Let us now consider the role of compassionate love and kind-heartedness in our daily lives. Does the ideal of developing it to the point where it is unconditional mean that we must abandon our own interests entirely? Not at all. In fact, it is the best way of serving them – indeed, it could even be said to constitute the wisest course for fulfilling self-interest. For if it is correct that those qualities such as love, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness are what happiness consists in, and if it is also correct that nying je, or compassion, as I have defined it, is both the source and the fruit of these qualities, then the more we are compassionate, the more we provide for our own happiness. Thus any idea that concern for others, though a noble quality, is a matter for our private lives only, is simply shortsighted. Compassion belongs to every sphere of activity, including, of course, the workplace. (Dalai Lama, 127).

            Here the Dalai Lama speaks of the necessity and importance of compassion. Elsewhere he speaks of the ubiquity and utility of compassion: “Because our capacity for empathy is innate, and because the ability to reason is also an innate faculty, compassion shares the characteristics of consciousness itself. The potential we have to develop it is therefore stable and continuous” (Ethics, 123-24). In Ethics for the New Millenium, the Dalai Lama provides a rich and deep articulation of what it can and should mean to be compassionate. He calls for us to question the rather petty and narrow interpretation of compassion that seems to dominate much of Western culture, and develops, in my humble opinion, a near-flawless formulation of personal compassion. I will shortly discuss the one glaring flaw in his approach after I have discussed the other two compassion theories, but right now I want to enlarge on the significance of the Dalai Lama’s teachings and how they relate to my theory on total change and the myth of permanence.  

            The Dalai Lama argues that compassion is the source and fruit of “love, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness” and that essentially the compassionate life is the meaningful and happy life, since compassionate thinking, words, and deeds provide the framework for the arising of the aforementioned virtues. This ties in to my claim that compassion is the center stone of the four concordive potentials, as I will show very shortly. He also writes that imagination plays a vital role in the effective fruition of compassion: “If we examine those actions which are uniquely human, which animals cannot perform, we find that this faculty plays a vital role…But the use to which it is put determines whether the actions it conceives are positive or negative, ethical or unethical” (72). In connection with my points on the other three potentials and our need for proper external conditions, imagination as a composite aspect of compassion is completely essential to growing our compassion, balancing our potentials, and self-evolving to a higher state of consciousness and presence as a species. What I draw from the Dalai Lama’s thoughts on imagination and compassion is that we need to recognize what kind of imaginative forces we are allowing to gain dominance in our lives, our thinking, speech, and behavior. We need to do this because our imagination colors and shapes everything we do and think as subjective beings. When we begin to monitor and choose our imagination in a positive way, we can gain more and more conscious control of our behavior and we can more and more easily take compassionate action. And compassionate action, as the Dalai Lama notes, generates more positive energy and more virtues in those who are both the practitioners and recipients of compassionate behavior. Imagining this universe and our role in it positively is the first step towards fully actualizing our compassion – and balancing and coordinating our concordive potentials. In this way, compassionate thoughts, words, and deeds serve as the orienting point for positive creative behavior and thinking, adapting compassionately to the environment around us, and accepting the changes these behaviors create for us and the world around us. In the second section I will take a more in-depth look at positive imagining and compassion and how exactly they work as I flesh out my concept of the syndividual. But now, having capped my discussion of the Dalai Lama, I am going to look at Christ’s compassion theory and look for some connections there.

            I really don’t even have to say what Christ is most famous for saying, but I am going to say it anyway, and I am also going to look a little bit at the context of his saying it – at the larger core of Christ’s compassion theory. There are two versions of Christ’s formulation, one in the Gospel of Matthew and one in the Gospel of Luke, and we will go with Luke because it is ever so slightly pithier. And to be fair to other religions, the Jewish prophet and leader Hillel, who was alive just before the rise of Christ, had a phrase in his repertoire of awesome phrases that was very similar to Christ’s. And indeed, the widespread nature of this sentiment (it occurs as well in pagan sources and in secular philosophy, such as Kant’s famous categorical imperative) points to the widespread acceptance, at least on the level of wisdom, of the inherent value and presence of compassion in human life. So here goes: “Do to others as you would have them to do to you” (Luke 6, 31-32). This seems a very simple and bare edict, almost like, “yeah, so, I knew that…,” and this is probably the case, at least in part, because we are so used to hearing one version of it or another. But it seems likely that many of us, myself included, have not taken enough time to more fully process the significance of this concept. It is so stunningly simple, so easy to pack away in the head without working into our daily lives what that message can mean for our lives and the lives of others. There is a near-infinity of wisdom in this simple phrase, and after looking more at the biblical context for Christ’s compassion theory, I would like to unpack some of the deeper significance of his teaching and its overall implications for my own theories in this essay.

            Around this phrase, in both Matthew and Luke, Jesus ties compassion in this universalizing sense (very close indeed to the sense the Dalai Lama invokes) to the worship and awareness of God. We are, for better or for worse, not so much interested in drawing a universal lesson from this, since such an attitude these days when construed as mandatory for humanity is more likely to cause strife and marches and gunfire then it is to cause positive global change. But what else does Christ talk about? Just before the Golden Rule in Luke, Christ provides some context for the enacting of the Golden Rule, and after calling for universal compassion, he harshly reprimands those who are compassionate in a more limited (and for us, familiar, sense). Before: “But to you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (6, 27-28). After: “For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them” (6, 32-33). Now to unpack that Golden Rule a little bit: Christ is telling us to perform our actions while being so aware of other people’s being and needs that those actions do not, to the best of our abilities, conflict with the presumable wellbeing of others. He wants us always to be performing the intellectual experiment of putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes, to deliberately shift our perspectives so we can more readily sense the implications of our actions for other people. Christ is telling us to be always imagining the lives of others as accurately and sensitively as we can so that when we take an action, that action is at least as positive for other people as it is for us. He is telling us to be imaginative and sensitive, and that these qualities are fundamental to successful and meaningful compassion. Without imagination and sensitivity, how can one be successful on a regular basis in taking compassionate action, in putting oneself in someone else’s shoes?

            To look at it in another way, Christ is calling on us to put all four of our concordive potentials to use in being compassionate and living a meaningful life: be creatively aware of others, adapt to this awareness and its significance in our lives, change your life on these principles, and you will be able to act often, if not always, out of compassionate concern. So two thousand years ago, Christ was telling people they already knew how to practice compassion when it was easy, but the more rewarding way to do it was to practice universal and imaginative compassion. And people loved it! Christianity kicked so much ass and this idea of universal love was… well, pretty much universally appealing (even if not universally practiced). This goes to show that compassion is definitely a core part of our being, whether we are atheists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists (especially Buddhists!), Christians, agnostics – we simply need the right conditions for our compassion to really shine. Christ and his message have helped to provide a particular version of those conditions for many people ever since he gave that famous Sermon on the Mount. But sadly those conditions are not universal, unlike the raw potential of compassion.

            Which brings us neatly to Mengzi. Mengzi argues that compassion is a fundamental part of human nature; and unlike Jesus and the Dalai Lama (at least in his Ethics for the New Millenium), Mengzi elaborates on the social and political conditions necessary for the flowering of compassion in society. For Mengzi, the social and political conditions he envisions are wedded to his vision of universal compassion, much as Christ’s vision was wedded to the worship of God. But we can accept and draw benefits from both aspects of Mengzi’s theory without accepting wholesale the total validity of his proposed social and political conditions, much as we drew from Christ without accepting (or rejecting) his theistic religiosity. On human nature, Mengzi writes:

As for what they [humans] are inherently, they can become good. This is what I mean by calling their natures good… As for their becoming not good, this is not the fault of their potential. Humans all have the feeling of compassion. Humans all have the feeling of disdain. Humans all have the feeling of respect. Humans all have the feeling of approval and disapproval. The feeling of compassion is benevolence. The feeling of disdain is righteousness. The feeling of respect is propriety. The feeling of approval and disapproval is wisdom. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom are not welded to us externally. We inherently have them. It is simply that we do not reflect upon them. Hence, it is said, ‘Seek it and you will get it. Abandon it and you will lose it.’ Some differ from others by two, five, or countless times – this is because they cannot fathom their potentials. (Mengzi 6A6.5-6.7)

Here the myth of permanence re-emerges as an issue again, since it has helped to hide from us our potentials: we have surrounded ourselves with a galaxy of distractions and with the strong bulwark of cynicism and jaded and staid complacency that is such a strong part of our zeitgeist. In order to overcome this bulwark, we must follow Mengzi here and reflect long and hard upon our potentials – and take action passed upon this reflection.

            Mengzi is much more linear than Christ, and more socially minded than the Dalai Lama, but between all three it is clear that compassion is one of our central features as human beings – and to borrow a Christian term but recast it in a secular mold, compassion should be the center-stone of our redemption. Mengzi blames the differences in the way humans manifest their compassion on social, political, and material environments, and in this I have to (mostly) agree. If we are to sincerely believe in our potential as a species, then we must believe in the significance that the social, political, and material elements must play in the success of our species. Mengzi says, “In years of plenty, most young men are gentle; in years of poverty, most young men are violent. It is not that the potential that Heaven confers on them varies like this. They are like this because of what sinks and drowns their hearts” (6A7.1). Generally speaking, Mengzi proposes as the remedy for poor social, political, and material environments that which men value in common: “What is it that hearts prefer in common? I say that it is order and righteousness” (6A8.1). More specifically Mengzi proposed a “benevolent government,” an ethically instructive educational system, a reinforcement of the value of reflection, and a whole suite of specific political actions for rulers to take, but we will not look into these last, since they are largely of so specific a nature that they will only detract from the foci of this essay (Norden xxv). But suffice it to say that much of what Mengzi has to say based on his theory of compassion could be quite profitably modified to serve as part of a framework for bringing about real and total change in our society. An ordered and righteous society certainly sounds good to me!

            Yet despite all the wisdom of Mengzi’s approach, we must remember that the change we seek will almost certainly have to encompass far more than the political, legal, social, and material changes that a purely Mengzian approach would advocate. But between the three accounts of compassion I have examined there exists a stable tripod of theory and practice that extends back across more than two thousand years and, if we include the spread of Buddhism and Christianity, across all the inhabited continents. And as the Dalai Lama notes, “All the world’s major religions stress the importance of cultivating love and compassion” (Ethics 123). This near-universality of an emphasis on compassion only further endorses my claims about compassion, but perhaps even more importantly, compassion is the sort of attitude that inherently encourages comity and compromise. This means that while I have only sketched out a tripod of theories on compassion as a way of demonstrating the viability of universal compassionate practice in our time, that practice has at its fingertips a world-wide body of theories and practices it can syncretistically draw upon and synthesize into a secular and universally utilizable theory of compassion that can also satisfy disparate religious and cultural beliefs. 

            All this jazz about compassion and commonalities and the core elements of humanity is one long DNA strand meant to point out one thing: the idea that we can’t change the world is a myth perpetuated by institutions, ignorance, tradition, and above all, fear. If total change is to come (and we are the ones who must bring it upon ourselves, not cosmic superheroes, aliens, Jesus, movie stars and philanthropists answering the real-world version of the batman signal, nor the four horsemen of the apocalypse – no one wants to see them come anyway!) we must look to our mutability, adaptability, creativity, and compassion for the solutions. Our compassion will have to be deep, and we will need to be creative in the ways we use it and conceive of it. We will have to be willing to change ourselves in the name of compassion, creativity, adaptability, and mutability. And we will have to adapt, to accept and understand the significance and value of our own creativeness, our own compassion and mutability. Cuz baby, I think a change would do you good.

            After all, we know we are not a perfect species, but that is no excuse for saying we cannot do a much better job improving the likelihood of our improving as a species. That is the myth of permanence talking; that is the negative imagination parading before our eyes. We can change. And by “can” I mean it is in our immediate grasp, it awaits only the momentous realization of a strong minority of a single generation for us to take the first discernible and self-knowing steps towards radically progressing as a species. We can choose from a pre-existing wide array of possible habits, diets, exercise regimes, institutions, climates, social surroundings, rhetorical environments, political structures, etc., all of which go towards shaping the manifestations of our humanity. And to top it off, we can invent (and are constantly devising meta-inventions, new ways to create inventions or to manipulate the manipulators of our environment) new forms of these in case the existing habits and diets and institutions are not effective enough for us.

            So we have evolved to the point where we can choose the grounds of our evolution to a remarkable degree. We can self-evolve, and I do not simply mean this in a physical way (though the sinister implications of this possibility are growing more apparent by the day). We can evolve socially, psychologically, spiritually – if we want to. And we will only want to if we see the benefits, and believe in their possibility. The myth of permanence radically denies this possibility – but it is a shitty lie. We can change in two key ways, and this is where I will be discussing the Dalai Lama’s one major deficiency in his compassion theory: 1) we can change as individuals by changing the way we imagine the world and thereby truly engendering our compassion. This is the first step. 2) But we can also change, and we must change, the external world around us. The Dalai Lama discusses compassion almost exclusively from an individualistic perspective; he calls for personal compassion, but he speaks very little about the importance and necessity of vast social, institutional, and global change. This is where Mengzi’s theory helps us out, since he is the theorist who specifically targets the external conditions that give rise to our actual expressions of being. He acknowledges that our families, institutions, traditions, economies, and other environmental factors strongly condition the ways in which our potentials do and do not become actualities.

            So how do we overcome this second hurdle to total change? The first hurdle is difficult enough. Surely we are not all called to become revolutionaries and activists? While the second section of this essay will more thoroughly address this question, I can say here that there are ways for all of us to be involved in jumping over that second hurdle, of changing our total conditioning environment without giving up our vocations or rejecting our families and taking vows of poverty. Just as the Dalai Lama’s vision of compassion does not require us to give up all the personal aspects of our lives, my vision does not call for all of us to become professional revolutionaries and full-time volunteers.