Sharon Salzberg: The Force of Kindness

This is excerpted from "The Force of Kindness:

Change Your Life with Love & Compassion"

by Sharon Salzberg

     We all know what it is like to deny the vitality of someone's vulnerable , complex, mutable life once we have him or her nicely pigeonholed as "other."

     The Advaita Vedanta master H.W.L. Poonja once said in response to a question about bringing peace to the world, "As long as there are two, there will be war." As long as there is that insidious sense of self and other creating "two," and we can objectify that "other" for our own ends, there will be war in our hearts, in our families, in our neighborhoods, throughout the world.

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     Just as cruelty can ravage lives and trample hope, kindness can be the quality we choose to steer our lives by. Rabbi Abraham Heschel once talked aobut a persistent effort to be worthy of the name "human." We can't deny how much brutality and callousness humans are capable of. Yet, at the same time, we can't deny the courage and compassion that offer us faith.

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     A dedication to kindness offers us a chance to try to make a real difference despite the obstacles and unhappiness we might face. No matter what our belief systems, actions, or status, we are joined together in this world through strands of relationship and interconnection. That suffering child, orphaned through a tsunami, who we see in Indonesia or Sri Lanka is part of our own lives, and we must not forget that. There is nothing that just happens only "there" anymore - not a war, not an exploitation of the week, not a disease, not a hope for change. We need to stop reinforcing the sense of dehumanization, of "us" and "them," of separation that leads to wanton cruelty in the first place.

     And if tomorrow is going to look any better than today, we must realize that the currency for compassion isn't what someone does, right or wrong - it is the very fact that that person exists. Commitment to the possibility of kindness cannot be discarded as foolish or irrelevant, even in troubling times when we often can't find easy answers. If we abandon the force of kindness as we confront cruelty, we won't learn anything to take into tomorrow - not from history, not from one another, not from life.

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     Can you imagine seeking strength without hatred, power without vengefulness, authority without dualism and division? Can you imagine having that much openness, that much courage, and that much imagination?

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     We can keep on trying, through the extension of lovingkindness to others, and make the effort to pay attention to them in an inclusive way rather than splitting them off into the "other" - the "different" ones who can be hurt with impunity. This doesn't at all mean that we will like everybody or acquiesce to everything that he or she does. It doesn't mean that we become complacent or passive about naming wrongdoing as wrong or about seeking change, sometimes very forcefully, with our whole heart.

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     It's easy to be unconscious. It takes something very compelling to turn us around, to turn us away from all the easy, complacent answers society offers us about how to live.... If the wish for happiness can be aligned with wisdom instead of ignorance, that urge becomes our homing instinct for freedom, allowing us to cut through many obstacles.

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     Any degree of suffering can be experienced as overwhelming, a sealed room from which we see no protruding edge to provide a toehold and facilitate escape. Compassion gives us that toehold, allowing us to use our own pain and our own witness of the pain of others as a vehicle for connection rather than isolation. It allows us to open rather than close down, to have an entirely different understanding of the possibility of a special kind of happiness, even in painful and challenging times, and of the role kindness plays in realizing it.

~ Sharon Salzberg