EMPATHY AND COMPASSION are often used synonymously, but they are really two different elements in the human psyche. True, when you understand another’s feelings as your own and are able to put yourself in his or her place, you will almost surely become compassionate toward that person. But you can also be compassionate without empathy. You can feel compassion for someone or even an insect or animal even if you don’t recognize the other’s feelings in yourself.
In Buddhist teaching you are instructed to be compassionate toward animals and insects because all living creatures have souls; indeed, they may have been humans in their past lives and may be humans again. (I don’t find this in my work, but it doesn’t mean the concept isn’t true. It may simply be that humans don’t remember lifetimes as a different species.) Thus, you can be compassionate toward a beetle or a bear without empathizing with it, without putting yourself in the insect’s or animal’s place.
Compassion comes from the heart, and it is illustrated by being kind and benevolent to all living things. Christ was supremely compassionate; by all accounts so was Mohandas Gandhi. When “your heart goes out to someone,” you are being compassionate. The “random acts of kindness” that many speak about—letting someone go ahead of you in a checkout line; relinquishing your subway seat to a pregnant woman; giving food to the homeless—are all examples of compassionate behavior, but only if they come from a genuine impulse to be kind and not because you are “doing the right thing” or expect brownie points in heaven.
Compassion is more instinctual, empathy more intellectual; they come from different places. If you do the “Dialogue with Illness” exercise described in chapter 3 and change places with, say, your abusive father, you don’t necessarily have to be compassionate toward him. You may realize: “Wow, my father’s father did the same thing to him that he’s doing to me. He took the cruel things he learned from his father, from his culture, and from his peers, and transmitted them undigested to me. I empathize with what he felt because I understand those feelings, and I’m going to break the transmission of negative behavior because of what I learned.”
That is an intellectual exercise. However, ideally, and even in as extreme a case as an abusive father, as you empathize with your father, you can begin to feel compassion for him. This may be difficult; he may be just as cruel to you as before. But he is an injured human being like yourself, and that realization might allow you a heartfelt response as well as an intellectual one. If you do respond, if you can see beyond your injuries, you’ll find that as empathy and compassion merge, they lead you toward the final destination of all the lessons on the route to immortality: spiritual love, unconditional love, love that is pure and everlasting.
* * *
“I’ve heard you’re famous for treating people by taking them back to their past lives. Is this true?”
The caller was a man named Hugh, and if I was “famous” in my field, so was he in his. He was a psychic medium whose local television show drew an audience of many thousands, the bulk of them wishing to contact loved ones who had died. I’m not psychic myself except to the extent that all of us are sometimes psychic (the “hunch” that leads to the correct business decision; the “surety” that makes us choose one life path over another), but I know it exists. I admire those like John Edward and James Van Praagh who seem to possess it and use it for healing, and I have long since learned not to denigrate things I do not understand.
“I’ve had some success regressing patients,” I acknowledged. “Does this call concern therapy?”
“Yes. Mine.” He gave a nervous high-pitched laugh. “Psychic, heal thyself? I don’t seem to be able to do it on my own.”
We made an appointment for the following week, and I awaited it eagerly. I had treated other psychic patients before and found them to be uniformly interesting. Their extreme sensitivity and their openness to the concept of past lives made them particularly suited to regression therapy.
Hugh was a slight man, short and thin, looking far less imposing than he did the one time I had watched his program—such is the power of television. His face was ruddy from the continued use of makeup, and his clothes (chinos and black T-shirt) seemed one size too large. He was obviously nervous, for his glances darted around the room like fireflies, and he frequently had to clear his throat before he could get out a sentence, though once he started, he was eloquent.
“What’s the trouble?” I asked.
“I’m exhausted. Bone tired. It’s not physical, though I don’t exercise enough, but mental. I feel as if all the people in the world are after me, wanting me to connect them to those they’ve lost. And they’re so needy, so insistent, so worthy, so legitimately hungry that when I say no, I feel guilty—enormous guilt that weighs a million pounds. I can’t get it off my back.”
People in the mall or even on the street would ask him for readings or information or messages from the beyond, but it doesn’t work like that. It’s not as if he can dial up someone’s relative, leap to the beyond, and deliver a message on cue. It takes energy, strength, and time to work as he does, and it sapped him. I empathized. The same kind of well-meaning assault has happened to me to some extent; I, too, have been stopped in restaurants or breaks during workshops. But people know regression is a time-consuming process and understand without bitterness that I can’t accommodate them. People seemed to think Hugh could access the messages left for them while he was eating dinner. He wanted to help—oh, how he wished he could help every one of them! That he couldn’t made him feel worthless, and with each rejected request his anxiety increased.
He was, he told me, both clairvoyant and clairaudient—that is, he had the ability to see things happening before they occurred or at a distance, beyond the view of the human eye, and also hear messages spoken only to himself. Like most psychics, these abilities manifested themselves very early. Many children, for example, have imaginary friends, often simply because they’re lonely and crave companionship. In some cases, however, the friends are not imaginary at all. In Through Time into Healing I wrote about a young girl whose mother couldn’t understand why she showed no grief at the death of her grandmother. “Why should I be sad?” the girl asked. “I was just talking to her. She’s sitting in a chair in my room.” That the grandmother told the child secrets about the mother’s childhood—secrets she could not have discovered on her own—validated the story. Other children, seeing accidents or hearing messages that turn out to be true, have added to the evidence of psychic phenomena.
Usually, a child’s psychic powers disappear before he or she reaches the age of six. Occasionally, though, the powers not only remain but grow stronger. This is what happened with Hugh.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “the other children thought I was weird. ‘That’s crazy,’ they’d say when I told them I’d seen a dead person who spoke to me or tried to warn them about a message I’d received. Sometimes their families told them not to play with me. They made me feel crazy, but that didn’t stop the visions or the messages. So what I did was keep them to myself, hide them from everybody. I was different then.” He paused and cleared his throat. “And I’m different now.”
The low self-esteem he had developed as a child continued into adulthood, and for several sessions we worked on that issue and on others associated with it. But I already knew that we would have to go deeper than just childhood sensitivities. I suggested regression. “That’s why I’m here,” he said, smiling.
Hugh easily entered the trance state (he had been practicing, in a way, since he was a little boy). “I see flying vehicles,” he began. “Not exactly planes, but more like cars that can fly, powered by pure energy. They cruise over sleek buildings pointed skyward and made of glass. Inside, men are working on advanced technology, and I am one of those men, one of the best and most important scientists employed there. The goal is to make everything more powerful so that we can alter all material forms, all matter on Earth, and control it, control the behavior of others, control nature. It’s not for good, though. It’s for dominance. We scientists are working to dominate the world.”
“Interesting,” I said. “You’ve gone into a future time.” I began therapy with Hugh just as I was starting to progress my patients, and he seemed to have arrived millennia ahead without prompting.
His response surprised me: “It isn’t the future at all. No. This is Atlantis.”
Atlantis! The fabled realm described by dozens of writers, most famously by Edgar Cayce. It existed thirty thousand or forty thousand years ago and then disappeared. Atlantis, whose inhabitants ruled their part of the world because they alone held the secrets of all matter and all living things. Hugh had not progressed into the future; he was in a world that had vanished long before recorded history.
“My job is to change my level of consciousness and learn techniques of energy manipulation in order to transform matter,” he said. He was breathing quickly and was clearly agitated by his role in this strange society.
“Transform matter by using psychic energy?” I asked, looking for clarification.
“Yes. Through the energy of the mind.” He hesitated. “Or maybe we used crystals. Energy through crystals. I’m not sure. It’s not the energy of electrical current—it’s something more advanced than that.”
“And you’re an important scientist.”
“Exactly. It’s what I was trained to do.” He grew sad. “I want to achieve personal power. It means suppressing my spiritual side, but that’s the price I must pay. Maybe I could alter my level of consciousness to an even higher vibration. That way I could advance spiritually, to approach a place beyond matter, beyond time. But I don’t bother with that. My colleagues and I—what we are doing is bad. Our aim is to control the civilizations surrounding us, and we are succeeding. We are achieving our goal.”
His life review was predictable to me. He regretted his actions and realized that he had taken the wrong path. If he had used his higher mind, his mind’s energy, for good and compassionate purposes, not for power and self-aggrandizement, he would have led a better, happier existence. He had wasted his knowledge, wasted his power, and wasted his life.
After he had left, I wrote two notes:
“That Hugh led a previous life in Atlantis does not prove the existence of Atlantis by any means or that I believe in it. This is only his experience, and perhaps he was seeing the future after all. It might be fantasy. It might be true. The important thing is his regret that he did not use his psychic powers for higher goals. That seems to be his regret today.
“There seemed to be a higher level of technology at that time than we possess now. Perhaps many people from that time are reincarnating at the present time because our technology is, once again, advancing to the level that existed in that ancient time and we have to see if we have learned our lessons—it’s the conflict between the compassionate use or selfish use of our advanced powers. The last time we nearly destroyed the planet. Which option will we take now?”
* * *
At his next regression session Hugh found himself in Europe—he wasn’t sure which country—in the Middle Ages. “I’m a large man with broad, powerful shoulders. I’m dressed simply in a tunic, and my hair is disheveled. I am addressing an assembly of townspeople. My eyes are piercing and wild and incredibly intense. I tell the people that they don’t need to go to the church or listen to the priests to find God. ‘God is in yourselves, in every one of us. You don’t need those hypocrites to show you the way to Him. Everyone has access to divine wisdom. I will show you the way very simply, and you will be independent of the church and its arrogant priests. They will lose their control, which you will reclaim for yourselves.’ ”
Hugh was soon taken prisoner by the church authorities and was tortured to recant. But he wouldn’t, no matter how cruelly he was punished. Eventually, he told me with horror, he was literally torn apart on a rack that the priests had placed in the town square, in part because of the priests’ fury but also because they wanted to use him as an example to warn the townspeople not to think in dangerous ways.
In a brief review of that lifetime, he made connections back to his ancient Atlantean life, which I summarized in a later note:
“Overcompensation toward spiritual rather than selfish motives in reaction to his Atlantean life and his knowledge of the possibilities of higher levels of consciousness led Hugh to be too public and not to pay enough attention to the power of the Catholic Church at that time and its zealous elimination of heretics or anyone who attacked the Church’s power, even at the lowest levels.”
Hugh also made connections to his present life. “My powers were developed in Atlantis,” he told me. “It’s there I learned my clairvoyant, clairaudient, and telepathic skills,” referring to the psychic powers of sight, hearing, and mind.
“What about the messages?” I asked.
“Those are different,” he said quickly. “They come from the spirits.”
“The spirits? What do you mean?”
“Spirits. Disembodied spirits. I can’t be more definite.” He cleared his throat. “They give me knowledge. They tell me the truth.”
A familiar theme—other patients spoke of spirits—but I detected a difference. When he left, I wrote the following:
“By externalizing the origins of his knowledge to others, Hugh was magically trying to prevent an occurrence of the physical destruction visited on his body in the Middle Ages. In other words he was saying, ‘This is not me. I’m just hearing it from others, even if they’re spirits.’ It was a kind of safety device because having psychic power is dangerous. But in a way the spirits prevented him from accessing even higher levels of his multidimensional consciousness.”
Perhaps, I thought, he could access those higher levels if I progressed him to the future. He was a talented psychic. Would he perhaps be even more talented and more accurate than others if he could access what was to come? It wasn’t essential to his therapy; he had learned the source of his anxiety and achieved an acceptance of his psychic powers. But still, I was curious as to what he would discover.
Would he be willing to progress to the future and take me with him? He could hardly wait.
* * *
Maybe Hugh went too deep. He seemed to be experiencing two journeys simultaneously, one into the future and the other into higher and higher levels of consciousness, to worlds and dimensions above and beyond this one.
“The next level, the one just beyond ours, isn’t as dense as the one we know,” he told me in a voice full of awe. “There is trouble getting there. The way is full of peril, but when we arrive, we’re more mental and less physical. Everyone’s telepathic. There’s a higher vibration. Our bodies are lighter. Movement is easier.”
In a way it was like the Atlantis he had described in his first regression. But there was more.
“I’m going up and up. At the different levels there are changes in the quality of the light. I can’t describe it. It gets brighter but softer. It doesn’t have color, or it has all colors. It leads to dimensions beyond light and beyond where thought could go. This level is incomprehensible to the human mind. And still I keep going. There’s no end. I go beyond infinity and, if possible, even beyond that.”
We both had the sense that these were positive places of great calm and beauty, though beauty is too humdrum a word. Hugh’s description lay more in his manner than in his words. What he envisioned transcended his vocabulary, and it was the serene beauty of his face, which was no longer pinched, that served as his eloquence.
The future he described was not his personal future but the future in general. (Later, when I started progressing groups in my workshops or seminars, this was usually the case, as I’ll describe in the final chapter.)
“The journey is like an airplane taking off in a thunderstorm,” Hugh said. “It grows darker and darker as we reach cloud level. There’s a lot of turbulence, fear, and anxiety. But then we pierce the cloud layer and come out on the other side into a brilliant sky—many shades of blue lit by an incandescent golden sun. It takes many years, many centuries to get through the clouds, which grow more ominous as the years pass. They are clouds of tragedies and calamities that will beset our civilization. But eventually, in eight hundred or a thousand years, maybe more, the clouds will disappear, the turbulence will disappear, and there will be a feeling of peacefulness, awe, and safety.”
He leaned forward, confiding in me in his hypnotized state.
“The people on the other side of the storm, they have mental abilities and psychic abilities far beyond what I have now. They’re telepathic.” His voice was almost a whisper. “They can access all knowledge. They are mentally omnipotent.”
Perhaps Hugh was describing Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious or what Eastern religions call the Akashic Record. In this record every action, to the tiniest detail, and every thought, no matter how trivial, of all mankind from the beginning of history is stored. Psychics may tap into this to learn the thoughts and dreams of other people, I thought. That’s what he said he told the townsfolk in the medieval town. And in his future vision he had mastered what the Atlanteans were seeking. They could convert matter into energy and energy into matter, and they could transform the elemental particles into each other by harnessing the energy of consciousness. In the time of Atlantis this power was used for evil. In the Middle Ages, though Hugh did not specify it, alchemists tried to transform common minerals into gold. In the future that Hugh saw, everyone was an alchemist, and they were using their powers for good. They had come through the clouds and into the blue sky and golden light.
I think Hugh’s quest is a metaphor for changing ourselves from the physical to the spiritual, and he seemed to have accomplished this in the far future. Perhaps all of us, those who are left after the “tragedies and calamities,” will do the same. What he brought back from the future was this: In the time he envisioned, the physical body could change. People could come in and out of their bodies at will. They could have out-of-body experiences whenever they wished. Even death wasn’t what it seemed. There was no more disease: Physical and mental illnesses had disappeared because people learned how to fix the energetic disruptions that cause disease in the physical dimensions.
I came to understand why his progressions took a dual road. In both there was a time of torment and then a paradise. Eventually, the future curved higher and higher, becoming more and more sublime until it joined the progression of higher levels of consciousness—the higher dimensions or worlds that Hugh had seen in his other journey forward. In other words, even though he was going off in two directions, he was heading for the same destination. In the first journey he went directly to higher levels of consciousness. In the second he went into future lives here on this planet. Both futures would eventually reach the highest dimensions and would meet at some point along the way. Our futures, he was saying, are like railway spurs, always leading to the main track. No matter which path we take, we are all going to the same place, and that place is a joy beyond all words and all human comprehension.
* * *
In his present life Hugh no longer feels different because he knows that his talents are possessed by all of us, although they are latent in most. He feels better about himself and privileged that he has been allowed glimpses into higher worlds. His work is much clearer to him, and he seems to receive information from higher levels now. He no longer attributes his knowledge to “discrete and external spirits” because of the fear carried over from the Middle Ages. He knows his powers lie within himself. He is happier, and that is the best measure of his progress. The clarity of his psychic readings reflects a clarity in his intention to help others, in his will to transform despair into hope, and in his life. He has become the alchemist he set out to be millennia ago.
I’ve included his story in my discussion of compassion not because he needed to learn it on his road to immortality, but because he had a superabundance of it. He felt sorrow and love for all who approached him, and in so doing he gave up too much of himself. Without compassion no one can ascend to high planes in the lives to come, but like all the virtues discussed in this book, it is part of a whole. One must learn compassion for others but also for oneself.
* * *
Chitra, thirty-five, also gave compassion without reward. A molecular research biologist, she spent her days in the lab and her evenings with her sickly and demanding mother with whom she had lived for ten years. There was no time for a social life or, indeed, for a life of any kind of her own.
She was the youngest child in an Indian family that had come to America when she was young, and given the Hindu tradition in which she was raised, she was expected to be the caregiver for her mother. A brother and his wife could not be expected to do this, nor could her married older sister who had two children of her own. Chitra had been married to a much older man—an arranged marriage—but her husband had died, leaving her with no children. As a result, the care of her mother fell to her.
When she came to me, she complained that her mother’s dependency and overprotectiveness was suffocating her; in fact, her breathing was labored, and she had trouble getting out her words. Hindi was her first language, but she spoke fluent English, as did her mother. She dressed only in saris except at work when she wore jeans and sweaters under her lab coat. She was a curious and delightful mixture of two cultures, though I doubt she was amused. It was the older culture that kept her from enjoying the younger.
Many Hindus believe in reincarnation, but for them it is an intellectual belief, part of their religion. Its use as a therapeutic tool is virtually unknown. Chitra may or may not have believed in past lives; she was reticent when I broached the subject. But she readily agreed to a regression. After two weeks of practicing relaxation and hypnotic techniques, she was able to enter a moderate trance state. Her impressions were hazy and her words halting.
“I’m in India . . . a prostitute but not really a prostitute. . . . I travel with the army which is fighting my enemies. . . . I don’t know what year it is. . . . Not so long ago . . . I am told that I am needed by the soldiers. . . . They are all-important. . . . It is my army, my people. . . . They have to be cared for. . . . I feed them . . . satisfy their sexual needs. . . . I hate what I have to do. . . . I can see myself dying. . . . I am still very young. . . . Yes, I am dying . . . dying giving birth to a child.”
That was all. In her life review she realized she didn’t want to linger in such a place. Helping the soldiers fight India’s enemies was not a higher good at all. It was a convention devised by selfish and cruel men, and as a woman she was trapped, doomed.
The second regression was just as brief. “I am a woman . . . sacrificial robes. . . . I must be killed to ensure a good harvest. . . . Maybe my death will protect my people from enemies . . . from natural disasters. . . . I am told it is a great honor to die. . . . I and my family will be rewarded in the afterlife. . . . There is a sword over my head. . . . It strikes.”
In both cases she had trouble breathing, and each time I brought her quickly back to the present. Chitra needed to learn from these lifetimes, but not in great detail. She went straight to the traumas, and when we talked about them, she realized that violence is antithetical to spiritual concepts. Promises of later rewards were self-serving lies by the generals or religious elders whose power was based on ignorance, deception, and fear.
We discovered the link in the two lives and their relevance to Chitra’s present situation: In both regressions she had been forced to sacrifice her own life, her own goals, her own happiness for some “higher” good. And, in effect, the sacrifice killed her, as it was killing her now.
* * *
Chitra’s mother had a past life memory as well, though she never came into my office. Excited about the work we were doing, Chitra brought home my regression CDs and was practicing at home, just as I encourage all my patients to do. Her mother, listening, saw herself as a young Indian wife three centuries ago. In that life Chitra was her mother’s deeply beloved husband, the focus of her existence. But soon the man died, probably from the venom of a snakebite. When Chitra’s mother came back to the present, she understood that she had clung to Chitra, her daughter, and explained it to Chitra as a reaction to her loss centuries ago. Her mother’s dependency and overprotectiveness, Chitra now realized, had their roots not in this lifetime but in a different one, and she was able to be more forgiving.
Her mother began to change. Slowly, for she was overcoming years of habit, she became less clinging, less protective. She became more open to spending time with her other children, and she was even willing to let Chitra start a social life, despite the possibility that it would lead Chitra into a relationship that would interfere with her dependency. This in turn led to an improvement in Chitra’s outlook. For the first time she could look forward without dread, and she let me lead her into the future.
* * *
Chitra experienced what I took to be three future lives during a single progression. In the first she saw herself as the mother and principal caregiver of a young child with severe muscular, skeletal, and neurological deficits. The family dynamic required Chitra to expend most of her time and energy on the little girl with little return. Her husband in that life had withdrawn emotionally and often physically; he simply couldn’t deal with the tragedy. Thus the flow of compassion, love, and energy seemed to me unidirectionally outward, with Chitra giving but never receiving.
In a second future life Chitra suffered severe physical injuries in a vehicle accident. “You couldn’t really call it a car,” she told me. “It was more like a giant flying cylinder with windows. Anyway, its programming malfunctioned, and wham!—it crashed head-on into a tree.” Chitra was paralyzed and had to receive extensive physical and psychological rehabilitation. “The technical levels of medicine are advanced,” she said with some satisfaction, “but regeneration of my nervous system tissue, both brain and spinal cord, took more than a year.” Chitra smiled. “The hospital staff was superb, but recovery was very difficult. I’m not sure I would have made it without the love of my family—I have an adoring husband and two boys and a girl—and of my friends. And the flowers! People called my hospital room the Garden of Allah.”
Here, I thought, was the reverse of the first life. Again, compassion, love, and energy were unidirectional, but this time they were flowing in.
In her third future, Chitra was a surgeon, specializing in orthopedics and neurology. “I work with rods or crystals,” she explained when I pointed out how uncommon it was to have two such different areas of expertise. “They emit a light, an energy, that has a remarkable healing effect, whether it be bones or brain. They also cause a sound energy that helps in the regeneration of muscles, limbs, and ligaments.”
Chitra derived huge satisfaction from the results of her knowledge and skills. There was also positive feedback not only from her patients and their families but from her professional colleagues. Her family life, too, was happy and flourishing. In this life she seemed to have achieved the proper balance of inflow and outflow. She was able to love others as well as herself.
Chitra told me that she reviewed this third life from a higher perspective, meaning that she had risen to a new level. She was still in a hypnotized state when she said this, but then she suddenly stopped. “I don’t know how this life is going to end. It’s puzzling. I’ll just have to leave it. Now!” As always, she was not one to linger in past or future lives.
Suddenly she was back in the present, animated and stimulated by her voyages. “All the lives, past and present, are connected,” she explained, “as is this life and the past life my mother described. What I’ve got to do is balance compassion, balance love, which must be received as well as given.” Her determination was palpable. “My life’s goals will never be sacrificed again—not because of cultural values, individual circumstances, or guilt,” she said. She was able to express her anger and resentment toward her mother and her siblings for trapping her in the caregiver role—despite the cultural taboos prohibiting such rebellion—and by so doing freed herself.
We went back to the third of her future lives, and this time she was able to see its end: death at an old age of natural causes. In her life review the significance that eluded me became clear to her. “The three future lives weren’t sequential or linear,” she explained. “They’re manifestations of probable futures based on what I do in this life.”
In a sense they were parallel futures that flowed simultaneously; the one she ended up in would stem from the content of the remainder of her life now. In fact, there were “a multitude of possible futures,” she told me, “all variations of the three I witnessed. And it’s not only my consciousness but the collective thoughts and actions of the entire human population that will have a role in shaping the one that turns out to be the actual one. If we consciously embrace compassion, empathy, love, patience, and forgiveness, the future world will be incredibly different than if we don’t.”
Her language had changed markedly. She no longer spoke in short, choppy sentences. Her more sophisticated words and ideas reflected a connection to a higher level of consciousness. This wise young woman had much to teach me.
“We have much more power to positively influence our individual future lives as well as the remaining future of our present life than we do to influence the planetary or collective future,” I noted after she left. “But our individual futures express themselves in the collective future, and the actions of everyone will determine which of a myriad possible futures we will come back to. If Chitra continued stuck in her present family pattern, then she might have to experience a future as the paralysis victim forced to receive love. If she just gave up, abruptly ending her relationship with her mother, abandoning her without a reasonable compromise, she might have had to come back as the mother of the seriously impaired child. Because that is how it works: We face similar situations again and again as we seek to learn the proper balance between giving and receiving, between sacrifice and compassion for ourselves—until we achieve the state of harmony. Given what she had learned and having recognized that balance, Chitra would come back as the orthopedic/neurological surgeon, but she could be born into a world of more or less violence, more or less compassion and loving, depending on the harmony others attain. If enough of us can somehow elevate the consciousness of humankind—if we can commit to changing the collective future by improving our individual futures—we can actually change the future of the entire world and all its inhabitants.”
* * *
Compassion is, as I’ve said, related to empathy. It is also related to love, in that it comes from the heart, just as love does. Three simple exercises will help you reach that place in your heart where compassion, empathy, and love coexist, as will the psychometry exercise I provided in chapter 3.
Relax, using the same method described in chapter 3. When you are in a relaxed state, remember a time in your life when a tear of joy came to your eye. (You might remember several times.) I’m not talking about when you won the lottery or your team won the World Series; I mean a time associated with something loving in your life. It can be a moment when someone unexpectedly did a good deed for you, such as volunteering to take care of your children so you and your spouse could have a private weekend together, or visiting you when you were sick. Or it can be a time when you did a good deed for somebody else, an action coming not from a sense of responsibility but from the heart. The point is that the giver—you or a friend or stranger—acted out of compassion, with no expectation of reward. The more you do this exercise, the more the compassionate moments will be linked, one to the next, and the more easily a tear or tears will come. By bringing compassionate memories freshly into your consciousness you will increase your capacity for joy, happiness, and further acts of compassion.
In a relaxed state, look into someone’s eyes. If you see that person looking back at you, that is the everyday event, so go deeper. Look beyond what lies at the surface of his or her eyes. Try to see the soul looking back at you, and if you find it, you’ll see there is more depth in that person than just a physical body. You’ll know that all people have a soul just as you do and that their soul and your soul are connected. If you see your own soul looking back, you’ll have reached a deeper level because you’ll see that we’re all of one substance and of one soul. How is it possible not to feel compassion then, for in treating another humanely, are you not treating yourself? By loving another, are you not loving yourself?
A variation of the above is to visualize the humanity of other people—friends, family, or strangers. They are not just a name or a trait (“My aunt Maude never stops talking!” “That homeless person is filthy!”) but are multidimensional, made up of a complex of factors, just as you are. They have mothers, fathers, children, and loved ones. It doesn’t matter what their nationality is or whether they claim to be your foe. They experience joy, love, fear, anxieties, despair, and sorrow exactly as you and I do. They were children once, laughing and playing with their balls, their dolls, their pets, their games, when they were trusting. I have my patients visualize as children their enemies or people they hate or are angry at. That’s just a start. See them as young lovers, as parents, as people who have won and lost, who have experienced birth and death, victory and tragedy. Really see the details. Particularize. By so doing you are not seeing them as a group but as individuals who have experienced everything that you have experienced. It is easy to hate groups because they don’t have individual qualities. If you follow this exercise, you’ll give up hate because it is harder to hate fully rounded individuals and impossible to hate souls. I had compassion for that Russian soldier, the man I was supposed to fear. He had a soul, I realized. His soul was mine.
* * *
Compassion and empathy aren’t learned overnight; life’s lessons are not simple. Another factor must come into play as we ascend toward immortality: patience.