Compassion: From Nice-to-Have to Must-Have

Issue 12

Let’s keep the idea here really simple because…it’s really simple.

“The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves.” And yet. As Karen Armstrong wrote while the Charter for Compassion (quoted above) was being drafted, “Why, then, do we hear so little about compassion from the religious? Because whether they are religious or secular, people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate.” Bingo.

In the old consciousness (where, you’ll remember right-wrong thinking resides), we preached compassion religiously and secularly all the way down to our public schools’ kindergarten classes. We became known as a compassionate nation by welcoming immigrants and with a culture of charitable giving (which is not necessarily compassionate action, but I digress). We treated compassion as a nice-to-have, something to use if and when we cared to. No judgment, it’s just how we rolled. Millions of us suffering from pervasive racism, however, and/or from poverty, hunger, homelessness, war, a decidedly uneven health care system, a vastly disparate education system, food deserts, environmental injustice, the prison industrial complex and the entirety of American cultural maladies is all the evidence we need to know that massive deficits of compassion existed and exist in America with regard to public policy, period end of (long) sentence. We have not done unto others and that’s the problem. Yet we can solve all the ills out of existence by intending compassion as the reason for any of the policy proposals we ever create. That’s the new consciousness, Boo. Everywhere, everyone, all the time, no exceptions.

We have not done unto others and that’s the problem.

It’s simple, to be sure. Yet I hear from people all the time about how hard it is not to judge others and how hard it is to be compassionate to which I have a few responses: 1) So what? 2) It’s harder to live at the effect of a dearth of compassion because…see list of woes above. 3) To those in Spiritual Workout world anyway, I say, it’s called a workout for a reason. So yes, our own individual willingness to find a way to do that thing we humans have been called upon to do for millennia is…a factor.

So, too, is the system of entrenched beliefs and practices about How Things Are Done by the very people doing the politics. A few years ago, in my capacity as a consultant purveying Consciousness Training, I was working with a progressive team under the auspices of a progressive City Attorney in a progressive city in a progressive state that was focused on a Community Justice Initiative: “a neighborhood-focused array of restorative justice, alternative sentencing, and diversionary programs seeking to address the root causes of criminal behavior and achieve incarceration reduction.” Woot woot.

I’d love to believe that the overriding intention for the initiative, new-consciousness-wise, was to treat our fellow citizens as we’d all like to be treated. My educated guess, however, is that it was a more mundane and familiar array of otherwise admirable intentions like cost savings, addressing underlying causes of various “criminal” activity, reducing recidivism, resource efficiency, and the like. I have every reason to believe that against the intended metrics, this and myriad other civil innovations throughout America have produced and are producing excellent, measurable results. But look around. The issues persist. Why?

Because we did not make it our intention to treat others as we would want to be treated. That engagement with the City of Los Angeles was reasonably brief but it was long enough for this human to observe the inner workings of a bureaucratic juggernaut likely emblematic of most town halls and city governments and not at all surprising: an entrenched ecosystem filled with hard-working, well-intended individual humans answering to multiple levels of authority drenched in a dizzying array of countless, conflicting layers of unexpressed personal and institutional intentions (e.g., making political points, jockeying for dollars and/or position, job security, etc.). Combine all of that with a collection of beliefs around what’s possible, multiply it by hundreds of thousands of politicians and office holders and government employees and citizens throughout the country, throw in a couple of centuries or so of the history of The Way Things Are and that’s why bright spots of screaming successes peppered throughout the nation are repeatedly smothered. The intentions were never to treat others the way we’ve been treated.

When new consciousness-wise, we properly bring compassion to the fore, when we make treating others as we would want to be treated the reason for any or all of the programs/initiatives/policies, none of that barrage of disjointed, ancillary, conflicting intentions will matter. I’ll give you that it will take effort to change The Way Things Are but again, so what? I also promise you it will be effort that will not be wasted because it’s so simple: to solve our most entrenched problems, we must make every policy an intention to treat others as we would want to be treated ourselves and go from there.

We’ve tried everything else.

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NOTE: It’s that time again. The place to discuss any and all of the issues addressed here and which run around in your heart and mind is upon us. Please join me this Tuesday, October 20 for the next Spiritual Workout for Politics & Current Events Drop-In, also known as the live online version of The Conscious Politics Sunday Newsletter. All are welcome and subscribers to this Newsletter are invited to use coupon code SWP2020 to attend free of charge.

And, for sure, invite your friends and relations because the more the merrier. It’s super easy to share from the event page.

NOTE: Photo: upaya.org. From Occupy Wall Street. Where I spent 40 glorious days.

NOTE: Do your Self a favor and check out The Charter for Compassion if you haven’t already.

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