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| Dalai Lama (left), with Daniel Goleman. |
David Goleman and the Dalai Lama collaborated in writing a book, A Force For Good: The Dalai Lama's Vision For Our World, that explores the Dalai Lama's ideals and calls for people to act. Because this is a world which also has the internet and social media, there is also a website, A FORCE FOR GOOD, where people can connect to share and explore that call to action.
Some research has been done which sheds some light on the feeling of compassion. As Daniel Goleman says, "This research is very encouraging, because scientist are not only using brain imagery to identify the specific brain circuitry that controls compassion, but also showing that the circuitry becomes strengthened, and people become more altruistic and willing to help out other people, if they learn to cultivate compassion - for example by doing traditional meditation practices of loving kindness....[I]t's a fundamental imperative that we need compassion as our moral rudder."
In a sense, it backs up the concept that exercising, or repeating, the pathway/actions, is key to keeping compassion strong. You must exercise, even mindfully, to keep it central in your life. That's why hatred subtracts so much from our concern for our fellow humans and other animals; it's a weakening impulse.
The book refers to something called "muscular compassion". Mr. Goleman describes it this way, "Compassion is not just some Sunday school niceness; it's important for attacking social issues - things like corruption and collusion in business, government, and throughout the public sphere. It's important for looking at economics, to see if there is a way to make it more caring and not just about greed, or to create economic policies that decrease the gap between the rich and the poor. These are moral issues that require compassion."
So, when we look at the intolerance in this world, in this country, and we see such acts as a clerk denying marriage licenses to committed homosexual partners, despite Supreme Court rulings: as people fleeing from war and famine and knocking on the door to a country much better off and being denied passage to other countries that vow to give them a safe haven; and even a purported news channel placing words of hatred in the mouths of people that never uttered them; that's a vision of a world, a nation, that has lost its way. It has lost any sense of compassion towards suffering humanity and sunk to its depths of darkness.
How to fix it involves getting back in touch with our own sense of compassion. Keep exercising it; spend moments of thought thinking about what that word means in your life and in the life of our nation. The more people who do that, the more people who exercise their compassion circuitry, the better off we all will be.
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| A compassionate world. |
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