Knowing others is wisdom; knowing the self is enlightenment.
TAO TE CHINO
You cross the street to avoid looking in the eyes of a homeless woman. Your heart is calling, but you don’t respond. Why? Maybe it’s because you learned not to be vulnerable as a child. You became afraid to be who you are, afraid to listen to your heart. It’s too dangerous. Opening to this homeless woman, even for a moment of eye contact, may make you feel vulnerable as you become aware of what she needs and what you have. Questioning the status quo, however fleetingly, may seem just too difficult at this moment; your conditioned response may be to cross the street and avoid vulnerability. You haven’t consciously thought these things, but you have made an unconscious decision, one of so many moments in an urban day. You pass on to buy the paper or get some lunch before going to your meeting.
This is us living the busy and unexamined life, acting from that complex of motives that takes us through the day. But when we don’t pay full attention to our inner dialogue, to our feelings and thoughts, and we don’t answer the call of the heart, we feel alienated from ourselves and from life around us, however subtly, and we don’t experience the moment as fully as we might. As we pass by the homeless woman, life passes us by.
Compassionate action gives us an opportunity to wake up to some of our motives and to act with more freedom. It gives us the chance to put ourselves out on the edge, and if we are willing to take a clean look at what we see there, we can come to know ourselves better. We can’t, of course, change what is arising in us at any moment, because we can’t change our pasts and our childhoods. But when we listen to our own minds and stop being strangers to ourselves, we increase the number of ways we can respond to what arises. Then we know when we are resisting contact with a poor person because of something that happened in childhood, and we know that now we have nothing to fear either from the homeless person or from the examination of our place in the economic structure. We are here right now, and we are free. We can either walk past the person, talk to her, give her some money, and go on, maybe reflecting on the causes of homelessness and its relation to our hot tub, or we can cross the street because we are still carrying around fear and protection from childhood and don’t want to deal with it today on the way to a meeting. Whichever we do, with increasing awareness comes an appreciation of our actions as they are, and then they begin to change. Even if we haven’t acted compassionately toward the street woman, we haven’t repressed the fact that she exists, and we aren’t judging ourselves; as awareness and acceptance increase, not blocked by our fears, we tend to act more humanely. It happens naturally.
A central quality in people who are drawn to compassionate action is empathy for those who need help, a commonality with people who are suffering, oppressed, or vulnerable. This feeling is often a result of imprinting during childhood, when we had no control over what was happening and felt frightened, helpless, vulnerable, sick, and alone in bed on a summer night. A friend who works with refugees lived through a middle-class childhood with a violent alcoholic father. She carries an image of herself and her two young sisters, huddled, waiting for the fighting inside their house to be over, feeling small, unprotected, and powerless to change anything. When she grew up, she found herself identifying intimately with those who felt helpless in the face of outside forces—battering husbands, uncaring governments, or mysterious diseases such as AIDS—even if there was nothing else in their lives that overlapped with hers. She found herself drawn away from a successful career in business toward work in which she could help people take responsibility for their own lives.
Empathy allows us to feel at home with people we don’t know and closer to people we do know. It can encourage us to do many useful things, because we tend to act from inside another person’s shoes. But we have to be careful about even such good qualities when they are developed through early experiences, especially traumatic experiences. They can cause trouble when we act out of feelings that grew along with the compassion. If your empathy began to develop when you were seven and felt powerless to stop your father from drinking or hitting your mother, unless you are aware of this fact you may start acting as though you were seven again while you are working with others who are somehow vulnerable. While you are working with refugees on the U.S. border, for example, your own seven-year-old anger at your parents may become so intermixed with your disapproval of a government that isn’t caring for these people that you overlook ways in which you could work with the government for the refugees’ benefit.
Ravi Khanna, former Oxfam America campaigns director, said, “It is so important to ask why you are doing social action. In organizations, it is often too hot a question for people. There is the danger of not agreeing with each other, so you don’t discuss it. Sometimes it takes a crisis to push the issue—at Oxfam, the Ethiopia famine, which expanded our work considerably, pushed it for us. It was good, but it was very difficult.”
The reason to look at motives that developed in the past is that we want to act more consciously now. We don’t want to pass on our own insecurities in a new form to those with whom we are working and thus create more confusion. Of course, it is a long and gradual process, learning to act from full awareness, but accepting that motives are there and looking at them as best we can is a good first step.
Some people, of course, spend large parts of their lives trying to identify deeply hidden motives, through therapy, meditation, group support, and other practices. Such an intensive process is not necessary before becoming involved in compassionate action; compassionate action is itself a process that reveals motivation. But as you are getting ready to start, try this exercise to stimulate your awareness. It is a spiritual as well as psychological exercise; that is, it poses that favorite question of the great Indian saint Ramana Maharshi, whose students asked themselves constantly, “Who am I?” The repetition allows the answers to keep changing. In this context, ask the question, “Why do I want to do this?”
Let’s take development work in Guatemala. “Why do I want to go to Guatemala to work with the widows and children?” “Well, I have been living my life mainly for myself and my family; this will make me feel better about myself.” That may work until you begin to see the complexity of the task, and you glimpse just how insidious Third World poverty is, and you realize that your actions—such as giving people food directly instead of teaching them farming techniques that would enable them to be independent and feed themselves—may have hurt more than they helped. You see that the food may have created dependency and the degraded sense of self-worth that goes with it. You no longer feel entirely good about yourself: “I shouldn’t have gotten into this without knowing more about it.” However, since you have now started to understand the situation and may eventually be able to make a positive contribution, this is the time to look for a deeper level of motivation, a new reason to keep going.
The shadow side of self-gratification is guilt, one of the great American motivators. Those of us growing up in the Judeo-Christian tradition were given considerable support both for feeling guilt and for acting out of it. Guilt is often experienced as a vague but haunting sense of having done something wrong or, more seriously, of being something bad. Guilt is related to a number of things, from feeling the weight of original sin to discovering that you are gay in prep school during the 1940s. It dissolves when we begin to realize who we are through meditation or life experience, but much of the time it is too much with us, and the antidote is often thought to be “doing good.”
Guilt, as any motivation, may lead us to do some wonderful work. In Guatemala, guilt over being part of the United States, which is providing money and guns to the police and the military, who have been accused of violating the human rights of the people, causes many “gringos” to try to redress the balance by supporting communities who are recovering from the violence. But guilt can veil the truth and contribute to exhaustion. It can prevent us from acting with balance. When accompanied by anger, as it often is, guilt can prevent the gentler qualities of kindness and appreciation from being present in our work. Guilt about the homeless on the New York streets led one woman to work long hours at a job she hated in a soup kitchen, where she came to resent the very people she had hoped to serve. In the long run, guilt, as does self-gratification, often turns out to be unsatisfying as a motivator. We need to go deeper.
“Why do I want to do this?” Beyond the personal motives of self-gratification and guilt, we have social motives: “Other people will think I am a good person for doing this. This work reflects the values of my family, church, or friends.” Could be, and that might keep us recycling while others are watching, or it might lure us onto boards of directors or school committees. An exceptional need to be approved (perhaps as a residue of an unhappy childhood or an alcoholic family) might drive us to give a major part of our energy to a truly worthwhile task. With the Guatemala support work, the need for approval wears thin when the work becomes incredibly absorbing and you notice that your friends are equally busy with their lives and aren’t really noticing what you are doing. Working for development groups pays so little that some friends actually become disapproving; they wonder why you are not being more responsible financially, why you are late paying bills or unable to vacation with them. And then—as you get deeper into it—people who were in support of helping Guatemala begin to question your methods. Your radical friends say that any development work makes village people feel a little bit better, just enough so they won’t challenge the root causes of their poverty, which are social and political; your conservative friends say that improving health among the poor only increases the birthrate and causes more unemployment, scarcer resources, and more suffering. “Hey, I started to do this so that other people would approve. What happened?” We need to go deeper still.
“Why do I want to do this? What is the truth? What about those times when I felt love for all beings? Don’t all people deserve to have their basic needs satisfied and to enjoy freedom? I am unhappy when I am not feeling clear about how and why to help. I want my actions to reflect my deepest inner understanding.”
When our hearts open, when we know that we are in fact the world, when we experience the pain of others in our own blood and muscle, we are feeling compassion. It begins as gentle love and acceptance of ourselves, and it extends to include our family and friends and, eventually, all beings, those we know and those we do not, as well as all of nature—rocks and raccoons and stars and water. We begin to reflect that, although the suffering of others may not be our fault, it is our responsibility, not in a heavy sense of having the world on our individual shoulders but in a natural way, as if we were all part of the same body; if there is an itch, we scratch it, if one part of it hurts, we try to heal it.
We also begin to understand that everyone wants to be happy, all of us, everywhere—the vulnerable and oppressed among us as well as the militant and oppressive. We would all like to eat when we are hungry and sleep without fear when we are tired, to do work that is productive and satisfying, to honor the spirit each in our own way, to watch our children grow up in a healthy and peaceful place. By acting compassionately, by helping to restore justice and to encourage peace, we are acknowledging that we are all part of one another.
When we are motivated by compassion, by acceptance and love of one another, we are also more likely to stay with the work even when it is difficult. Through doing this, we learn to respect the process of long-term learning, and we discover that learning happens through dialogue, mutual exploration, and respect for one another’s strengths and weaknesses. Helping ceases to be one person doing something to or for another; it becomes circular; the helper and the helped and the action itself are all part of a seamless whole.
When Carolyn North began Daily Bread to collect food from bakeries and restaurants for food pantries and soup kitchens, she found that she often needed to remind herself that each of us has a role in the Big Picture and that attitudes and opinions that separate us arise only too easily. “What I’m trying to do is manifest this spiritual connection on the level of community, by actively bringing people together and sharing. It’s an attempt to get people in the community to rebalance something that has gone very out of balance. But one thing I had to face pretty early was the dilemma of self-righteousness. We were often tempted to judge a fancy restaurant when we picked up twenty pounds of surplus salmon—that there’s something immoral about such an operation, that we were better than they were. At first I didn’t recognize it as a problem, and then I realized that we are all doing our part in the community.”
This appreciation of all parts of the whole helps us begin to feel what it is to be an instrument rather than a maker of change. Mother Teresa is said to have given this advice to a monk who said he loved lepers and wanted to work only with them. That meant that he didn’t want to do chores that he considered less important. “Your vocation,” she said, “is not to serve the lepers. It is to belong to Jesus. Your work is the means to put your love for him into action, but your vocation is to belong to Jesus.” The act itself is not as important as the spirit in which you do it. The brother is said to have changed completely. It no longer mattered whether he was cooking, washing streets, or taking care of the lepers. Whether we appreciate that story as a Christian teaching or hear Mother Teresa’s reference to Christ as a metaphor for the truth within us, the message is the same. when we are motivated by love and compassion, we become instruments for what needs to be done, and the work becomes more joyful and more satisfying.
“Why do I want to do this?” It’s a big question, the answer keeps changing, and sometimes you’ll feel like saying, “Who cares, forget the endless self-absorption, I just want to get it done.” Certainly, the goal is not to be rationally conscious at every moment of why you are acting; in true compassionate action, in fact, we tend to lose ourselves entirely into the work, becoming one with the service and the person being served. As in meditation, we are simply and naturally present, acting in a relaxed rather than a studied, intellectual way. But asking ourselves this question will help us become more aware of who we are; it will help us act more consciously. Remember that no answer is absolute. Trying to define yourself, as Alan Watts said, is like trying to bite your own teeth. But the answers will provide some pieces of the puzzle of how to make space for compassion to arise and how to act on it when it does, and these pieces may help relieve the suffering of others and allow our own selves to be whole. Many people before Mother Teresa have held poor and dying babies, but we are drawn to her because there is something in the way she moves and looks that reminds us that we and the baby are one. Such conviction and example help restore the balance for which we and the world are yearning.