From Mindfulness to Heartfulness: Transforming Self and Society with Compassion by Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

Author:Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc
Published: 2018-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Oneness

My sense of connectedness was unwittingly nourished early in life by my father, who wailed incessantly about the incredible suffering he saw in the world. He confessed that it destroyed his faith both in his fellow humans and in a benevolent God. It also drove him to drink, and left him hopeless about creating a kind and just world. Witnessing suffering made him dismissive of happiness as a state of mind possible only to a person who denied and neither saw nor felt the horrors of this world. He claimed that he could not be happy if there was someone, somewhere, who was suffering.

I saw that he was sincere when he shocked me, one lazy summer afternoon. We were at the beach, sitting on a blanket watching children playing in the water, when my father startled me by saying, “I hope that I never see a child drowning . . . because I would have to go in to try to save him, even though I know it would kill me.” My father had a bad heart that had been surgically repaired. It surprised me that he knew that if he saw a child drowning he would try to save him, even though he would die in the process.

I couldn’t understand how he could even think of doing that. Where would that leave me? I wouldn’t have a dad anymore. So I asked him, “Why would you do that, Daddy?” His answer was, “I couldn’t just sit here and watch a kid die; I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

This story remains with me today as a testament to compassionate empathy — an immediate connection you might form with another person, to the degree that you forget yourself and your safety and spontaneously do what is necessary. While Dad’s inability to act would be called emotional empathy, his potential for heroic action is compassionate empathy. Despite our separation from individuals, we have an amazing need to connect and a capacity for immediate empathy that transcends those we’re close to. In the midst of a catastrophe — when someone’s life is in danger — we may suddenly throw ourselves into the situation to take care of them, as if they were our own souls. We see this all the time in response to natural disasters or crises.

The hero is one who has given his physical life to that truth. But whether you love your neighbor or not, when the realization grabs you, you may risk your life. In such a psychological crisis you suddenly realize, without thinking, that you and the other are one — that you are two aspects of a single life. Our apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. We are conscious of our separateness, while our true reality lies in our unity with all life. This is a truth that may become spontaneously realized under circumstances of crisis, which tend to connect us with others.

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