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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
Field Notes on
the Compassionate Life: A Search for the
Soul of Kindness
by Marc Ian Barasch
Rodale Books - March
2005
Life offers up its own daily catechism,
even if it's just seeing people in a
little better light. Why not just resolve
to give everyone the benefit of the doubt?
"If we treat people as they ought to be,"
said Goethe, almost nailing it, "we help
them become what they are capable of
becoming." Or more to the point: Treat
them as they already are, if we but had
the Good Eye to see it.
Once, at a conference, I noticed a man
striding toward me, his face alight. He
seemed really happy to see me, but I
didn't have a clue who he was. When he got
closer, he pushed his glasses up to the
bridge of his nose, peered at my face,
looked down at my nametag, took a step
back.
"I'm so sorry," he said, embarrassed.
"You looked just like a friend I haven't
seen for years. You even have the same
first name ... so when someone pointed you
out. . ." He trailed off; the effusive
warmth seeped away. I told him it was
fine. His Good Eye had enveloped me in a
gaze of anticipatory delight that made me
feel golden. We wound up having lunch. He
told me about his research (which
coincidentally dovetailed with my own); he
talked about the happiness and sorrows of
raising a young daughter with multiple
sclerosis (for everyone is fighting a
great battle). We still stay in touch.
Maybe we should all take off our
glasses and hope for more cases of
mistaken identity. For that matter, it
might be unmistaken. Why not welcome
everyone as some long-lost cousin, sprung
from our African mother, bumping into each
other again after a fifty-thousand-year
separation. Wonderful to see you after all
this time -- you look great!
A friend of mine, a psychologist, works
as a counselor to the obdurate, lethal men
at Arkansas's infamous Tucker Max prison.
She's well aware that most people look at
her clients and see only dregs -- "ugly
toothless hulks," as she puts it -- but
she claims she can only see "radiant bulbs
with these big lampshades blocking the
light. I know they're supposed to be
'untreatable psychopaths,' but I feel
like, Oh, take that fright-mask off! It
could come off in two seconds!" It sounds
absurd, but she's remarkably successful.
In her presence, the toughest nuts crack
wide-open; even their wary, death-row
warders let down their guard and cry. She
has an x-ray vision that goes straight to
the human core.
"It's like there's this horribly thick
suit of armor," she explains, trying to
make me see it through her eyes, "and I
know someone's trapped inside, so how do
we get them out?" I ask her why she even
bothers. "The joy!" she says, as if it's
the most obvious thing in the world. "Just
the joy of being with people when they
show up as they really are."
If we can't see who people really are,
say possessors of the Good Eye, it's just
our ordinary eye playing tricks on us,
focusing on differences and defects, blind
to deeper connection. If we misstake each
other for strangers, it's just blurry
vision. The Good Eye is the corrective to
Einstein's "optical delusion of
consciousness." As with the rearview
mirror that cautions Objects May Be Closer
Than They Appear, we might be closer, much
closer, than we think.
The sixteenth-century Tibetan
meditation master Wangchuk Dorje
recommended a practice he called "the
Activity of Being in Crowds." Walking
through a throng, he said, is a "good
opportunity to check your progress and
examine the delusions, attachments, and
aversions that arise." I find the bustle
of a mall an especially good place to
check my Good Eye for jaundice. It's not
just the plenitude of people, but of
everything under that fluorescent sun that
pushes our buttons. With everything
winking merrily, beckoning with comeons
for instant gratification, and mirrors,
mirrors everywhere (it is all about me,
after all!), I go into a sort of mall
trance. The mind itself gets into the
spirit of things, hawking its tawdrier
wares; my finicky responses to the goods
on display merge with my reactions to the
people I pass -- little covetous twinges,
subtle flickers of attitude, petty
judgments on how people walk, talk, dress,
and chew gum. And here a surge of
superiority, there a deflating thought of
inadequacy; here a lurch of desire for a
sleek, well turned-out woman, there a
picador's lance of envy at her undeserving
boyfriend in the slobby polo shirt.
I return from these shopping
expeditions with a discount grab-bag of
those feelings the spiritual traditions
agree most occlude compassion. I'm
collecting a set of action figures based
on Augustine's deadly sins (and can we
just define sins as "biggest obstacles to
selfless love"?). Yesterday I snagged
Mammon, avarice (a Buddhist would call him
tanha, craving), and today my favorite,
Leviathan, jealousy, complete with
light-up green eyes.
The Koran describes jealousy as a
"veil" that beclouds the eye of the heart.
Jealousy turns other people into sources
of resentment: If I had what you have,
Leviathan croaks mechanically when I push
the little oval button in his back, then I
would be happy. Jealousy tints everyone in
bilious shades of envy. It presents a
perfect paradigm of insufficiency: I am
less because you are more. It's a zero-sum
game. Jealousy's only hope is that the
other person will be diminished, imagining
that would free up proportionately more
for itself. (It extends all the way to
that uniquely German coinage,
schadenfreude, gloating over another's
misfortune, the Good Eye turned into the
Evil Eye itself.)
But just as there are emotional toxins,
there are also antidotes, remedies, what
the apothecaries of yore called specifies.
In Buddhism, the supreme medicine for envy
is said to be mudita, or "sympathetic
joy," which calls on us to feel happy
about another's success. Easy enough when
it comes to rejoicing for those we really
care about: Every parent kvells over their
kid's triumphs; a teacher exults when her
favorite student aces the math exam. But
to expand this feeling from a narrow
circle to a wider arena is like pulling
wisdom teeth.
I once witnessed an exchange between a
Tibetan lama and a questioner on this
subject. "Rinpoche," inquired a pleasant
middle-aged man in a checked sport shirt,
"I adore my son. He's a linebacker for his
high school football team. I find myself
rooting for him to just cream the opposing
quarterback. Is there anything wrong with
that?"
"Of course not," the lama replied. "You
love your son, and you want his happiness,
and he's happy when he beats the other
team. This is only natural."
There was an audible sigh of relief in
the room. The spiritual path may be
challenging, but it's not
unreasonable.
The man smiled. "Thank you, Rinpoche,"
he said, making a brisk little folding
gesture with his hands.
The lama laughed sharply. "I was only
joking! Actually, this is not at all the
right attitude. In fact," he said,
glancing at the man mis- chievously, "a
good practice for you would be to root for
the other team. See them winning, see them
happy, see their parents overjoyed. That
is more the bodhisattva way." The man
thanked him again, this time with an
ironic groan at a homework assignment that
stretched past football season.
I have a wildly successful acquaintance
next to whose perfectly pillowed existence
mine seems a lumpy mattress. I've seen him
on magazine covers, a self-satisfied,
cock-of-the-walk, air-brushed grin on his
face. Even worse, he's in my field, though
he does ever so much better (sell-out!).
I've been training myself, as an antidote
to a fulminating case of green-eye, that
whenever I feel that little twitch of
envy, I wish for more bluebirds of
happiness to come sit on his eaves. "Don't
you mean," asks a cynical friend, "come
shit on his sleeves?" But the fact is, my
good wishes provide an unexpected sense of
relief. It's an unknotting, expansive
feeling, as if what's his and what's mine
suddenly, metaphysically, belong to both
of us and to neither. I recently came
across a line from Yoko Ono: "Transform
jealousy to admiration / And what you
admire / Will become part of your life."
Maybe she did break up the Beatles, but I
think she's onto something.
Don't believe me? Try it for yourself.
Root for the other team. Visualize someone
who makes you envious -- someone who
squats smug as a toad in what is surely
your rightful place in the world. Think of
them in all their irritating splendor,
enjoying the perks and accolades you no
doubt deserve. Then ... wish sincerely
that they get even more goodies.
Isn't this the mortal sin of "low
self-esteem"? Well, not exactly; it's more
like a metaphysical jujitsu. In rooting
for someone else's happiness, we tune to a
different wavelength. We feel more
beneficent, less deprived, more capable of
giving. The focus on another person's
satisfaction becomes a lodestone that
paradoxically draws us closer to our own.
(Isn't most envy just our own potential
disowned? We are jealous of what we
ourselves might become.) Seeing the world
through another's eyes (you in me, me in
you) makes it feel there's at least twice
as much to go around; not more money or
fame or square footage, but what underlies
the whole pursuit: more love.
It could be argued this approach might
work in a monastery or on a mountaintop,
but not in the hurly-burly of real life,
where the game is tooth-and-nail and
rooting for your own team is what keeps
the opposition from eating you alive. I
recently saw a quote from mega- mogul and
master of the Squinty Eye, Donald 'I'rump,
extolling the benefits of pure paranoia:
"People you think are your friends in
business will take your money, your wife,
your pets ... Life's a vicious place. No
different than a jungle." Yet I've met
people who swim in the piranha-infested
corporate waters for whom the Good Eye has
not only been good karma, but good
business.
Copyright
© 2005 by Marc Ian Barasch and
reproduced with permission.
For
more information, visit www.compassionatelife.com
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