I picked up a book of interviews with Dalai Lama at the bookstore the other night, and he was talking about the nature of compassion in an interesting way. It was a discussion of the difference between how we experience our own suffering and the way, in a state of compassion, that we experience someone else's—what the odds were that we can experience someone else's suffering at all, and to what extent.
I was struck by his idea of compassion being more essentially a state of profound awareness, of deep noticing, than an outward action. Compassion as he described it came before any action we might take, like tut-tutting over another person's problem, or telling them they're a Christian martyr, or even doing something to actually help them out of their trouble.
Not surprisingly, the Dalai Lama was more concerned with compassion as a way of existing than with the actions resulting from that state—the implication being that if you're able to reach the true state the actions will follow of their own accord.
So I realize more and more that my ability to act in any constructive way depends on my ability to get my feelers out, to turn my radio on, to notice what's really going on within me and without me.
There's a great Hollywood story about Harry Cohn, the monstrous head of Columbia Pictures. Herman Mankiewicz, the guy who wrote Citizen Kane, says that when he was a writer at Columbia he was talking to Harry Cohn one day about a story idea, and Cohn told him he could tell if a story would be a hit or not by whether it made his fanny squirm, to which Mankiewicz replied, "Imagine, the whole universe wired to Harry Cohn's ass!"
Cohn fired him, but the point of the story (in our context, at least), is that the Dalai Lama would be more likely to share Mankiewicz' perspective than Cohn's. Harry Cohn was a notorious egoist and bully and while he may have imagined that his fanny was in tune with the cosmos, what he really meant was that when it came to the dominant vibe, Harry Cohn's ass was sending and the cosmos was receiving, if it knew what was good for it.
My feeling is that a lot of people, when they try to judge what's going on around them, confuse sending and receiving just like Cohn. I grew up an enormously self-conscious young man and, as far as my perception of my influence on the world around me was concerned, very much in the same place as Harry Cohn.
It wasn't out of a bullying stance, but out of quivering meekness, that I imagined that my every action and even attitudes and thoughts were making the stars whirl through the ether. I thought my mistaken deeds and attitudes were controlling how people acted towards me, and only if I corrected these false transmissions from my error-ridden insides would I be able to get people to like me.
Self-consciousness at this level is not consciousness at all, of course, but an enormous delusion. By assuming such blanket responsibility for other people's actions and reactions, and by casting it is such a negative light, you miss the few things that really are connected to what you're putting out, like people liking you because you're a good person.
How do people get out this hole? How do you reset your receiver to pull in the True Cosmic Consciousness or NPR or the Mr. Rogers or any transmitter of bonafide sanity?
I don't know. Meditate, see a counselor, collect hard knocks in the school of experience, maybe immerse yourself in Jane Austen novels. Austen talks about these problems all the time. Every book is about people misreading social interactions, misjudging the opposite sex, and groping towards some halfway accurate state of awareness. The "good" guys turn out to be actually bad, the "bad" guys turn out to be actually good, and eventually the characters sort it all out and get married.
Austen died unmarried herself, so she surely understood the long odds of bumbling your way to consciousness. But so fetching is her dry, deadly realistic sense of humor, so clearly was she in tune with what's really going on herself, that we buy her happy endings. The essentially realistic part of the books is her characters' ability to make their way to awareness. That happens in real life, whether you end up married or not.
I was struck by his idea of compassion being more essentially a state of profound awareness, of deep noticing, than an outward action. Compassion as he described it came before any action we might take, like tut-tutting over another person's problem, or telling them they're a Christian martyr, or even doing something to actually help them out of their trouble.
Not surprisingly, the Dalai Lama was more concerned with compassion as a way of existing than with the actions resulting from that state—the implication being that if you're able to reach the true state the actions will follow of their own accord.
So I realize more and more that my ability to act in any constructive way depends on my ability to get my feelers out, to turn my radio on, to notice what's really going on within me and without me.
There's a great Hollywood story about Harry Cohn, the monstrous head of Columbia Pictures. Herman Mankiewicz, the guy who wrote Citizen Kane, says that when he was a writer at Columbia he was talking to Harry Cohn one day about a story idea, and Cohn told him he could tell if a story would be a hit or not by whether it made his fanny squirm, to which Mankiewicz replied, "Imagine, the whole universe wired to Harry Cohn's ass!"
Cohn fired him, but the point of the story (in our context, at least), is that the Dalai Lama would be more likely to share Mankiewicz' perspective than Cohn's. Harry Cohn was a notorious egoist and bully and while he may have imagined that his fanny was in tune with the cosmos, what he really meant was that when it came to the dominant vibe, Harry Cohn's ass was sending and the cosmos was receiving, if it knew what was good for it.
My feeling is that a lot of people, when they try to judge what's going on around them, confuse sending and receiving just like Cohn. I grew up an enormously self-conscious young man and, as far as my perception of my influence on the world around me was concerned, very much in the same place as Harry Cohn.
It wasn't out of a bullying stance, but out of quivering meekness, that I imagined that my every action and even attitudes and thoughts were making the stars whirl through the ether. I thought my mistaken deeds and attitudes were controlling how people acted towards me, and only if I corrected these false transmissions from my error-ridden insides would I be able to get people to like me.
Self-consciousness at this level is not consciousness at all, of course, but an enormous delusion. By assuming such blanket responsibility for other people's actions and reactions, and by casting it is such a negative light, you miss the few things that really are connected to what you're putting out, like people liking you because you're a good person.
How do people get out this hole? How do you reset your receiver to pull in the True Cosmic Consciousness or NPR or the Mr. Rogers or any transmitter of bonafide sanity?
I don't know. Meditate, see a counselor, collect hard knocks in the school of experience, maybe immerse yourself in Jane Austen novels. Austen talks about these problems all the time. Every book is about people misreading social interactions, misjudging the opposite sex, and groping towards some halfway accurate state of awareness. The "good" guys turn out to be actually bad, the "bad" guys turn out to be actually good, and eventually the characters sort it all out and get married.
Austen died unmarried herself, so she surely understood the long odds of bumbling your way to consciousness. But so fetching is her dry, deadly realistic sense of humor, so clearly was she in tune with what's really going on herself, that we buy her happy endings. The essentially realistic part of the books is her characters' ability to make their way to awareness. That happens in real life, whether you end up married or not.
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