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Talk Notes
Well, thank you all for coming in out of the beautiful sunny day and welcome to Carrie Cook who is a special person in my life and I'm really excited to see her here. So, thank you. Thank you for coming.
So, we've been talking about the paramitas these last Sundays and actually for a couple of months now, I think we've been talking about them. Yesterday, Raizelah and I led a women's retreat and it was on the topic of compassion. And as I prepared for this dharma weekend, I wanted to see how the two topics related to one another. If you think about it, compassion is deeply connected to the paramitas. The paramitas or perfections are virtues that bodhisattvas cultivate to help others with compassion being a central theme. The practice of compassion is essential for developing the paramitas as it motivates and guides the actions of a bodhisattva. You could say that compassion is the root of all the paramitas. Just as a tree depends on its roots for life, every transcendent action depends on the wish to benefit others.
When we talk about the six paramitas and I will go through them in a minute. The transcendent actions or the perfections of a bodhisattva. It's really easy to view them as a kind of spiritual checklist of chores. We think today I will practice patience or tomorrow I will work on my ethics. But if we strip away the technicalities, we find that these six practices are not separate pillars. They are six different ways that compassion the Sanskrit word is karuna breathes and moves in the world. Remember that breathes and moves. Without compassion the paramitas are just rigid disciplines. With compassion they become a path to awakening. So let's take a look at each one and see how compassion works within. First, generosity, Dana. Generosity isn't just about giving away money or things. We certainly know that true generosity is the courage of a compassionate heart that refuses to cling. When we feel the suffering of others needs as our own, giving becomes a natural reflex rather than a calculated sacrifice.
Moving to ethics or sila. We often view morality as a set of thou shalt nots. But through the lens of compassion, ethics is simply non-harming all the way. We follow ethical guidelines because we deeply care about the well-being of others and we realize that our negative actions create ripples of pain. This is of course central to our precepts.
Patience shanti patience is perhaps the most difficult paramita. Raise your hand if you've ever had a child or been in a position where you had to have the patience for someone else. It's the ability to endure hardship and even personal offense without resentment. And I don't know about you, but that is a real hard one for me and for many others.
It is only possible when we apply compassion that we can see the ignorance and pain of the person attacking us. We have the ability to stay patient because we understand that they are suffering too. And I just really want to underscore how challenging that is. The fourth paramita is virya, enthusiastic effort. I always think of Bob Rose. He just has carried on this enthusiastic effort throughout his big life. Spiritual burnout is real. What keeps us going when the path gets steep or difficult? It is the great resolve born of compassion. We find tireless energy because the goal isn't just personal peace. It's the liberation of all beings
that provides an infinite fuel source and source and and I always refer to Martin Luther King because he was such a force on me when I was a child when I was an adolescent and when he said until all men are free I cannot be free and that was sort of my introduction I think to the bodhisattva vow.
Fifth is concentration. Dhyana
Meditation. Meditation and focus are often seen as internal and solitary. I myself meditated alone for years because I thought why not just need to meditate. Then I learned about sangha. A truly compassionate heart seeks a stable mind in order to be truly present for others. So it isn't just about me. It's about being there. We cultivate stillness so we aren't swept away by our own reactivity when someone else needs a steady hand.
I think that this is at the core of our commitment to meet the moment and to and to meet the moment as it is and our bodhisattva world to be in the world our bodhisattva vow to be in the world for the sake of saving all beings.
Sixth is wisdom prajna.
First of all, you can't really really inhabit wisdom without the realization of emptiness or interdependence. It might be easier to think of it as interdependence because so many people have a stumbling block with the word emptiness.
But that's what we call it
and to understand that we are in fact all connected. And it's compassion that makes wisdom skillful. Wisdom tells us that we are all connected. Compassion is the felt experience of that connection.
So if you find yourself struggling with any of these practices, the answer is not to just try to work harder. In fact, look closer. Look in inside into your heart. When we can cultivate a genuine aching wish for others to be free from suffering, the paramitas, the paramitas don't just become easier, they become inevitable.
So this is a succinct linking of compassion to the paramitas. Nice to read, nice to hear. perhaps even helpful. But what do we do when it doesn't feel possible? Generating compassion for someone whose ethical framework feels alien or even abhorrent is one of the most significant psychological and spiritual hurdles a person can face. It feels counterintuitive like asking the body to accept a toxin. The difficulty usually stems from three primary cognitive and emotional barriers.
The confusion of compassion with approval. The biggest mental block is the fear that feeling compassion for someone is going to be the same as validating their behavior. We often mistakenly believe that if we feel for someone, we're saying what you did is okay. Now I think back again to you know being a parent and especially being the parent of a person who had a mental health disorder and in looking at his abhorrent behavior. I could only say I love you. I just don't like you right now. I don't like your behavior. I don't like where it seems to be coming from. that I'm going to love you no matter what.
Compassion is a wish for someone to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering like ignorance or hatred. You can deeply oppose someone's ethics while still recognizing that their actions are driven by a distorted sense of pain or confusion. I used to tell my granddaughter when her dad was in the throws of his bipolar, his mind is playing tricks on him.
Another barrier to really seeing compassion or being able to generate compassion I would call tribalism or othering. Our brains are evolutionary wired to have in-group outgroup. Chris Burkhart likes to talk about voting somebody off the island when she teaches sometimes. And when somebody violates our ethics, our neurobiology marks them as a threat.
Once someone is labeled as the other, our empathy centers actually dampen or kind of wilt and it becomes cognitively challenging to view them as a complex human being with a history, fears and needs. Much easier to view them as a caricature of their beliefs.
I know you know many examples of this. And third is a threat to our own identity. I referred to this before. Our ethics are often the bedrock of who we are. And so of course we have this identity which gets us in trouble. When we encounter somebody with opposing values, it can feel like an existential threat. After all, my ideas are right. Right. We worry that by humanizing the person we disagree with, we are weakening our own moral stance. There's a subconscious fear that if we understand why they feel the way they do, we might lose our own footing or become complicit in their worldview.
Now, I'm going to confess that sometimes when people give dharma talks, often they have a stack of books next to them and they refer to the books. For the next little part, I consulted Gemini.
And Gemini talked about moving from sentimental compassion to functional compassion. So for example, a framework of the unmet need. Try to view another person's ethical stance as a perhaps misguided strategy to meet a universal human need like safety or belonging or significance. You don't have to agree with the strategy to recognize the underlying human need.
And then of course our favorite recognizing interdependence. Nobody exists in a vacuum. Person's ethics are the result of their upbringing. Their culture, trauma they may have had, their education. It's not an excuse, but it does provide a map for how they arrived here, which makes compassion more accessible.
And then there is focusing on the suffering of ignorance.
In many traditions, the most pitiful state is to be someone who causes harm while thinking that they're doing right. Seeing someone as trapped by their own narrow perspective can transform anger into a form of objective empathy. I'm moving around and making noise. Try to be quiet.
Okay, better.
So ultimately generating compassion for those who are different from us isn't about being nice. It's about maintaining our own humanity and preventing our hearts from becoming as hardened as the ethics we oppose.
In closing, I'd like to say that - suggest that - compassion, this is not from Gemini, that compassion and the paramitas are like the breath. Yesterday in our women's retreat, a participant observed that when we pause in the sweet spot at the top and at the bottom of each breath, there is a magic or exquisite quality that is generated. We take in the wisdom of the paramitas like an inhalation and then we hold it. We give compassion like an exhalation. In that sweet spot of no breath we receive an alchemy that is both paramita wisdom and compassion for ourselves. Because without a fit vessel which has received all this great wisdom, we cannot give out the compassion that is so desperately needed in this world where we dwell.
So let's talk a little bit. And I think that two three four five six seven eight. We could go do um triads and take um what do we have? We could take let's take four minutes each to respond to the question. How do you usually find yourself responding or reacting when you encounter a viewpoint that fundamentally clashes with your own and how do you work with it?
So if those questions fit something you can speak to use it. Otherwise maybe just spend some time talking about uh what you want. So find your triad
and all time there will be two people together too.
So, does anybody want to bring something back from their group? A pearl.
Push the button again. Hello. Yeah. I just wanted to say that in our group we we realized, you know, how it often is important to come back around and really be aware of my our own, you know, whatever is going on with us, not just, you know, the other person or trying to figure out how to, you know, communicate with them, but really looking at what is triggering us, you know, with with the whole interaction. So anyway,
Thank you, Dez.
Okay. Okay. Closer. Okay. Eat the microphone. I feel like it's very close. I appreciated at the very end my two comrades mentioned how to how to keep yourself from reacting in a non-compassionate way. And I'm terrible with names. Melissa mentioned well first Dave said creating a moment creating a moment for yourself and Melissa responded with taking a breath and I thought that was a really wonderful way to end our our time together talking. It was a something I can take with me. I appreciated that. Thank you.
Well, one other really wise thing that they both talked about is how if you remember, you know, in a family, you realize you really got nowhere else to go. So you got to work it out and you got to deal with the person. And if you could expand that and remember that we all all of us anywhere all beings are part of one family that might be a way to make it easier.
Thank you.
I could ask if anyone from Zoom would like to speak.
Can we do that? Carrie, did you have anything to say? If you're if you're there, Carrie, and you want to unmute, you don't have to talk, but in the chat. Oh, something in the chat. It's set up, I think, now. So, those can just unmute. She has not got the Oh, she just wrote something from Carrie to everyone. Okay. She can't do it. Okay. Well, we're so glad you're here. Thank you for being here. I just wanted to speaking about the breath. You know, this is something that we all know. We have our breath. We've had it from the first one we took and we'll have it till the last one we exhale. that can be a huge tool for us. It's something that swimmers know, runners know, and meditators know because we need to we need to be present with our breath. And we can use that breath just as you said to take a breath before you speak to work with yourself and always bring it in. And I just want to say one last thing about compassion and that is that first give the compassion to yourself and that is can be a very big deal very hard but that's where it needs to start otherwise we really won't know how to give it.
So thank you Dez. I just want to say that it wasn't the first person that instructed me on my breath that I will always appreciate was not a teacher was not a parent. It was a RN in the middle of the hospital when I was in a really not so good place. She's the one that gave me the tool of my breath.
Thank you.
