BOOK EXCERPTS

FROM CHAPTER 1, "THE CIRCLES OF COMPASSION”

When I was in my twenties, my Buddhist teacher tricked me into taking a vow of universal compassion. Using some spiritual sleight-of-hand I've yet to figure out, he made it seem I might aspire to a tender concern for everyone--even putting their welfare before my own.
In his wily way, he had framed this vow--the bodhisattva's promise to live for others--as enlightened self-interest. It was not, he told me, a matter of wearing a one-size-fits-all hair shirt. I was taking the vow for my own good. It would give me leverage to pry loose, finger by finger, the claustrophobic monkey-grip of ego; give the heart a little breathing room. By treating others with generosity, I might even find them responding in kind. I was being made privy to an ancient secret: To attain your own human potential, be mindful of everyone else's.
…But for many of us, there's a nagging worry the whole compassion routine could edge into self-effacement--into loving others instead of ourselves, giving away the store until the shelves are bare. Until we've stockpiled enough self-esteem, says common wisdom, maybe we can't afford to be overly giving. The 19th-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote that to love thy neighbor had but one purpose: "as with a pick, [to] wrench open the lock of self-love and wrest it away from a person." (He said it approvingly, but....oh, wonderful, now compassion will burglarize us.) What about looking out for number one?
...I dropped in on a new-age workshop recently. Plenty of talk about self-empowerment and self-realization, self-efficacy and peak performance, but compassion didn't rate second billing on the marquee. It made me wonder what sort of selfhood we're after: the self which "gets its needs met" but is never fufilled? Or the self that abundantly gives yet is never emptied? Instead of self-discovery, what about other-discovery, our real terra incognita?

FROM CHAPTER 2, “ROOTS, BRANCHES, AND THE CLEAR BLUE SKY”

The world has always been divided between those who believe we're basically kind and those who say we're basically cutthroat. Is compassion a fundamental human instinct, or does it depend on putting a lid on our inner chimp? Is it our birthright, or just a filigreed artifact of culture?...
Sometimes when the world seems a lovelorn place, I contemplate a picture over my desk of two bonobo apes hugging and kissing with lush abandon, and I perk right up. I'm inspired by this species of primate whose social life, in the words of one zoologist, is "ruled by compassion," and whose method of solving conflict could be fairly said to be, Make Love, Not War. They are not just a reminder of where we come from but of what sort of creature we are, at heart.
This image--peaceable, gregarious hominoids with hardly a mean bone in their bodies--isn't the usual picture of our evolutionary heritage. The official family portrait hanging over the mantelpiece of science depicts us as an aggression-prone, brainy ape driven by selfish instincts and constrained (at best) by a thin thread of culure. It's only lately that some scientists have begun stressing the traits we share with higher primates that reflect on us more kindly-conciliation, nurturance, a flair for alliance, and especially empathy.

FROM CHAPTER 3, “EMPATHY: YOU IN ME, ME IN YOU”

Mayors or Teamsters, cabbies or kings, each person received from the Dalai Lama the same keen, heartfelt regard. He seemed able to enter intimately into each person's world while remaining firmly grounded in his own. His quality of empathy, at once indiscriminate and specific, began to overwhelm me, not least because he made it seem so ordinary: ordinary kindness, ordinary consideration, only taken to an extraordinary degree.
A friend told me of visiting him in India and asking for a succinct definition of compassion. She prefaced her question by describing how heartstricken she'd felt when, earlier that day, she'd seen a man in the street beating a mangy stray dog with a stick. “Compassion,” the Dalai Lama told her, “is when you feel as sorry for the man as you do for the dog.”

FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE GOOD EYE”

The 18th-century Rabbi of Berditch was known as a master of the Good Eye. It was said he could see nothing of people's sins, only their goodness (even if he occasionally had to shut one eye to do it). He'd roust the local drunk from his stupor on a high holy day, seat him at the head of the table, and respectfully ask for his wisdom. He'd noodge a man who'd publicly flouted the Sabbath by praising him as the only person in the village who wasn't a hypocrite. He extended his compassion to all, whether powerful or impoverished, scholarly or simple, righteous or reprobate…
…I got an email the other day whose title line read: "Affirm Everything About Anyone." Yes, exactly, I thought: unconditional positive regard. It turned out to be an offer to spy on people via the Web, but no matter. Why not just affirm everything, about everyone; accept each person in as-is condition and love them for who they are?

FROM CHAPTER 6, “HEART'S SCIENCE, HEART'S MYSTERY”

The study of "prosocial" (as opposed to antisocial) feelings is so new, it's still possible for scientists to put new emotions on the map that hitherto hadn't been named. Jon Haidt (that's "height," not "hate"), a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia, wasn't setting out to be the heart's Magellan; it's just that he'd gotten his broken, and it hurt like hell. It made Haidt wonder about another heart-sensation that had always intrigued him: that warmth in the chest (often accompanied by a "choked-up" feeling) that we get when we witness a good deed. Film critic Roger Ebert once remarked that the movie moment which most reliably floors him is when the hero performs an act of selfless nobility and sacrifice. We all know that one, when we emerge into the lobby's too-bright tlights. blinking with still-moist eyes, exchanging tremulous half-smiles, enduring skeptical looks from the action-flick crowd. Haidt dubbed this feeling “elevation.” Elevation opens a window onto our fundamental nature. It implies we are drawn to each other's goodness, wired to feel exult over each other's compassion…
…The heart itself may be smarter than we think. It turns out to have its own brain of sorts, some forty thousand neurons and support cells arranged in an intricate architecture resembling that of the cortex. It even generates its own supply of oxytocin, the so-called "cuddle chemical" which, though it has a half-life in the bloodstream of only seconds, can create a lifelong imprint. Could it be that the heart strikes up love's music and the brain, that happy fool, dances to its tune? Sometimes, more often than you know, your heart could be the boss of you.

FROM CHAPTER 7, “THE GIVEAWAY”

Harold's is one of those stories that sounds, to skeptical ears, like tabloid fare; vaguely freakish, possibly pathological, completely unlikely. Here, ecce homo, is a man who donated his kidney--one of two spongy organs shaped like, well, giant kidney-beans, nestled cozily on opposite sides of your lower back--to someone he didn't know from Adam or Eve…
We each know ourselves to be capable of selflessness. We'll lay aside our needs--even lay down our lives--for our nearest and dearest. But beyond the charmed circle, we tend to parcel love out, weighing who deserves what (while placing a subtle thumb on the scale: what's in it for me?). Altruists seem instead to have inscribed in their very bones the great writ of all faiths: Love the stranger. They don't just give themselves to family and very best friends; they give themselves to pretty much anyone who asks, sometimes till it hurts.

FROM CHAPTER 8, “THE ALTRUIST”

Every society has taken note of children who are exceptionally giving at a very young age, even in families and cultures which do not particularly encourage it. Sometimes, almost inexplicably, a lotus appears in a daffodil patch… One theorist believes that such children see the world in a way which constitutes a " different new intelligence" that he dubs "caring thinking."
These compassionate early-bloomers seem to appear in all times and places. They grow up to be people with an acute empathy for the downtrodden; a reflexive belief in "one humanity;" an intense thirst for justice; a tendency to shed personal privilege; an osmotic pull toward others' suffering; and a gardener's faith that the watered seed always flowers.

FROM CHAPTER 9, "THE ELIXIR OF FORGIVENESS”

Theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “Forgiveness is unconditional, or it is not forgiveness at all." Though I'm inspired, it's lofty enough to give me vertigo. We have all experienced that hardness of heart that makes reconciliation seem unattainable. Sure, I've always wanted to glimpse the good flame burning bright in even the dim and the wicked and Lord, judge not, judge not. But I find it a mighty tall order for a heart that so often comes up short. I still get miffed when an acquaintance passes me by in the market without an effusive hello.
… But now and again, we hear of people who have forgiven the unforgivable, extending themselves to the perpetrators of unspeakable crimes. How do they keep their hearts open amid the buffetings of true malice? I wasn't sure I could imagine it. I was about to find out.

FROM CHAPTER 12, “THE BELOVED COMMUNITY”

If we really want to heal our world, we'd better find an antidote beyond the topical remedies of truces and treaties. If war is an infection in the human system, its cure must lie in strengthening what it most directly attacks: our capacity for compassion.
True, it takes a discerning eye to see vulnerability behind the fright-mask of those who oppress us. Martin Luther King used to portray his racist adversaries as broken people, living in spiritual exile, in need of a forgiveness only the oppressed could grant them. He inspired among his followers a paradoxical sense of empowerment: it was only they, the victims, who could heal the damaged souls of their enemies, by moving them to mercy and leading them out of hatred's wilderness…
These days, the notion of building a more compassionate world takes a backseat to the dictates of security. It is a time of the hard-eyed realists. The Secretary of Defense sardonically quotes Al Capone: "You will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone." The peacemakers have been banished to the kids' table with the rest of the utopians. It is said we've crossed an historic threshold, from an interregnum of innocence to a New Age of Terror.
I don't believe it. Yes, there is awful public tragedy, wrenching private sorrow, the dire clangor of arms. Plague-dogs of rage and cynicism roam the planet's nameless back alleys (and some name-brand front offices, too). And we are not safe. I read it in the Times; I can read it in Thucydides. It is a long battle, this struggle between love and hate. But to live in a climate of fear, with its color-coded thermometer-readings, means that men with box cutters, bullets, and bombs sit above us like kings. The hermetic paradox still holds: In the poison is the medicine. Hatred only summons forth its unconquerable opposite. Still, if love is ever to triumph, it's not just knocking the haters off their thrones. What we need is a regime change of the heart.