Invite you to begin with a thought experiment.
See if you can imagine a world in which you cannot feel the pain of others.
So if you could exist just inside your own world,
And regardless of what's happening around you,
Whether it be with your family or people that you don't know,
It has no effect on you whatsoever,
Whatever would happen.
A very isolated,
Desolate world.
Next,
Pretend as if suddenly,
For the very first time,
You could experience.
The suffering of someone else for the first time.
And what a revelation that would be.
That somehow when you see someone else's suffering,
That your heart naturally opens.
That in some way you are having the experience of another person who is suffering.
I mean,
If you think about it,
It's pretty wild.
It's pretty weird,
The fact that you somehow can feel,
In a diminished way,
The pain of somebody else.
The neuroscientist says that there is,
In studying this,
There are these things called mirror neurons that actually,
When they see something happening in the world to someone else,
They actually replicate in a diminished way that experience inside of you.
And they see the same parts of your brain lighting up for a certain experience of suffering that would happen in your same brain if you were experiencing yourself.
So you're actually precisely hearing the experience of that other person inside of yourself.
Of course,
We don't need a neuroscientist to tell us this.
We know that if you're watching the horror movie,
And the young innocent protagonist is left in the house alone during the thunderstorm at night,
And the lights go off,
And she decides to go down to the basement to check things out,
That you want to jump out of your seat because you can't stand it.
So we all know this,
Right?
But it points to this strange and really wonderful sense of connectedness that we have,
That I think,
As with many things in experience,
We take for granted,
And really pushes this question of,
Well,
What's the boundary,
Really,
Between us?
You know,
There is a boundary,
Everyone knows that,
But maybe it's not as solid as we might think.
And we think as far as the Buddha and these qualities that we spent a lot of time talking about,
The boundless qualities of heart and mind,
The Brahma viharas,
There's loving kindness and sympathetic joy,
And equanimity and compassion,
And compassion,
Where we're going to focus tonight.
And the classic definition of compassion from the teachings is loving-kindness when it encounters suffering.
So loving-kindness encounters suffering.
The natural reaction of the heart is compassion.
You don't have to figure it out,
Right?
Loving-kindness,
When it meets suffering,
Automatically is going to respond with compassion.
Well,
I'd like to talk about a couple ways that this sometimes unfolds.
And this is,
I think,
From my life and maybe from your life also.
There is an image I'll use of two people.
You have the suffering person and the compassionate person.
And in one model,
Each has a bucket.
And the suffering person's bucket is nearly empty.
The compassionate person's bucket is not empty.
And the compassionate person starts pouring.
From their bucket into the suffering person's bucket,
Trying to fill it up.
And then another person comes,
And you keep trying to pour from your bucket,
And you may end up finding in a very short time that you're empty.
You know,
You're empty.
There's nothing left there.
I still remember quite vividly the experience I had after college.
I worked at a homeless shelter in New York City for a few years.
And people were coming all day,
All night,
Needing things.
And I remember one day in particular,
We were serving a meal to the homeless.
People were coming in looking for clothes from our clothing room.
They were asking for lots of other things.
A woman came to the door and said she was about to be evicted,
And she needed a few dollars to pay her rent.
And so in the middle of all these other things,
I run up to my room,
I have a few dollars,
I start asking the other volunteers,
Trying to aggregate enough money,
And I finally get close to what she needed.
I come back downstairs,
I give it to her,
And at that moment,
All of a sudden,
I had to go into the storage room,
Sit on the floor,
And I just felt like I have nothing left to give.
I feel like I just have to stop.
I just have to stop.
I had gone beyond whatever that limit was.
My bucket was empty.
And there were still people lined up calling my name,
Asking for me,
Asking for things from me.
So what if instead of there being two buckets,
There was actually an ocean in which we meet each other?
Another story from the same homeless shelter,
But not about me.
We had a soup line for men.
There was a woman,
An elderly woman,
Very frail,
But huge smile,
Would always greet every single person coming in.
They were like,
Hi,
Sweetie.
Hi,
Honey.
How are you?
It was an enormous mountain of a man who came,
Who was seething with anger.
You could tell it sort of filled the room as soon as he entered.
And she went up to him and said,
Let me show you to your seat.
" And he turned around to her and said,
Really shouted,
Why are you being so nice to me?
And it felt like he was about to hit her.
And everything in the room stopped.
And everybody's staring at them,
Wondering what's going to happen next.
So she thinks for a minute and she comes up and she places her little frail forearm next to his forearm.
And she said,
It's simple.
We're the same species.
And he thought about it for a while.
Okay,
And he sat down.
No big deal.
Same species.
So this ocean,
So this ocean,
Well,
Where do we find it?
There's another story,
Which I think I've told here before,
Of the fish that hears of something called the source of life,
And it's something that fulfills all desires.
So the fish starts searching for it,
Traveling the seven seas,
Never finding it.
The search gets more desperate and more distant.
And finally,
The fish gives up,
Goes back to its home waters.
And encounters an old fish who asks it why it looks so dispirited.
And it says,
Well,
I've been searching for the source of life.
The fish explains,
I've looked everywhere.
I've tried everything.
I have no success.
And the old fish smiles and said,
I've heard many names for the source of life,
But one of them is water.
So the source of life,
This ocean,
Is everywhere.
So we'll try together this,
Sometimes what's called a glimpse practice,
Which is just a kind of a short practice to just give a flavor,
Just a little bit of flavor of this.
The Tibetan word for meditation is familiarize,
Which I love.
Because to me it says that all of these practices are just giving us a little hint,
A little glimpse to familiarize ourselves with the ocean.
And naturally,
As you do these,
The mind jumps in and has all these questions.
Am I doing it right?
Is this it,
What he's talking about?
Is that it?
Maybe it's not.
It could be.
I'm not sure.
And the problem with the mind is that this experience is not thought-based.
In fact,
It is not a thought and you cannot reach it by thinking it.
It is actually this other very simple dimension of experience.
In Buddhism,
Also thinking is the sixth sense.
Along with hearing,
Seeing,
Touching.
Smelling.
So what does that say?
It says that,
That thinking itself is experienced by something other than thinking.
There's something that experiences everything,
Smells,
Sights,
And thoughts themselves.
So you can ask yourself that question.
What is it that is experiencing the thinking?
It's just this simple experience of wakefulness that we take for granted.
We skip over it because we want to race to the thought.
So let's see if you try this together.
You can do eyes open or eyes closed,
Whatever you wish.
And you can begin by just simply being aware of your body,
Sitting in a chair.
You can unhook your awareness.
From the thinking in your head,
From the thought factory,
And let the awareness descend down your neck.
Feeling like a bubble of awareness that's moving down to feel your throat from the inside.
And you let that bubble of awareness just continue down into your upper body.
Again,
Knowing your body from the inside.
Familiar with this direct knowing of the body from the inside.
And feeling or noticing an open space around the heart.
In the center of your chest and feel as if you can relocate your head to this open heart space.
And have a sense of awareness that extends out.
It's like a field of just energy.
That also includes your body.
Extends beyond your body.
Moving forward,
Looking out,
But also inside.
And sensing in this space,
This non-clinging space.
Where all the thoughts and feelings and sensations pass.
And again,
If the mind wants to check,
To ask,
Is this it?
Maybe yes,
Maybe no.
And just let that doubting part that questioning part.
Just allow it to sit down and relax.
And sense this.
Ground of being or the spaciousness that's inside and outside.
It's interconnected,
Embodied.
Just being here.
And you can come gently back.
One person described this sense as being non-urgent love,
Non-urgent love,
Just this gentle capacity to be with everything.
Or just a fundamental sense of okayness.
It's a very.
.
.
Gentle sense that'll come upon you.
And maybe despite all your other thoughts to the contrary,
Just a simple sense of,
Well,
In this moment,
There is an okayness.
So if this is a dimension of experience,
If this is the water in which we all swim,
The obvious question is why is it so hard to see?
And one answer is that it's just so close.
It's like the water.
It's just so close.
Where there are these expressions that the seeker is the sought.
Or this quote from Meister Eckhart,
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.
That my I and God's I are one I,
One seeing,
And one knowing,
And one love.
So this is actually happening all day long.
It's actually happening.
And I think the idea is that with some simple practices,
You can just sort of touch into it again and get used to where it is.
So close you can't see it,
So subtle your mind can't understand it,
So simple you can't believe it,
So good you can't accept it.
Well,
Back to compassion.
So if it is loving awareness meeting suffering,
This is the definition,
Then you can ask yourself the question,
Well,
What's the source of the loving?
And again,
If it's not me from my own little bucket,
Then you can just ask yourself this question,
Where is it coming from?
Or is it just the nature of awareness itself?
The compassion isn't necessarily something that you do when you meet suffering.
It is just the natural reaction of awareness itself.
That's what it wants to do every time it sees suffering.
You don't have to help it.
It just wants to do it.
Tanya Singer,
A German researcher,
Scientist,
Was studying empathy,
And she was doing brain scans of people.
She would ask them to produce empathy,
And she would scan the brain,
And she would see the areas that light up.
And then after that,
Doing this for a while with a number of different kinds of people,
She asked Mathieu Ricard,
Who was a French scientist,
Who became a Tibetan Buddhist monk,
Right after school,
So I think he's still a monk,
I think,
For 50 years.
He's been ordained.
Anyway,
So they put him in the machine,
Too,
Because she wanted to see,
Well,
What happens with this guy's brain?
So,
In the other subjects that she saw,
They were meditating on empathy,
And their brain was lighting up in all these areas that are associated with suffering,
Because they were,
Again,
Thinking about another suffering person,
Those same feelings were arising in them,
That they might experience themselves if they were suffering.
So they put him into the machine.
And she comes back and tells him that he's doing it wrong.
Because all of these pleasure centers are lighting up in his brain.
And she reminds him this is supposed to be an empathy exercise.
I tried to explain again.
But his response is that instead of taking on the pain on a psychological level,
He simply,
Again,
Met it with this natural awareness,
The natural sense of compassion,
Which is.
.
.
Heart and mind have been trained to meet all experience.
So instead of the difficult emotions of empathy,
All the pleasure centers in his brain were lit up.
And the Buddha compares suffering to the taste of salt in water.
He says,
If your mind is small,
Like a glass of water,
Then a simple problem will make life taste very bitter and hard to swallow.
But if your mind is vast,
Like a great river or the ocean,
The exact same dose of salt has no trouble dissolving without disturbing your peace.
So where would you like to dissolve your water?
I guess is the question.
Or this quote from Zen Master Dogen,
To study the way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.
To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barrier between self and other.
Maybe I'll say it once more.
To study the way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.
To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barrier between self and other.
So this very simple experience of unhooking from the drama,
From the questioning,
Doubting mind,
And relaxing back into the ocean.
There's a saying that the Absolute is always looking to awaken to itself.
The Absolute is always trying to awaken to itself.
So inside of us all,
There is a feeling that it wants to know itself,
And we just have to allow it.
I'll conclude with this story from Greg Boyle,
Who is a Jesuit priest who's been working with gangs in East LA.
Has anyone heard of Greg Boyle?
Yeah,
He's been there about 40 years.
And when he first got there,
He tried to broker peace agreements between the gangs.
And although he met with some success,
He felt like that was just kind of giving more oxygen to them,
Allowing them to continue.
Next,
He tried to go out and find jobs for these gang members,
But found that there were very few felon-friendly employers out there.
So he decided instead He said to start his own enterprises that were going to be managed and staffed by these former gang members.
The first one was a bakery that he called Homeboy Bakery.
It's been followed by all these other ventures that are called Homeboy Industries.
And he started a free clinic to take the gang tattoos off gang members.
And this is from his book called Tattoos on the Heart.
Mother Teresa diagnosed the world's ills in this way.
We have just forgotten that we belong to each other.
Kinship.
Is what happens to us.
When we refuse to let that happen.
When kinship.
Is our goal.
Other essential things fall into place.
And without it,
There's no justice,
There's no peace.
I suspect that if kinship were our goal,
We would no longer be promoting justice,
We would be celebrating it.
Kinship has a way of sneaking up on you,
Even as you seek to create it.
I celebrate Catholic services on a rotating basis in 25 detention institutions in Los Angeles County,
Juvenile halls,
Probation camps,
Jails,
And state youth authority facilities.
After Mass,
In the gym or chapel or classroom,
I hand out my card.
The infomercial that follows is always the same.
Call me when you get out.
I'll hook you up with a job.
I'll take your tattoos off.
I'll line you up with a counselor.
I won't know where you are,
But with this card,
You'll know where I am.
Don't slow drag,
Because if you do,
You'll get popped again and end up right back in here.
So call me.
I hand out thousands of cards a year.
So a homie named Louie,
17 years old,
Appears in my office one day,
Bright,
Happy,
Smiling.
Never in my life have I seen so many hickeys on a human being as on this guy.
His entire neck is spotted with them.
I'm thinking Mr.
Guinness of the world records might be interested in talking to Louie.
So here I am,
He announces,
Arms outstretched.
I just got out yesterday,
And he points to my card with glee,
And you.
Or the very first person I came to see,
I take a look at this giddy young gang member and say,
Louis,
I have a feeling I was the second stop.
The two of us collapse in laughter and suddenly there's kinship so quickly,
Not service provider and service recipient,
No daylight to separate us,
Just us.
Often we strike the high moral distance that separates us from them.
And yet it is God's dream come true when we recognize that there exists no daylight between us.
Servicing others is good.
It's a start.
But it's just the hallway that leads to the grand ballroom.
Kinship.
Not serving the other,
But being one with the other.
So let's do one last meditation together.
And again,
You can just check your posture,
Find a relaxed way of sitting.
Maybe you can again just feel the contact of your body with the chair.
You can start by just taking a few of those full deep cleansing breaths.
Then unhooking from your thoughts and just let that bubble of awareness again move down through your neck,
Into your chest,
Feeling directly from within your body,
That awareness that's alive and awake.
Instead of taking suffering of another into your body,
Allow it to continue through your heart space.
To that empty awake space behind and around your heart.
You can feel the support of that awakeness.
Coming into your body.
And then feeling this awake,
Unconditional space,
This loving space,
Go out to the person in front of you and connect to that awake space around them,
Through them.
So you can recall for yourself someone who you know who is suffering in some way.
Who's facing some challenge or difficulty.
Struggling in some way,
And bring that person to mind.
Or you could choose some place in the world where people are struggling.
Bring them to mind.
And feel an open-hearted space within your body.
That's arising from the center of your chest.
Feel you have relocated yourself from your head to this open heart space.
From which you're now moving through the world.
And sense how you can know from within this,
This contentless,
This timeless,
Spacious awareness.
And perceiving the world through these open eyes of your heart.
And extending this compassion to the person or people you've brought to mind,
I see your suffering.
I care for you.
May you be well.
Even if you can't do anything.
Unfreezing the paralysis that we can feel when we see suffering.
Might make us want to turn away.
Instead we can.
.
.
Recognize and reaffirm this interconnectedness,
This kinship.
I care about you.
I see you're suffering.
May you be well.
Just feel that care running from your open heart out to them.
I care about you.
I see your suffering.
May you be well.
And coming gently back.
