This is an excerpt from Frank Ostaseski's beautiful book, The Five Invitations. These are times that ask of us, I believe, to open our hearts as best as we each can to both the suffering and the deep love within ourselves and our world. May you find in this wisdom, compassion, and nourishment for the journey... ❤ Molly
Radical Connectedness and the
Source of Compassion
When speaking about compassion, I always feel like I should put a warning label on the bottle. It's important for caregivers or those working with suffering to understand something about the presence of compassion. When compassion is truly present in the room, a great deal of pain and suffering is likely to show up in response. That is because the pain wants to expose itself to the healing agent of loving kindness.
Years ago, I was invited by a Zen teacher Bernie Glassman Roshi to help lead a multi-faith "bearing witness" retreat at the former Nazi death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The idea was to immerse ourselves in an environment so unsettling that we had no choice but to drop our habitual ways of thinking. Bernie wrote:
"When you bear witness to Auschwitz, at that moment there is no separation between us and the people who killed. We ourselves, as individuals, with our identities and ego structure, disappear and we become the terrified people getting off the trains, the indifferent or brutal guards, the snarling dogs, the doctor who points right or left, the smoke and ash belching from the chimneys. When we bear witness to Auschwitz, we are nothing but all the elements of Auschwitz. It is not an act of will, it is an act of letting go. What we let go of is the concept of the person we think we are."
Every day, we sat along the train tracks at Birkenau, meditating, praying, and chanting the names of the dead. We also met daily in small groups to talk about what we were experiencing. The group I facilitated included a woman who told me she had been a child in the camps, as well as the sons and daughters of former prisoners and Nazi soldiers.
Feeling restless one night, I decided to go into the camp at Birkenau and meditate in one of the children's barracks. It was a long, grim building that had once been a horse barn. Shortly after I sat down, I heard someone enter the other end of the building. It was the woman from my group who said she had been a child prisoner in the camp. She began to cry and scream in the darkness.
I got up and sat beside her. And she kept wailing. I'd never heard such sounds. They were primitive, almost animal-like. The wailing went on for most of the night. No words were spoken. There isn't anything you can say when someone is experiencing such anguish. All you can do is bear witness. As light began to break, we returned to the hostel and silently hugged good-bye.
Later that day, I flew to Berlin to teach a workshop on grief and forgiveness. I didn't mention my experience at Birkenau; it can still be difficult to speak of such things in Germany. As the workshop was ending a day or two later, however, a woman in the very back of the room stood up and said, "I've been listineing to you talking about forgiveness, but my father was a prisoner in the concentraion camps, and I can't forgive his killers. My heart is like ice.
The whole room went silent. Again, the only appropriate response was to bear witness.
Then a woman on the other side of the room raised her hand to speak. I thought to myself, Now the stories of the camps and the grief of those losses will come.
She stood and said, "my heart is like ice, too. It feels like a stone. My father was a Nazi officer who was a guard in the camps. I know that he killed people. I can't forgive him."
Silence.
Then these two women did the bravest thing I have ever seen. They made their way across the large conference hall of 200 people and embraced. They didn't say a word. They didn't have to. They just held each other. Their actions were a clear recognition that they were no longer alone in their pain. For that moment, their suffering was all of our suffering.
***
It's easy to imagine that compassion requires some heroic strength that we do not possess. We may believe that we are not up to the task of meeting the suffering of the world. It can be helpful to consider the possibility that compassion is not a quality we possess, but rather one that we access, inherent in the nature of reality. Love has always been there all along. It is absolute because everything always has been held in love.
The later schools of Buddhism rest on the foundation of compassion. They include rich descriptions of different types of compassion tied to the development of Bodhicitta, which refers to the impulse of the "heart-mind" to awaken. At our Metta Institute trainings, my friend and colleague the Zen teacher Norman Fischer spoke of "radical connectedness" and said how the wisdom of non-separation is the source of compassion. He said, "Bodhicitta is the feeling of love based on the deep recognition that what we have called 'self' and what we call 'others' are destinations, concepts, habits of mind not realities in the world. Real altruism isn't self-sacrifice for the benefit of others... arising from some guilt-driven sense that we should be good, we should be nice, we should be kind or helpful. It is a profound recognition that self and others are not fundamentally different only apparently different."
There are said to be two levels of Bodhicitta. They are Absolute and Relative. Through Bodhicitta, we transcend narrow self-interest and embrace all beings in compassion. IN a more secular way, we might speak of universal and everyday compassion.
All spiritual traditions point to universal compassion as an innate and essential aspect of existence. In Buddhist thought, it is vast and boundless, the dynamic quality of reality that contributes to harmony. As a facet of love, it is open-ended and unlimited. Universal compassion is the foundation of all healing, an underlying source of benevolence and caring. Its nature is impersonal, yet it is always embracing us, even if we didn't know it. Even if our conditioning has obscured our ability to see it as integral to all activity.
Then there is everyday compassion. This is the compassion that gets expressed in daily life, when we help someone, feed the hungry, stand against injustice, change soiled sheets, give a foot rub, listen genuinely to a friend's broken heart, or contribute to an earthquake recovery fund. We may be effective or ineffectual in our efforts, but we do the best we can.
These two facets of compassion rely on each other. Everyday compassion can be exhausting. We get weary and worn out from our repeated efforts to care for our families, help others, or reduce the world's suffering. This is why everyday compassion must be sourced in the abundance of universal compassion. But it's a two-way street. Universal compassion also needs everyday compassion. Without everyday compassion, universal compassion is just an abstract idea, a big prayer. And if prayers alone were enough to heal the world, we could have ended suffering a long time ago.
With this understanding, we see that compassion doesn't come from our individual efforts. It emerges from our basic nature, it is a dynamic expression that arises from reality itself. Universal compassion needs arms and legs and strong backs. We are it's vehicle. We are how it is manifests in the everyday world. It uses our commitment, bright minds, and kind hearts. Meanwhile, everyday compassion is constantly refreshed because it arises from universal compassion. Gradually, we learn to trust that while there is endless suffering in this world, there is also endless compassion to respond.
- Frank Ostaseski
Excerpted from the Chapter "Bring Your Whole Self to the
Experience" from The Five Invitations: Discovering
What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
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