Summertime means bugs.  Bugs bug us.  We don’t like to be bugged so we kill bugs.  We are playing gods, taking it upon ourselves to decide matters of life and death.   No big deal, right?  After all, it’s just a bug, right?  Right, it is just a bug. 

Where am I going with this?  Right here, to this thought: you are missing an opportunity for compassion-training.  Get yourself a $30 dollar BugZooka (which is a battery-free, catch-and-release, pump action hand-vac) and spend this summer practicing compassion.  

Let me clarify a couple of things.  First, I am not advocating for bugs.  I am advocating for myself.  I live in the world that is more of a jungle than it theoretically has to be, in a world that plays mindless god left and right, in a world that could certainly benefit from a bit of compassion-training.  This kind of world is unsafe, for me, for you, for anyone.   So, my interest in compassion-training is entirely self-serving.  Sure, I care about the bugs too.  Case in point, just this morning as I got up to wash my face there was a moth in the sink on its back, flapping its wings.  It was stuck.  Its wings were “glued” to the walls of the sink by the moisture.  I opened the trashcan and rummaged for something thin yet hard to help the moth peel off away from the surface of the sink.  I found the cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper and tried to use this.  It didn’t work: as I tried to scoop up the moth, I kept damaging its wings and it would flap wiggle its body in desperate agony.  I felt like Saddam Hussein’s little brother in a torture chamber with a  captive audience.  I knew the BugZooka wouldn’t work in this situation because the wet moth would be stuck inside the capture chamber and I’d have to scrape it out somehow.  So, I opened the faucet, hoping that as the water fills up the moth might be able to flip over on its stomach at which point I could try to scoop it out once again.  It didn’t work.  It got sucked into the drain to its death.  I felt bummed out for a moment: as primitive of a life as it was, it ended.  There was no lingering guilt (after all, I did the best I could) just a moment of regret, a moment of identification, a moment of compassion, a moment of humanity. 

This is exactly the sort of thing that having a BugZooka allows you to practice.  You see a bug, you grab your BugZooka, you sneak up on the little creature, you push a little red button, and bam: you see the unsuspecting creature temporarily trapped and panicked inside a plastic chamber.  Then you open a window or step outside and you release it back into the wild, feeling good that you didn’t have to kill anyone.  It’s a trivial moment but, I believe, it is nothing less than god-training.  Fact is: to live we have to kill.  We kill to eat, we kill to heal (notice the “bio” in the word antibiotics, “bios” means “life” in Greek).  The business of living – on some level – is inevitably zero-sum.  We will – one way or another – take life, i.e. play god.  So, if we are going to play god, we might as well practice being mindful, discriminant gods, not mindless, trigger-happy, zombie gods that can’t stand to be bugged. 

One more point to clarify.  As I am suggesting this stupefyingly simple compassion-training summer-camp, I realize that there is bound to be a reader out there who will read this and sigh with scorn: “It’s just bugs, kill the damn things, they don’t know any better.  Life is cruel.  There is no room for these bleeding-heart shenanigans.”  I can envision the objection that compassion-training is passivity-training, that compassion training will make someone vulnerable and defenseless.  I don’t think so:  compassion training is one thing, self-defense and assertiveness is an entirely separate matter.  Case in point: I spent this morning writing this silly little blog about bugs and yet, should you barge into my home uninvited in the middle of the night, I’ll do my physical best to mess you up.  My point is simple: it’s not an either/or – either compassion or self-care.   No.  It’s not a dualism of the opposites, it’s a dialectic unity of the opposites: compassion is self-care.   Meaning: when you practice compassion, when you avoid unnecessary violence you a) take care of your mind/conscience  and b) practice and model mindful coexistence that makes the world (and you) safer in the long run.

In short, skip on a week’s worth of lattes and get yourself a $30 compassion-training kit.  Awaken your benevolence one bug at a time.

Here’s the link:  http://www.gaiam.com/product/id/1006886.do?SID=WG092SPRTAPEMACS&GCID=S18376x028&keyword=bugzooka

p.s. I am not paid by BugZooka, don’t own Gaiam stock (if there is one), have not accepted and will not accept any gifts from Gaiam should they want to thank me monetarily for any increase in their sales of this product; writing this was reward enough.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a very complex work with multiple layers of meaning.  To date, the book has been translated into 65 languages – more than any other novel.   So, for those of you who aren’t familiar with this work, I will only summarize the part of the story that is relevant to the topic of betrayal and compassion.

Winston Smith, a civil servant/bureaucrat responsible for maintaining the propaganda of the Party, is a citizen of the Big-Brother totalitarian regime.  He falls in love with Julia, a mechanic that repairs novel-writing machines.  They develop a romantic-dissident relationship in a society that had banned both love  and freedom of thought.  They are set up by a party member, O’Brian, and are eventually captured by Thought Police.  They are interrogated and tortured.  O’Brian explains that the Party wants power for the sake of power and aims to extinguish any form of free thought and individual partiality (such as romantic attachments; love, after all, is a form of partiality and individual bias).  During this psychologically and physically trying re-programming and re-education, Winston quickly breaks down – he confesses anything  just to escape further turmoil.  O’Brian, who is personally responsible for this re-education, however, is not convinced.  He believes that Winston still loves Julia.  To help Winston break through this attachment, he designs a custom-made torture for Winston. 

The following re-formatted dialogue from the novel will help set up the scene further.

O’Brian:  “You asked me once what was in Room 101.  I told you that you knew the answer already.  Everyone knows it.  The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst world.” (The door opened… A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or a basket of some kind.) “The worst thing in the world varies from individual to individual.  It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.  <…>  In your case the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.  <…> By itself pain is not always enough.  There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death.  But for everyone there is something unendurable – something that cannot be contemplated.  Courage and cowardice are not involved.  If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope.  If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air.  It is merely an instinct which cannot be disobeyed.  It is the same with the rats.  For you, they are unendurable.  They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wish to.  You will do what is required of you.”

At this point, O’Brian explains how the contraption works: it’s basically a helmet with a sliding compartment door, with two hungry rats ready to bore through Winston’s face as soon as O’Brian slides the partition out.  As the contraption is mounted on Winston’s head, he searches for a way out from this nightmare.  O’Brian had clued him that there must be a way out and that Winston knows it.  Here’s Winston’s epiphany:

Winston:  “Do it to Julia!  Do it to Julia!  Not me!  Julia!  I don’t care what you do to her.  Tear her face off, strip her to the bones.  Not me!  Julia!  Not me!”

O’Brian is satisfied.  Winston’s mind is now purged of all partialities – having reconnected with his primordial survival instinct, he is now only in love with the Party, with the Big Brother, with the only entity that can assure his continued survival.  Winston’s off the hook. 

Now, this is not a trivial scene from this nightmarish novel – the entire novel ends four pages later.  This moment is a pre-climax.  Here’s the climax scene – in my reading of this novel – the scene of understanding.  It happens a few pages later when Winston and Julia – having been both released – finally meet again.

Julia:  “I betrayed you.”

Winston: “I betrayed you.”

Julia (continues):  “Sometimes they threaten you with something – something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about.   And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.’  And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick… <…>  [but] at the time it happens you mean it.  You think there’s no other way of saving yourself. <…> All you care about is yourself.”

So, there you have it:  to understand is to forgive.  The scene seems anti-climactic but it isn’t.  It’s a quiet explosion of acceptance!  Julia, just like Winston, has been through Room 101, she understands Winston, she can relate, and, thus, not hold a grudge.  She can forgive.  Sure, they no longer feel the same about each other – in this grotesque dystopian system they have been brought to a brink of death and betrayed each other to save themselves.  It’s hard to re-discover love after this – not because of betrayal  that you can forgive and relate to – but because you know how it’ll end up.  Big Brother will know…  The fact that Winston and Julia go their separate ways is, however, peripheral in this context.  The point to note is that Julia understands Winston and seems to be able to forgive. 

In real life, one partner’s betrayal is rarely matched by a symmetrical counter-betrayal.  Sure, an argument could be made that Julia could understand and forgive Winston because she herself has similarly betrayed him.   But I believe it is possible to understand, and, thus, forgive someone who had betrayed you even if you have no similar reference point.  How?  By appreciating that betrayal isn’t betrayal, that betrayal is self-care.  Now, this isn’t Orwellian Newspeak or Doublespeak.  It’s just motive analysis.  We’ll let O’Brian explain:  “for everyone there is something unendurable.”  A seemingly unlikely expert on compassion, O’Brian appreciates two very basic axioms of human nature:  a) that survival is instinctual and, therefore, natural, and, b) that we all have breaking points.   Therein lies the platform for compassion: a betrayal is an act of self-preservation.  And as long as there is a self, the self will be self will be self-serving.

“Do it to, Julia!” Lessons

Motive-Focus: Betrayal – motivationally – is an Act of Self-Care

The first lesson here is the same idea I have been discussing in the Compassion Series:  motive focus.  To forgive a betrayal we have to focus on the motive – which is always, in one way or another, a pursuit of well-being.  This is instinctual for all of us:  we are all moving away from pain towards well-being.  There is nothing wrong with that.  A desire to advance one’s well-being is as natural as gravity.  Say, your partner betrayed you by cheating on you.  Was his/her motivation to hurt you or to seek satisfaction and pleasure through a parallel relationship?  Chances are that your partner was motivated by his/her desire for sexual, romantic fulfillment.  What this means is that it wasn’t about you but about your partner’s desire.  Sure, it concerned you.  Sure, you got hurt in the process.  But what matters here – if you are to be able to forgive your partner – is that he/she was not motivated by a desire to hurt you per se, but by the desire to satisfy his/her… desire.  So, motivationally, your partner’s act was just another, albeit short-sighted, act of self-care. 

There could also be a scenario where somebody betrays to get back at you for some reason.  Say, your partner goes on a rebound after you had cheated on him/her.  While it would seem that your partner is determined to hurt you, to let you know what it feels like to be cheated upon, to give you a bit of your own medicine, the fact of the matter is that even in this case your partner’s primary motive is to restore some sense of justice, albeit in an emotionally immature manner.  Whenever we try to hurt someone in order to restore some sense of balance or justice, we are, once again, motivated by self-care and hurting someone or hurting someone’s feelings is but a means to that emotionally immature end.  But the goal – as always – is for us to feel better about the situation we are in.  So, if your partner betrayed you in return for your betrayal, it helps to keep in mind that he/she is trying to take care of him/herself rather than to hurt you per se.  Whichever way you slice it, the motive behind betrayal is always self-care and since we are all in the evolutionary business of surviving, why judge someone on the basis of this universally held motive?  If anything, recognition of this motivational common denominator is the beginning of re-connecting, the beginning of identification, understanding, and forgiving.

We All Have Breaking Points and They Are Set at Different Levels

We all have different breaking points.  Threaten one person’s paycheck or bonus and they are instantly for sale.  Threaten another’s whole career path and they don’t budge.  Reality constantly bribes us with promises of pleasures and racketeers us with threats of suffering.  In this sense, life is a non-stop batting cage and you are armed with a bat of skill-power one end of which is craving-control (to deal with temptation) and the other end is worry-control (to deal with consequences of threats).  There are, of course, other ways of looking at this.  You could say that our breaking points are propped up by willpower or that they are jacked up by integrity.  I, as you see, am using the term “skillpower.”  The words “willpower” and “integrity” are a bit too fixed, not sufficiently elastic to accommodate my next point.  I’ll clarify what I mean in a moment.  But for now, let’s just play with these two words (“willpower” and “integrity”) anyway. 

Say, your partner ‘s subordinate enticed him/her with sex in order to assure a job advancement.  Your partner fell for it.  You ask your partner why he/she did it.  They explain: I was turned on, he/she kept coming onto me, he/she is really hot.  You object: “I understand that sometimes we all encounter temptations, but you should have had more self-control, willpower, integrity!”  But then you gradually realize that if your partner had had more self-control, willpower, integrity than he/she did, then he/she would not have been him/herself.  Indeed, as you are reading this right now, you are what you are, you’ve got what you’ve got and that is all you’ve got whether it is enough for somebody else or not.  If right this very moment somebody made a pass at you, you might think that to flirt back to is to invite more such attention but if, say, you are having a crappy day, and this random act of flirtation feels just right, all your willpower and integrity might fly out of the window… or it might not… depending on how much of it you’ve got.  But one thing’s clear: at this very moment you are only you, not more, not less, and your capacity to withstand temptation is exactly where it is at this moment, whether it is enough or not to manage this moment.  Same would apply to your partner who cheated on you: he/she had whatever self-control, willpower, integrity he/she had at the time – not more, not less. 

Let’s try another example:  you and your partner are in the process of buying a car.  You decided not to be bullied by car salespeople, you got your own figure in mind, you got a game plan, but then, while on the car lot, one of you succumbs to the high pressure pitch and accepts a bad deal.   You are infuriated, feeling betrayed.  But, hold it, consider what happened:  your partner backed down because he/she couldn’t withstand the pressure, the tension of it any longer.  You were fine, you didn’t bail, but he/she did.  It is what it is.  Perhaps, after a bit of analysis, you realize that your partner’s need for approval and external validation came into play here.  You realize that he/she is too easily threatened by losing others’ approval.   Sure, for you it’s not a big deal, you can deal with it, you can de-catastrophize the consequences of others’ unfavorable thoughts about you, but your partner isn’t as smooth at this kind of psychological karate.  He/she, unlike you, hadn’t had the same nurturing parents or the years of therapy to work through insecurities.  Having pondered this, you realize that your partner’s betrayal of the game plan wasn’t a betrayal of you, but a desperate move to stop the tension.  And you reasonably accept that, of course, there would be differences between the two of you in what you can stand and what you cannot stand (because, after all, if you wanted to be with a clone of yourself, you would have just partnered with your reflection in the mirror).

So, to briefly sum up this point, our breaking points depend on self-regulation skillpower (self-control), or, if you wish, on willpower or integrity levels.   We differ in what we can handle (temptation-wise and/or distress-wise).   We all have different breaking points.  However high or low they are for any given mind, they are where they are, at any given moment in time.  Which brings us to the final point.

Breaking Points Aren’t Fixed, They Are On a Range

When we talk about willpower or integrity, we tend to mean a certain fixed amount of some kind of moral stamina.  It’s not like that.  Breaking points – if viewed as a real-time, moment-by-moment capacity to withstand the temptation or distress – can be attenuated by a variety of factors.  Take intoxication, for example.  Take the most devout priest, pour enough Irish Coffees into him, and you’ll discover that the ten commandments apparently have loopholes.   Intoxication dilutes our judgment, turns off our frontal-lobe breaks, and, as a result, our judgment goes downhill.   Let’s add a few more pixels to this picture.  Say, you are a career clergyman.  After years of impeccably devout, if not ascetic, mission in, say, Africa, you have been reassigned to a comfortable Western parish.  You haven’t had a serious drink in years but you decide to celebrate this transition with an Irish Coffee – after all, Catholic Church allows it.  Until this moment, you thought your breaking point was pretty high –after all, you have survived many a deprivation and restrained many a passing desire.  But suddenly tipsier than you thought you’d be (and how could have you known if you had abstained all these years), you find yourself reaching for a second and a third shot.  Before you know it, you are out and about, just to get some air, and you bump into a lovely young lady that compliments you on your earlier sermon.  You realize you are flirting with her – the fact that it might not be obvious to her is another matter.  You know it!  But what do you really know?  That you sinned?  Hell, no, you just had too much to drink which biochemically eroded your frontal lobes, and, as a result, the bar of your spiritual integrity slid down a bit.  No big deal, happens to us all, humble, humans. 

Let’s reverse the scenario.  You are Father So-and-So and you’ve been keeping a pretty steady regimen of night-cap spirits.  You can handle your liquor like the best of them which allows you to keep your chastity vows at pretty darn high level, drunk or not.  So, what do we have here?  A case of spiritual integrity or pre-cirrhotic tolerance of booze?  

Whatever it is, one thing is clear: we all have breaking points and they are subject to moment-by-moment attenuation.  A morally-impeccable congressman gets limbically high-jacked by a whiff of infatuation – it doesn’t help that he had been pulling pre-campaign all-nighters either.   A chronically relapsing mind-in-recovery – powered up by craving-control psychotherapy– walks straight past a battery of street-corner drug come-ons, bumping up his/her breaking point to a new level. 

Whichever scenario you examine, chances are a) you are dealing with something you can, in principle, relate to; b) there is a breaking point involved that is where it is, at a baseline, and it slid off from that relative baseline “high” to a new low thanks to a combination of complex internal and external factors, and c) the seemingly unforgiveable betrayal of you, in reality, had nothing to do with you – the “traitor” was just trying to take care of him/herself exactly in proportion to his/her psychological resources at the moment. 

What’s there not to forgive, right, Julia?!  We are all motivationally innocent, doing the best that we can, at any given point in time.  To understand is to forgive is to love.

Julia gets it.  Do you?

So, here's my Hallmark wish to all, you lovers: even if you don't wake up to a bed of roses on February 14th, may you remain on your lotus seat of compassion!

360 Degrees of Compassion

Self-Acceptance Manifesto (self-acceptance = other-acceptance)

While sugar water looks more transparent than salt water,  recognize that the water hasn’t changed.  Water is water.  You can distill it back just like it was from either of the two solutions.  

Consider sugar and salt here as symbols of information.  You are full of “this” and I am full of “that.”  The difference between you and I is “this” or “that.”  But if we dissolve our minds down to their essence, to their base, what remains is the same, the pure water of awareness.   What you are in between your thoughts and what I am in between my thoughts is indistinguishable.  Without any information to distinguish one mind from another, all consciousness is the same.  Space is space whatever you clutter it with.   

When struggling to forgive, we try to put ourselves into somebody else’s mind.  But the other’s experience just doesn’t taste quite right: we feel that under the same circumstances we’d be different. 

The salt of forgiveness is to understand that if you and I were informationally the same, there’d be no difference in the taste, and we would do the same thing.  To forgive, you have to understand that.  Spend enough time in the other’s perspective to see past the informational differences, to clearly see the sameness of intentions (pursuit of wellbeing) and the persons-specific perfection of the attempts. 

(pavel somov/present perfect/2010)

Catalogue the slights, offenses, inefficiencies, imperfections, insecurities that get under your skin, that offend your sensitivities, that you find unforgiveable in others.  And see if you can identify with any of that, let alone forgive any of that.  Think of some specific examples that have wounded you – physically, psychologically, financially – throughout the years. 

Challenge yourself to see the humanity behind the offensive. 

Document you compassion out-reach: journal about your compassion achievements.

Reader “TPG” writes:

“Interesting thread.

In your opinion, are there any crimes or misdeeds out there that are, in fact, unforgivable? The Holocaust? The destruction of an entire educated/merchant/intellectual class in a Cultural Revolution? The abuse of young children by trusted religious authorities, and the subsequent cover-up of that abuse by higher-up religious authorities? Even ordinary murder, where the victim is not around anymore to forgive?

Here’s what I think. There is a whole range of wrongs out there, that range from the easily forgivable to the impossibly unforgivable. If we don’t acknowledge that some crimes are, in fact, unforgivable, then we devalue the core of forgiveness.

Would love to read what you have to say on this subject. Thanks.”

PS comments:

TPG, thank you for your question. I am glad you asked. I get this question a lot. The kind of compassion I talk about is, indeed, terrifying. We are afraid of the consequences of this kind of 360-degrees-wide compassion. We just want a dose of kindness, preferably, for ourselves, maybe for our circle of significant others.

The terrifying thing about compassion is that once you understand how it works (formula is simple, French have it abbreviated to a saying – to understand is to forgive), then, with enough thinking, you can understand, and, therefore, relate to anything. Which, of course, prompts you to ask that scary question: “If I can understand this (insert the seemingly unforgiveable), if I can relate to the psychology behind it, what does that say about me?” While the question is scary, the answer is reassuring: “Nothing other than that you are human, capable of relating, and compassion.”

Having grown up in Soviet Russia and as a kid playing “Russians and Germans” I had a chance to replay Soviet rage over 20 + million dead in WW2. Four of my own male relatives (grand-father and 3 of his brothers) died in WW2. The other (grand-father) made it home with cirrhosis of liver after 5 years in the trenches. My aunt had been hauled off to Germany during WW2 for labor (and god knows what else). I got nothing against Germans but compassion: they had it just as rough. What about Hitler, you might ask? What about him? Just an overcompensating neurotic. What’s there to hate, his failed perfectionism? I feel sorry for him. His kind of neurosis is everywhere (just check the media and political circuit). It’s too cliché to not know how to relate to it.

My mom (whose father was Jewish), basically stranded as a kid during WW2, had to eventually legally change her first and middle name to spare my brother and I Soviet anti-Semitism. The grand-grandparents generation (on both sides/one grand-grandfather was a deacon, the other an industrialist) lost all they had (and some lives, a pregnant relative of mine died off a boot-party during an interrogation, according to my family lore) during Bolshevik revolution. Read Solzhenitsin about unimaginable cruelty of Gulag – at one level of analysis, you might conclude that it was a country of monsters; at a deeper level of analysis, you see that it was a country full of fear run by a mentally ill (paranoid) mind (Stalin). Mental illness is nothing new in history or politics. What’s there to hate? Compassion makes more sense. I don’t have any beef with the Soviets. I was one, I can relate…

Kozhukhovo neighborhood (Moscow, Russia) I lived in had witnessed two terrorist attacks: one at the Avtozavodskaya subway station (in 2004) that I used to take to go to school every day; the other attack (the notorious theatre hostage situation) in Nord-Ost/Dubrovka Theatre (in 2002), both attacks attributed to Chechens. I have nothing against Chechens. I can relate (to both sides of that issue). My understanding doesn’t have to be black-or-white, this-or-that. Reality is multifaceted and it is possible to see past one’s nose…

End of Soviet Union, beginning of Russia: overwhelming financial downfall for the entire population, except, of course, for a handful of well-connected and financially forward-looking, to put it politely. My parents’ hard-earned savings (and retirement dreams) evaporate due to rampant inflation. Hundreds of millions in Russia get financially screwed during the so-called “privatization.” Many more get swindled over and over in the years to come and taken advantage of during post-perestroika lawlessness. What’s there to hate? As long as there is a self, it will be self-serving. Ego (self-interest) is a normal part of human psychology. Self-preservation is instinctual. The story of ego is playing out on the world’s news non-stop (Great Wall of China, Berlin Wall, Wall Street – ego tends to wall in and separate). That’s just psychology… I am like that too, I got my ego, I can relate…

The story goes on… Everything is forgivable. If it’s a human act, it’s possible to understand the psychological determinism behind it. If it’s a human act, you can relate to it, at least on the level of motive.

My position:

• we are all motivationally innocent;
• no one is evil (I worked in the correction system, I didn’t see any monsters, just people);
• there are no socially unacceptable motives, just socially unacceptable behaviors (which reflect mind-specific interplay of nature and nurture);
• anger is a function of fear (more about this later);
• cruelty/sadism is misguided limbic imprinting (more about this later).

Acceptance/compassion isn’t passivity or inaction. I am not saying: swing the prison doors open, I am saying – open your mind to the possibility of compassion while at the same time protecting the society. Compassion is a matter of attitude, not a matter of policy. Compassion doesn’t eliminate legal consequences, it just sets up the platform for rehabilitation. If we de-humanize crime and criminals, if we fail to understand the psychology behind a criminal act, then we are handicapping any effort of rehabilitation. Crime – as all human behavior – is motivated. As I see it – at core, – there is only one motive – pursuit of wellbeing. How we go about it is a reflection of the interplay of our nature and nurture.

Once again, compassion is not passivity, it’s just a humane attitude, an attempt to reach out to a fellow mind, an offer of understanding, and, hopefully (although not always), a pre-requisite for rehabilitation. Helping a misguided human mind get back on a more humane track is easier than to turn a monster into a human. The latter (turning monsters into humans) is correctional alchemy.

I measure kindness not by how much time/money you give away but by how much you can forgive.

You don’t have to forgive everything but if you want to, you can. Compassion/forgiveness isn’t a feel-good endeavor (”letting go”/rumination control is easier). Compassion is optional; if it is an existential value of yours, then… it is possible to do the work of understanding and identification and to forgive even the incomprehensible.

At the end of it all, you might still ask: “But why should I forgive?” You shouldn’t. There are no shoulds: I repeat – compassion is optional.

For details on Compassion Series:

http://www.eatingthemoment.com/360-degrees-of-compassion/?currentPage=6 and http://www.eatingthemoment.com/360-degrees-of-compassion/

Post-scriptum:

The compassion platform I am offering is not based on Buddhist scripture but on the psychology of motive.

Thank you all. All be well.

Some think that you should forgive.  I don’t think so: forgiveness is a matter of existential choice, not a matter of obligation.  Compassion is a value, not a law, thus, it is to be chosen, not to be forced.  If you want to forgive, then forgive, if you don't, then don't.  “Have-to” style forgiveness is meaningless.  You don't have to forgive, but if you do, you can. I certainly recommend it.

Forgiveness Isn’t Just Letting Go or Moving On

Some extol the virtues of forgiveness saying that it is good for you because it allows you to move on (emotionally).  True but this kind of “moving on” isn’t really forgiveness – it’s an attempt to put something out of your mind without any resolution. If you recall from an earlier definition of forgiveness, it involves understanding and identification.  Moving on without understanding and identification is not forgiveness but rumination control.   Useful, but not compassion per se.

Forgive-and-Forget: Forget About the Forgetting Part

Forgiving has nothing to do with forgetting.  While we can forgive on demand, we cannot forget on demand.  By equating forgiveness with forgetting we run the risk of confusing ourselves.  Indeed, if you insist on the notion that forgetting is a mandatory part of forgiving, then whenever you'd remember the incident for some reason, you would be prone to conclude that you must have failed to forgive.  Fact is you cannot control the pace with which your brain metabolizes/digests the information.  So, forget about needing to forget.  Just remember to forgive!

Approval-Seeking as an Obstacle to Forgiveness

Some equate forgiveness with weakness.  They are concerned that if you forgive, others will think less of you.  I think this reason is bunk: it’s the excessive concern for what others think (i.e. approval seeking) that is more akin to a weakness, not the courage to forgive.  

But nothing’s absolute and this point has a flip-side.  I can certainly see how, say, in a prison yard, among inmates, public display of forgiveness can be seen as a weakness and be a reputational liability.  As unfortunate as it is, it is what it is: when in Rome, do as Romans do (to survive).  In this kind of context, unwillingness to forgive is adaptive, and, thus, forgivable.

“I had given up my home completely, yet my thoughts quite naturally lingered on the possibility of return…  These thoughts occupied my mind all the way to Osaka Pass…    As I paused to rest, my glance was caught by a cherry tree so heavy with blossoms that I could hardly take my eyes from it. 

Its blossoms detaining travelers

The cherry tree guards the pass

On Osaka Mountain.

I composed this poem as I continued <…>  at dusk I saw prostitutes seeking companions for the night and realized that this too formed a part of life.”

The power and irony of ordinary perfection:  an ex-concubine 2^nd Ave. beauty is arrested by a sight of beauty of Osaka Pass, and gets a pass into self-acceptance.

References:

The Confessions of Lady Nijo, 1973, p. 182-183).

pavel, checking his watch in a karmic check-out line

Consequently, it seems accurate to say that since all behavior is motivated by a desire to advance and/or protect one’s well-being, all behavior – regardless of whether it is socially acceptable or not, - is predicated on socially acceptable motives. The pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain are the only two motives that we have. There are no other motives but these two. The plethora of motives ranging from wanting an ice-cream to wanting to be on good terms with one’s higher power are but permutations of one and the same idea of wanting to achieve an enjoyable, meaningful state of mind. This isn’t a misplaced reductionistic hedonism, but a reality of inevitable homeostatic self-regulation.

To sum up, all motives (and there is really only one, that of self-regulation with pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain being but two sides of one and the same motive coin) are moral. To be able to appreciate this inevitable morality of the motive we have to exercise a motive-level of analysis when interpreting an event such as crime and not be distracted by the unacceptability of a given behavior that served as a means to an end. In evaluating a morality of a given crime, thus, it could be said that while the motive (like all motives) was socially acceptable or moral, the means by which the fulfillment of the motive was pursued was socially unacceptable or immoral (within the context of a particular culture).

Let’s take a classic “psychopath” that admits to enjoying the stimulation of a burglary. How in the world can such behavior be driven by a moral motive?! Let’s ask the perpetrator. Cromwell, Olson & Avary (1991, p. 63 – in Lykken) provide a useful example in their report from their study of active burglars: “the informants unanimously reported a “rush” upon entering the site. Some referred to the feeling as a ‘rush of adrenaline.’ All found the feeling very pleasurable. ‘I know that once I’m inside, everything I find is mine. I can have anything there. It’s like Christmas.’”

What is the morality of the motives that underlie this behavior? While obviously socially unacceptable, these behaviors, at the foundation, are motivated by a desire to procure material wealth with minimum of effort expenditure (on the assumption that it is easier to take what one needs than to earn it) and by the promise of stimulation. Reduced to an even deeper level of analysis, these motives can be, as always, deconstructed to wanting to regulate one’s well-being by means of procuring material wealth with minimum of effort and by way of creating a situation of stimulation.

Is it morally wrong to want to be comfortable or stimulated? Of course, not! Is the behavior chosen to fulfill this motive for well-being socially unacceptable? Of course, yes!

A typical analysis of this situation would result in a moral judgment that the person that performed a burglary is a bad person, fundamentally immoral. An analysis that allows for a differentiation between the motive and the behavior would, however, allow one to conclude that while the behavior was obviously unacceptable, the underlying motive of wanting to preserve and/or enhance one’s well-being through assuring access to material wealth with least effort and through the stimulation of the “adrenaline rush” is morally no different than the motivation that drives most of the “normal” population to try to optimize their cost-to-benefit ratio in the work arena by asking for a raise and to take a yearly trip to Disney to try adrenaline-pumping “death drop” rides.

The fact that a person has committed a crime in order to obtain material wealth is, in essence, driven by the same socially sanctioned motives as a person who goes to work to obtain material wealth is rather straightforward and easy to acknowledge. The fact that a person who has committed a crime in order to feel powerful is driven by socially acceptable Adlerian strivings for superiority (that are akin to any upwardly mobile individual motivated by the narcissistic gains of social recognition and status) is also apparent but is a bit harder to acknowledge. Being able to see the fact that a person who has committed a crime that involves intentional, if not sadistic, element of violence is also motivated by socially acceptable goals is very hard to acknowledge.

But let us try. Imagine you had a chance to explore the motivation behind a sadistic urge. What you are likely to hear, assuming that the perpetrators’ comments are frank, is that he or she was stimulated by the opportunity for violence or sadism, that is they wanted to break the law, to hurt someone, to see their victim suffer and plead for mercy. Morality, driven by indignation, and diagnosis, driven by dispositional attribution, would finalize our judgment right here: we would conclude that the person in front of us is motivated by violence and is thus inherently bad and immoral.

But let us pursue with the inquiry. Why would inflicting pain onto another and witnessing them suffer motivate certain individuals? Maybe, there is a sense of satisfaction from displaced justice. Maybe, there is a stimulation of trespassing the final social boundary of bodily integrity of another. Maybe, there is an erotic arousal that accompanies the act. Maybe, there is a sense of ultimate power from the use of pain as an uncompromising leverage of manipulation.

What this examination of the core motivation reveals is that the violent and/or sadistic behavior, as appalling as it may be, is designed to meet the same socially acceptable needs (for stimulation, pleasure and a sense of power and self-worth) as the rest of the human behavior. A sadist is not motivated by sadism per se but by the pleasure that it yields. A person that carries out a violent vendetta is not motivated by violence per se but by violence as a means of justice, in an attempt to remediate some actual or perceived wrongdoing by punishing the party involved or by symbolically displacing one’s pain onto an unsuspecting, innocent party. A person that rapes is motivated by a need for control or personal power. These needs/motives for pleasure, justice, control and self-worth are the very needs that keep most of the humanity going. The un-sophistication of the means chosen to meet these needs, to fulfill these motives, is proportionate to the sophistication and limitations of the individuals that commit these acts. If, however, as diagnosticians and students of behavior, we make a mistake of thinking that the sadist is motivated by sadism, the satisfaction of such a need naturally becomes largely unavailable outside the sphere of criminality. However, if an urge for sadism is deconstructed to the underlying motivational core of sensory pleasure, stimulation and power (that is established through relational dominance and downward social comparison), then, despite still being prognostically challenging, the case acquires a hope of a legitimate rehabilitation vector in the direction of finding alternative means to meeting one’s need.

The importance of discriminating between the social/moral acceptability of the behavior and the social/moral acceptability of the underlying motive can be usefully illustrated by the findings of the literature on psychophysiology of antisocial personality disorder that suggests that “antisocials,” at a baseline, are “underaroused and needing a “fix” of sensory input to produce normal brain function” (Black, 1999, p. 115). But the very fact of this psycho-physiological deviance is not necessarily synonymous with behavioral or cultural deviance: while one underaroused individual might seek self-regulatory stimulation through the behavioral activation of criminality, another might find it through such socially sanctioned behavioral activation means as extreme sports or extreme professions. It is certainly understandable that from a superficial level of analysis, knowing that a person feels stimulated by the process of crime might suggest that for such a person crime is an end in and of itself. However, by exploring if the same person would perhaps equally appreciate another, more socially sanctioned opportunity for stimulation, might help a clinician differentiate between an otherwise socially normative end and the socially questionable means by which a given individual chose to satisfy it. Blair, Mitchell & Blair (2005) emphasize: “While we would argue that there is a biological basis to the antisocial behavior of the 5 percent of criminals who commit a disproportionate percentage of crimes (mostly individuals with psychopathy), we certainly would not argue that there is a biological basis to the antisocial behavior of most criminals” (p. 154). This recognition of the fact that the majority of antisocial behavior does not have a biological basis allows a correctional substance use treatment provider to appreciate that “individuals classified as presenting with conduct disorder or antisocial personality disorder are not a homogeneous group but rather a highly heterogeneous one” (Blair, Mitchell & Blair, 2005, p. 43) whose criminality might be instrumental in meeting a variety of otherwise normative psychological needs, spanning the entire hierarchy of needs, with crime serving as a means to satisfy one’s basic logistical needs of sustenance, security, belonging, stimulation and narcissistic strivings for accomplishment.

At the risk of over-summarizing, allow me to reiterate the key point of the rehabilitation-compatible operating model of human behavior. When stripped of situational specifics, all human behavior is motivated by a desire to self-regulate by avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure (in its various permutations). Consequently, all human behavior, including crime (that is anti-social only in its means not goals), rests on a moral foundation which, if acknowledged, becomes also a foundation for rehabilitation. Crime is behavior. Robbing, hurting, deceiving, manipulating is behavior. All behavior is motivated. Therefore, crime, like all behavior, is instrumental and as it is in the service of a motive: a mind needs, desires, wants a particular state, and directs the machinery of the body to behave in a way that would yield a target state of mind. Seeing crime as self-regulatory, as a means to one and the same universal end of well-being, as opposed to being an end in and of itself, is essential for understanding rehabilitation opportunities. Such instrumental view of crime allows a rehabilitation clinician to see crime as but one of the many possible strategies for meeting one’s needs and, therefore, allows a clinician an opportunity for exploration of psychologically and physically healthier, legally safer and socially sanctioned alternatives to meeting one’s needs.

from “Crime and Recovery”- a Group Treatment Modality Exploring Crime as a Substance Use Relapse Factor (Somov, P. 2007). 

Implications of Explanations for Relationships

How we explain what happens makes all the difference. If we attribute the event to personal factors, we are, by definition, more likely to “take it personally.” In other words, if we believe the door was “slammed shut” by the person, we are likely to make another leap of logic and conclude that it had something to do with the meeting we just had. If, on the other hand, we speculate that it was the draft (the context), not the person, who led the door to be noisily shut, we would most likely disregard the event as unimportant and not take it “personally.”

Explanatory Style & Fundamental Attribution Error

Social Psychology has a substantial amount of research that points to the fact that people tend to make personal attributions more often than contextual attributions. It is known as the Fundamental Attribution Error: the “fundamental” part of the term refers to the fact that this type of error is wide-spread, and is, in essence, normal; the “attribution error” part of this term suggests that we are often incorrect in understanding our environment.

What this means is that we are not very good scientists, we tend to take things “personally” – and it’s normal! Our explanatory style is paranoid by default: we tend to err on the side of paranoid caution rather than nonchalance, because it is safer that way. Nature, with its emphasis on survival, is conservative like that. But the safety of this slightly paranoid, personalizing explanatory style comes at a cost of conflict…

Habitual Explanatory Styles

While we all make attributional/explanatory mistakes, some of us are more personalizing (paranoid) than others. The world has changed and the Darwinian “fittest (both physically and psychologically high-strung, i.e. paranoid and aggressive) survive” is up for long-needed revision. Given the research on the cardiac health of the so-called Type A personality and the hostile, conflict-prone individuals, the Darwinian slogan should be amended as “the laid-back and psychologically relaxed survive.”

Changing Explanatory Style

Changing the explanatory style is both a conflict prevention tool and a strategy of compassion. It involves questioning of your hypotheses and generating alternative hypotheses about what causes events around you – doing that would be good (interpersonal) science! Here’s how you can change your explanatory style and prevent conflict: when your co-worker or supervisor says or does something that makes you initially uncomfortable, remind yourself that there is a good chance that “it is contextual, not personal,” that it has to do with them moreso than with you.

The Art of Giving the Benefit of the Doubt

“Giving someone the benefit of the doubt” is a cliché we have all heard time and again. But like most clichés this suggestion is rather ambiguous and sheds little, if any light, on how to actually do it. Entertaining a contextual attribution is the process of giving somebody the benefit of the doubt. By considering the possibility that someone’s actions might be influenced by the power of the circumstance (environment, context, situation), we, in fact, doubt whether the person means/intends to act this way towards us. As a result, the other person benefits from our non-personalizing view of the situation, and! – as a result, we benefit from sparing ourselves an experience of a conflict.

The Benefit of the Doubt Formula

The following formula captures the essence of giving another person the benefit of your doubt.
To give benefit of the doubt, think: “It’s context, not person.” In doing so, you are doubting your own initial, knee-jerk, defensive, personalized attribution that what happened was directed at you personally. Instead of concluding that your initial interpretation is the only right one, you are holding off the ultimate judgment, you are remaining tentative, you are reminding yourself of this human propensity to err on the side of being paranoid – and by remaining open to contextual explanations you are giving the other person the benefit of doubt (the benefit of your doubt about your initial take on the situation). In essence, you are acknowledging to yourself that perhaps this wasn’t about me after all. This allows you to spare yourself the possibly premature judgment of the other person’s behavior. Forgiving is fore-giving - a giving of a benefit of the doubt be-fore all the facts are in. Forgiving is an advance of compassion.

What can’t you forgive?  Somebody’s cutting in front of you in traffic?  Are you sure you can’t identify with that?  How about someone who’s lost their temper?  If you have ever lost your temper, I am sure you can identify with that and, therefore, forgive it?  What are your pet peeves?  What angers, annoys and bugs the hell out of you? 

Catalogue the slights, offenses, inefficiencies, imperfections, insecurities that get under your skin, that offend your sensitivities, that you find unforgiveable in others.  And see if you can identify with any of that, let alone forgive any of that.  Think of some specific examples that have wounded you – physically, psychologically, financially – throughout the years. 

Challenge yourself to see the humanity behind the offensive. 

Document you compassion out-reach: journal about your compassion achievements.

I italicized the last sentence in the quote because it is an example of motive-focus, i.e. an example of compassionate analysis of human action with the emphasis on motivation, not behavior, which is so rare in front-page journalism as we tend to sensationalize rather than analyze.

We are all motivationally innocent.  There are no socially unacceptable motives (what’s socially unacceptable about desperation?), just socially unacceptable behaviors. 

References:

Looting Flares as Authority Breaks Down, by Simon Romero & Marc Lacey (The New York Times, Jan. 17^th, 2010)

Put differently, inability to forgive is insistence that whatever is shouldn’t be.  Furthermore, inability to forgive is the inability to accept that our shoulds aren’t everyone else’s shoulds. 

Fact is everyone has their own shoulds.  Often times, we are appalled by how unapologetic somebody else might feel after they have – in our opinion – trespassed on our wellbeing.  As we reel from their offensiveness, we find it particularly unforgiveable that they are not sorry.  In order to be able to forgive the offending party’s lack of remorse, we have to once again examine the situation from their perspective.  We have to walk away from our shoulds and examine the shoulds that pre-determined their thinking and their course of action. 

When we are able to understand where they are coming from, we are in a better place to identify with them.  We can then think: “Well, if I were like you, I’d be then thinking the way you were thinking, and then I’d do what you did.  Seeing your “software,” your worldview, knowing the shoulds that guide your reflexes, I can now relate to what you did.  I can see how what I see as an unforgivable imperfection you saw as a perfectly normal course of action.  This makes all the difference!”

Rainer Maria Rilke

“To understand is to forgive” formula is more than just perspective-taking, more than just seeing the event from other person’s perspective.  In order to forgive, you also have to understand why what happened had to happen.  You have to understand the psychological determinism of the particular "why" that led to whatever happened.

Why is a motive focus.  We are far more used to posing this question (rhetorically, with indignation) than to answering it.  There is one core motive – the pursuit of wellbeing – and a plethora of ways in which we try to pursue it.  Some pursue their wellbeing by going to work, others – by boosting your lawn-mower for a quick re-sale on the way to buy drugs.  Motivationally, there is no difference. 

Say, you busted the guy red-handed, you ask him what he is doing on your property, in a moment of rare candor, he explains that he wanted to steal your lawn-mower.  That’s a goal, not a motive.  To get to the core motive, you have to keep on asking questions.  Why did you want to steal from me?  I needed money.  Why did you need the money?  I needed to get high. Why did you need to get high?  I didn’t want to feel sick (or) I wanted to feel good.  Now, there’s your core motive: not wanting to feel sick or wanting to feel good is the pursuit of wellbeing.  So, the difference isn’t in the “why” but in the “how” we go about meeting our needs and desires.  (Now, to clarify: I am not saying you should try to have a conversation with someone robbing you, I am just using this as a hypothetical exchange to illustrate a point about the motivational fuel that we all run on).

No one’s motivationally evil.  Motivationally, everyone’s innocent.  It’s just that some of us are less sophisticated (more limited) than others in the modus operandi.  Why?   That’s exactly the very history that has to be understood in each case.  And when we understand this history, the determinism of the mind-specific psychology behind a given behavior/act, we realize something very important - namely, that so-and-so had done the best that he/she could (no matter how much it sucks in comparison to what, say, you would have done in a similar situation), exactly in proportion to the intricate interplay of their nature and nurture.  It is this insight that becomes the platform for compassion and forgiveness.   After all, we can all relate to doing our best and still screwing up - no saints among us!

So, to forgive, you have to see beyond the behavior, you have to be willing to hear the whole story and to unravel the psychological determinism of the other person’s actions to see the inevitability of what happened, the intricate interplay of nature and nurture that wove into any given fact.  And only then you will be able to see the event from their point of view, i.e. you will be able to identify with them and, thus, forgive. But this kind of “understanding” is too much work.  And this kind of “identification” threatens our own sense of self.  After all, who are we if we can relate to something that we originally thought we couldn’t relate to? And what would this kind of identification-based compassion say about us?  That’s just too much thinking and feeling.  I am not being sarcastic: I really mean it – compassion is too much work and that’s why we don’t do it.  A lack of compassion and unwillingness to forgive is too forgive-able!  Can you relate to lack of compassion (yours or others') without judging it as callousness?  If you can, you can have both self-acceptance and compassion for others at the same time - nice existential bargain!

Bottomline: if it's human, relate!