May 15th, 2011 | Posted in Emotions+Stress
Dalai Lama Compassion
Cultivating patience or tolerance for others is an antidote to the problem of anger and hatred. Loving-kindness is diametrically opposed to hatred. If hatred is an attitude or an emotion that can’t stand another person’s well-being—’I don’t like it that you’re happy because you’re my enemy’—loving-kindness is just the opposite—it is wishing for the happiness and the sources of happiness for the other. And so the more you cultivate loving-kindness, the less you have to deal with anger and hatred. It’s like having a strong immune system.
Compassion is also diametrically opposed to cruelty. Cruelty is delight in someone else’s suffering and even yearning to inflict cruelty. Compassion is just the opposite—’May you be free of suffering and the source of your suffering.’ are phrases repeated mentally, along with generating the feeling of the compassionate wish, until both the thought and feeling become deeply ingrained and genuinely felt (even if they may not be at the beginning).
A uniquely Buddhist concept, mudita, refers to being joyous at the well-being or joy of another person. The more you cultivate empathetic joy, the more you will naturally be counteracting its opposite, ‘I can’t stand that you’re happy; I can’t stand that you’re famous or wealthy,’ which is jealousy. In empathetic joy you delight in the good fortune of others, so you undermine jealousy before it even has a chance to arise.
Finally, there is equanimity, which is diametrically opposed to attachment and aversion. The more you cultivate equanimity, once again, it’s like having an immune system that enables you to carry a peace zone with you wherever you go.
TWO WAYS OF GENERATING POSITIVE EMOTIONS.
(1) Exchanging places with others. There is a series of gradual exercises on how first to equate yourself with others, then to exchange yourself with others, then to consider others as more important than yourself and sometimes just to take others’ point of view in seeing your own ego as selfish and arrogant. You start being upset at that ego from the others’ point of view, just as you might ordinarily be toward someone else you saw as selfish.’
(2) Generating a basic feeling of intense loving-kindness—for instance, by considering someone you love very much, the classic example being the very kind mother. And then you imagine that mother in a terrible situation. There is a lot of imagination used, because we’re dealing with emotion. Say you imagine her as a doe being chased by a hunter. She jumps over a cliff and breaks her bones. The hunter comes and is about to give the final blow and then she looks at you and says, ‘Can you help me, son?’ and you feel powerless. Or you imagine someone who is very dear to you having no food for months and asking you for a morsel. You do all this to generate a very powerful emotion of loving-kindness for someone you really love.
Once the feeling of loving-kindness becomes strong, then the meditator extends the feelings toward other people and finally toward all living beings, by realising that, in fact, there is no reason why you should not extend those feelings to all sentient beings. You can combine both complementary methods into something that you feel naturally and you can expand rationally.
Generally speaking, before engaging in a Buddhist practice you attend to what the purpose and benefits are. This is a very practical procedure. If you skip that stage and you are just told to cultivate compassion, most likely if you did it all, you would cultivate something contrived that wouldn’t have much juice to it.
[A classic procedure in Buddhism for cultivating compassion is to try to verify by means of cogent reasoning that every sentient being has, in fact, actually been your mother in some life in the infinite past. Viewing an individual as your mother brings forth a sense of fondness, cherishing, gentleness, affection and gratitude.]
Often you can get the impression that the cultivation of compassion and loving-kindness is something that we do for others, an offering we make to the world. I feel, from my own experience, that when I practise compassion there is an immediate direct benefit to myself, not only for others. In fact, by practising compassion, I get one hundred percent benefit, while the benefit to others may be fifty percent. So the main motivation for the practice of compassion is self-interest. From my own small experience, I find that as soon as some kind of sense of caring or concern increases in my heart, this brings me more inner strength. The result:— I feel less fear and more happiness. There are some problems here and there? Okay, no matter. If there is shocking news, sad news, I may be uncomfortable for a few seconds, but then I recover very swiftly and there is peace again. I think the practice of compassion is like a medication that restores serenity when one is very agitated. The great tranquilliser is compassion.
HOW COMPASSION CHANGES THE BRAIN
There is more and more evidence that perception and imagination are very closely linked mental functions. There is a tremendous amount of overlap of the mental image and the perception of a real situation. Therefore, you can learn and modify with the imagination in a physiological sense. This is the idea of neuro-plasticity. Techniques have been developed recently by sports coaches who will train skiers, for example, in the summer, by having them lie down in bed and imagine skiing on the slopes. The fact is, when they actually put their skis on, they’re much better. It works the same with compassion training.
When we first begin a practice of this sort, we generate a transient state of compassion or other positive emotions, which can come and go. But when it’s practised more consistently, it becomes more of a mood or a temperament. As a temperament, there is some evidence to indicate that a part of our brain has changed in a relatively permanent way.
