40 Days of Compassion

Wikipedia: “Compassion is a human emotion prompted by the pain of others. More vigorous than empathy, the feeling commonly gives rise to an active desire to alleviate another’s suffering.”

Contributors are pushing increasingly deeper into “the pain of others.”  Jason’s post on his encounter with self-destructive, homeless drug addicts typifies the pattern:

http://40daysofcompassion.com/2010/03/its-not-about-me/

He senses and experiences the pain of others.  Then he recoils likely in self-protection and frustration at suffering and powerlessness.  He leaves unsettled.  If he’s like me and most of us he asks, did I do the right thing?  Could I have done more?  Do I feel guilty?  ”What would Jesus do?”  But what could anyone do?  What can one man do in a world of undeniable suffering?  And mustn’t we protect ourselves?  ”In the event of an emergency, an oxygen mask will drop from the compartment above you.  Please, fasten your own mask before assisting others.”  You can’t pull anyone up from below.

That’s common sense, a core principle of first aid, and good utilitarianism.  Like it or not, compassion seems to have a hard limit at the point where one’s own interests impartially equal those of the initially suffering.  If we’re both hungry and I have two pieces of bread, I might give you a piece of bread so that we both have a piece of bread.  But I’m not going to give you both pieces.  1:1–sure; but 0:2 is just as bad as 2:0.  Right?  Why, oh, why?

The same logic applies to the emotional transactions underpinning compassion.  No one wants a psychiatrist who breaks into tears every time he counsels a trauma victim.  He or she’d never be able to get through the day.  The term for that kind of burn out is technically “Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder.”  We call it “compassion fatigue,” and  it’s real, and its pain is real.  (See the following article for more on the science of compassion and ways in which mirror neurons give us empathy and pain: http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0604/features/emotion.shtml)

So, we are to follow the recommended, common sense path of limited compassion, i.e. dispassionate concern.  After all, that’s what’s practical.  It’s what the psychologists typically preach, not getting lost in our own disabling “personal distress.”  And it’s the way the world works.  Life’s not fair.  Pity isn’t love.  Deal with it.  Do the best you can and move on.  Keep “the energy” good.

All true.  And yet, based on my own experience of trying to love a hard-core, diagnosed sociopath, I have glimpsed another path, oh so briefly.  This road is hard and must not be sought or shirked.  When it comes, the logical conclusion of total compassion leads straight to the heart of suffering, death, and evil.  Limitless compassion can cost you everything–your heart, sanity, health, and life.  But if you keep going, you will burn everything non-essential from your soul.  You will be left with nothing but love.  You will be love.  And from the position that is no position at all, the absoluteness of all vantage points at once that is perfect freedom, you will find peace in hell.  You will find life beyond death.  And then suffering will be joy, dark light, and your integration complete.  Baptism by fire leads to mystical detachment from all but love.  Thus is the path of the cross, the path of life.  Suffering given meaning by… compassion, changed from glory into glory.

Transcendent ego death is so radical it must be experienced to be believed, so foreign it must be glimpsed to be imagined.  It is impossible for me to express.  In this series, I will try.  But as a warmup for now, so as not to meditate on compassion but to meditate compassionately on suffering, let’s take off the gloves:

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.