In a novel that I’m writing, a young girl who is a monk at a Zen monastery goes on a ‘field trip’ to see the people living homeless in her city. Her name is Asida, and one of the men who is living on the streets confronts her, insisting that the people in the distant skyscrapers are living plush, wonderful lives while he and the other homeless are suffering. Asida doesn’t respond as the man hoped — she looks toward the distant towers with their wealthy inhabitants and says to him: “They are as hungry as you are. They’re just hungry for other things.”
Who Deserves Our Compassion?
Most of us are ready to give our compassion to people who don’t have enough food, who are lacking proper shelter, who are ill, or who have suffered accidents or been victims of violence. It is easy to see that these people deserve our compassion. Yet, it is equally true that most of us don’t feel a lot of compassion for billionaires or CEOs of major corporations or people who treat others poorly.
Many of our greatest spiritual teachers have suggested that there is something ‘wrong’ with our usual approach to life. We might call this suffering or sin, but the idea is the same — our daily lives move through cycles of good and bad, frustration and victory, happiness and sadness, pain and pleasure. This is the magical state of being called ‘Dualism‘, and it can seem to us like it is the natural way of being. Life is meant to be like this, we tell ourselves. This is the way of things. Some days are wonderful, other are awful, and most of them will be somewhere in the middle.
There is a suggestion, however, that this isn’t our natural way of being. Indeed, dualism could be seen as a great delusion that causes humanity immense and unnecessary pain. We learn dualism through years of teaching, and it is only with extreme effort, applied through all of our childhood and adolescent years, that we master the art of dualism. By then, like a gymnast who does a back-flip with no effort or thought, we have learned an amazing and complex skill, and made that skill second-nature. Indeed, we learn the art of dualism so well that we forget there is any other way. It just seems natural.
As expert dualists, we divide the world into those who have and those who have not — except we forget that what we really mean is that we tend to divide the world into those who we perceive to have less than ourselves, and those who we perceive to have more than ourselves.
Do we tend to give money to those wealthier than ourselves? Of course not! Do we tend to give food to those who eat better than we do? No. When we live in desire of something, then we can easily feel jealousy for those who have more. These feelings can even turn into feelings of disgust, such as we might feel when we learn of CEOs who have used government money (OUR money) to give themselves bonuses of millions of dollars. Surely these are terrible people!
When we think of these people as terrible, however, we only strengthen the cycle of dualism, in both ourselves and in the world. We feed our own sense of jealousy and anger, and when we tell other people that they are terrible, they more often than not find stronger ways to justify their actions.
Feeding Conflict
Conflict is like a fire, and needs constant feeding if it is to remain burning. We mistakenly can assume, by looking around us at the violence we see in the world through our media, that humans are intrinsically violent animals. Jesus said that we ’sin’, and the Buddha suggested that all of us are ’suffering’. Does this mean we are intrinsically flawed, or that we have been led astray from a path of true compassion?
The wealthy person, who takes a bonus of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, is suffering from a cycle that is much like the one we all find ourselves caught within. Who among us does not live in a house that could easily shelter many homeless? Who among us is truly hungry every time we sit down to eat a meal? Who among us does not take much more than we need to live happily upon this planet? Once we buy into the idea that ‘a good life’ comes from amassing things or remaining in some particular emotional state (such as a state of happiness), we grow attached to these things, and begin a cycle of craving. Once we enter that state, all of us are suffering from the same cycle of craving that drives the CEO. My own house, though very modest by United States standards, is large enough to shelter perhaps fifty people or more. And yet I live in it with only Rebecca.
Giving of Our Compassion
What is called for is not to invite the homeless to live with us. Nor is it to write a check to a millionaire. It is only for us to examine our sense of compassion, and discover if we harbor biases. Who do we believe deserves our compassion, and why? Can we learn to see the suffering that all humans dwell in, whatever their clothes, their country, or the size of their bank account?
When we can give our compassion without bias, even to those who harm us, then we transform. When we reach out into the world around us, we might be the single person who feels love and compassion for a person who has only experienced hardness and the jealousy of others. This compassion has the ability to break through the cycles of suffering, and to show people that there is another way.
We humans have tried the mechanisms of jealousy and craving for thousands upon thousands of years, and during all of this time we have moved through personal and social cycles of prosperity and destruction. Always the cycle of dualism. After so much trying, might it be suggested that dualism doesn’t work? Perhaps it’s not about fighting to balance the good over the bad, but instead it’s about observing the life-view we have adopted, and questioning whether it truly serves us, on both a personal and a global level.
The place to begin this exploration is with ourselves, for only when we see dualism clearly can we understand how it guides and pilots our lives. Then we may feel compassion for ourselves, which is the seed from which all other compassion is born.
