The long journey to compassion

How do we develop compassion?

This is a question that cuts to the heart of our spiritual growth.

Swami Kriyananda said: “God gives us the experiences we need, because if we lack compassion for any aspect of human experience, we have to go through it.”

purple tulips
Pure, expansive feelings of compassion and kindness are born of direct experience, not merely from ideas in the mind. Click to enlarge. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This is the fundamental, self-interested reason why we shouldn’t judge others. We only judge people because we don’t have the compassion to understand their situation. And so we have to develop compassion, and the way we generally develop compassion or any other expansive quality, is by having our own experiences and learning our own lessons.

Some years ago, I read about a woman who had lived without moral standards. She was given to sensuality – she had no sexual restraint, and she just lived like a tramp. At the same time, she had an enormous sense that this wasn’t her true nature, but she couldn’t resist her compulsion to live in an immoral way.

Finally, she appealed to Edgar Cayce, the American seer and prophet who died in 1945. Cayce was astute at reading people’s past lives, and he told her that for many lifetimes she’d been a nun, and that she had developed an extremely judgmental attitude toward people who didn’t live up to her own high moral standards. As a result of her blindness to the pressures other people are under, she was thrown into an atmosphere where she was subject to the same pressures, and unable to resist, so that she would expand her heart by learning what it’s like to be in another person’s shoes.

This is the source of the kindness of the masters, that they’ve experienced everything. Master made a stunning statement: that anything you no longer desire, and that you can see it won’t bring you happiness, it’s because you’ve lived through it in the past, and you’ve learned.

We don’t learn by standing on the sidelines and observing. We learn by our own direct experience. The fact that we aren’t murderers, rapists, or thieves is because we know from inside that those things won’t give us happiness. And if we judge others, we’ll have to develop compassion for them by being just like them. It’s chilling, when you think of the endless webs of karma we weave by the way we treat others.

Over several weeks, David and I have been moving our household. The home we’re moving to has served the Ananda community as a wonderful gathering place. It’s been available as a meeting place for the residents and church members to a greater or lesser extent over the years. And it seemed it would be a perfect place for us to live, because then it would be available to all. Which is why we’re calling it Chela Bhavan, which means “house of the disciples.”

Chela Bhavan
Christmas meditation at Chela Bhavan, the “House of Disciples” in the Ananda Community of Mountain View. Click to enlarge.

When I offer suggestions to people about how they might change their lives to improve their situation, they’ll often respond, “Oh, but I couldn’t do that, because it would mean I’d have to move!”

And I’ve always thought, “Well then, move!” Because really, what difference does it make?

But over the last weeks, my compassion for them has grown, because it’s a tremendous job to gather everything you’ve accumulated over the years, pack it up, carry it somewhere else, and put it all away and start over.

It’s disrupting. But in our case, it’s blossoming into a number of spiritual realizations that I’d like to share with you today.

We liked the apartment where we lived. David spent many hours developing the garden over the years, and it was lovely to see how the house related perfectly to the garden. I would go out sit and have my cup of tea and watch the birds, and David would come out and clip the flowers. We had a wonderful oak and a maple that we watched grow over the years, and all of these little things gradually became part of the fabric of our lives. And now we’ve been taken away from all those things, and all of a sudden I’m finding that the heart turns back in longing. And it’s particularly ridiculous because the place we’re moving to is a big upgrade by any standard, because it’s larger, newer, and more beautiful.

But I grew attached to what I knew. And, more than that, I defined my life by all of the little routines we’d created, and the familiar had begun to hold a great deal of appeal, even at the expense of the next wonderful step in our learning.

When I first met Swami Kriyananda, I was twenty-two years old, and then I moved to Ananda Village when I was twenty-four. Swamiji is twenty-one years older than me and has a vastly greater experience of the world and people. He would often make strong statements about things that I didn’t understand at the time, and couldn’t agree with – he would talk about the characteristics of a country, for example, and the attitudes of its people. Or he would speak sweepingly about why certain attitudes don’t bring us happiness. And being young and stubborn, I would think, “That’s not true.” But then decades later I would think “On what basis did I make that claim?”

I was stubborn because what he said made me uncomfortable. I had sentimental ideas of how things ought to be, but Swamiji was speaking from his own direct experience of reality, and it offended my sentimental notions. My ego was attached to my sentimental view of the world.

It’s not that the old apartment where we lived was all that nice a place, but it happened to be my apartment. And it isn’t really that the opinions I hold are all that wise, but they’re my opinions. They’re the opinions I’ve lived with, and I’ve become comfortable with them. They’re my friends, and when somebody attacks them, I’ll stupidly defend them.

Richard Bach, the author of Jonathon Livingstone Seagull, said, “The reward for defending your delusions is that you get to keep them.”

I lived in a close relationship with Swamiji, where he would speak the truth to me, and he would often speak it in a way that made me uncomfortable. He would always be asking me to move out of the comfortable little house I had built up around myself. And then I would defend it, thinking, “That’s not a very kind thing to say about something that’s sentimentally dear to me, Swamiji. You’re being judgmental – you’re not giving my cherished sentiments a chance.”

And then I would generally pass through it fairly quickly. But I developed a mantra that sounded silly, but it worked for me. I said, “Swami Kriyananda is a very intelligent man. Everything I know about the spiritual path, I’ve learned from him. So, what are the chances that he doesn’t understand the principles I’m trying to cling to at this point?”

Gradually, instead of clinging to my little point of view and insisting on pushing it onto him, I started to ask, “Why would a direct disciple of Master, who’s spent his entire life dedicated to these teachings, and who is the most thoughtful, intelligent person I’ve met – why would he say something that a novice like me could contradict?”

At times, it was all simply too much. Sometimes I couldn’t detach myself emotionally from the little house I had always lived in, and embrace what he was saying. But I had too much respect for him to reject what he said out of hand.

At one point, David and I were living in a geodesic dome at Ananda Village. And domes are beautiful to live in, for the way they feel and the energy they generate in the living space. But they have many practical problems, including a complete lack of straight walls. We had a closet that went back and ended in a point, and you could hardly get all the way back in there. But there was a shelf at the back of the closet that was a good place to store things, because another problem the dome had was that it leaked like a sieve when it rained, and it didn’t leak there.

The dome leaked so much that we had to put a wooden pallet in the bathroom so the water could flow under it and we wouldn’t have to wade in it. But it became a perfectly normal way to live. It was just the condition under which we had to live at the time, and we actually became attached to it.

And in my mind, I created a kind of mental shelf that I patterned after that closet, where I would take things that Swamiji said, that I couldn’t immediately agree with. I didn’t want them hanging in the front of my closet, because they were slightly disturbing to me. And yet they were far too valuable to throw out, so I would mentally put them on the shelf where they wouldn’t get rained on, and I would keep them until I was ready to take them out and look at them clearly.

In our recent move, I’ve held basically every object we’ve accumulated over our life together. And some of the things we’ve stored on the shelves are ridiculous, and we throw them away. But with others I’ll say, “That’s such a nice book, I think I’ll keep it.” Or it’s a nice picture, or a garment. “Why have I not been using this?” Because time has passed, and things look different to us as we change.

And so, over the years, without a single exception, every single one of Swamiji’s ideas that I couldn’t embrace, but saved and didn’t reject it, waiting to see what would happen, I found that in the end all of them were true.

When my consciousness shifted and I was able to understand and accept those ideas, I began to have the same experiences, at my level, that Swamiji had had. For example, as I began counseling and traveling, my life got bigger and I would remember the things he’d said, and I would say, “Well, what do you know, it’s absolutely true that, as Swamiji said, you can tell a German wherever you go in the world.”

You can sit in a café in Jakarta, and you can tell a person’s nationality even before they speak, as Swami remarked, just because of the way they hold their mouths, or how they move. I’m using this as a random example of the many statements of Swamiji’s that I originally couldn’t accept. As we become more open, we discover that the world is very different than it seemed.

Now, we are no more the person that has been molded by this body than we are the apartment we’ve lived in for many years. We’ve just experienced a certain plane of consciousness while living in this body, and we’ve become attached to it for no deeper reason than we’ve been living in it for a long time.

Gary teaches middle school at Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto. Click to enlarge.
Gary teaches middle school at Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto. Click to enlarge.

During our recent household move, Gary McSweeney, who’s a big, strong man, has helped us a great deal. He’s used to working with his body, and I, on the other hand, am mentally very strong but I’m not as accustomed to using my body. It doesn’t come naturally to me, and I’m not as strong as Gary. But it was interesting to me, to see that because he’s lived in that big body for a long time, his whole orientation to life is different than mine.

I teased Gary that if he’s born as a man in his next life, he’ll be 5’1” and very delicate, and he’ll never be asked to move another heavy object again, out of karmic kindness for the many heavy objects he’s had to lift this time.

I have a desk that is apparently made of cast concrete, and our new place has a curved staircase. It took five men half an hour to bring the desk up to the second floor, because it barely fit and it weighed a ton. They moved one laborious step at a time, and I promised them I would smash the desk with an axe and throw it out the window before we would ever take it out of there again.

But the guys said, “Oh, it was a lot of fun!” Because they’re men and it was a challenge, and they liked it. To me, it was a scary proposition – what if this huge object fell over on them? But it was the little boy’s way.

Mothers sometimes have so much trouble with their little boys, because the boys are strong and they fight. That’s sort of how they define their way of approaching the world.

When Master established his headquarters at Mt. Washington, there were families living there at the start. Now, it’s all monks and nuns, but in the beginning he took whoever would come. And there was a single mother who had a young son, and she was distressed because her little boy had a very warlike attitude. He was always making weapons, and he was always sneaking down the corridors of Mt. Washington looking for enemies, and shooting arrows, and it seemed to her mind completely incompatible with the non-violent life of a yogi that they were trying to live.

But Master saw it differently, and he called the young boy over and talked with him, man to man, about what he was doing.

The boy said, “I’m protecting you from enemies that might come.”

Master said, “Well, in that case, you’d better stay close to me.” So he kept him as his “bodyguard,” because he could see where the boy’s consciousness was. He was acting out what he was born to do.

And each of us gets into these patterns of what we’re born to do, defined by where we’ve lived, what we’ve loved, and the bodies we’ve had. But the trick and great secret of life is not to allow ourselves to cling too rigidly to what we seem to be, because our past lives are hidden, and they were most likely very different.

A friend of mine was built like me, but smaller and very delicate in her body. She wasn’t particularly strong, although she was strong-willed, and she went out and bought a huge four-wheel-drive jeep.

Watching her drive, I said, “Why did you buy this car?” She said, “It feels natural to me.” As if she’d been big before, and she had the feeling that that it who she was supposed to be. It was ridiculous to see her driving, because she could hardly see over the steering wheel. But it was an attachment to a particular image of herself.

Now, the art of living is to take whatever God gives us. Because the position we’re in right now is not an accident. The cosmic cards haven’t gotten scrambled. It’s not as if you’ll ever end up someplace you shouldn’t be.

And it’s not that every single detail of your life is exactly the way you wanted it to be. Parents at Ananda sometimes try to silence their rebellious children by telling them, “It’s not our fault. You chose us as your parents.” And the children have learned to respond by asking Swami and others, “How could I have chosen them?! Why would I choose them?”

Swami mitigated the answer a bit by saying, “You don’t necessarily choose every detail.” You choose a broad flow of energy. You might come into a family because of one person in the family, and then everybody else comes along. And in that sense, you did choose them, but they weren’t specifically the reason for your being there. Nonetheless, it was the conditions you had to accept, because this world isn’t perfect.

But we live under these conditions for a long time, and we naturally begin to think it’s who we are. And even worse, we allow our happiness to be conditioned by our need to continue these conditions. And it’s completely wrong. Because sooner or later something will happen. Maybe you’ll get to stay in that house, but then you’ll die, or a tidal wave will wash it away.

Swamiji made an important comment, that people learn more from getting their desires fulfilled than from having their desires frustrated. Because until we’ve experienced it, we can’t actually know. You can tell people, “This isn’t going to make you happy.” But they have to experience it for themselves before they can understand it.

In the late 1960s and then early 1970s, when all of the social standards were falling apart, including marriage and sexual morality, someone asked Swamiji, “What do you think of the social revolution?”

Swamiji represents a very orthodox tradition. He’s a monk, and he holds to traditions that are much longer than any particular social movement. But to everyone’s surprise, he said, “Generally, I favor it. Not because I necessarily favor the behavior. But I’m in favor of individuals having the courage to find out for themselves what is true.”

It’s not necessarily better to follow an accepted norm just because you don’t have the courage to step outside it. It has to be spontaneous from your heart. If people have the courage to go out, or the lack of structure to try lots of things, in the end they’ll find that the principles of traditional spirituality and morality aren’t arbitrary, and they’ll discover those principles for themselves.

They’re based on the inner experience of the individual, and if you have that experience, you’ll understand the reason for moral principles. The disloyalty and philandering and laziness and dishonesty, all of these things just don’t work. Drugs and alcohol – you can try it, but there’s just one problem with it – it doesn’t make you happy. It’s not that you’ll go to hell after you try it, but it will put you in hell right now.

Every so often, I’ll have a dream that I’m doing something I would never do in my waking consciousness. I’ll find myself in a situation that is completely foreign to my basic nature, and I’ll wake up and be relieved, “Thank God I’m not really there. How could I be so stupid as to disregard everything I know to be true?”

My subconscious is still throwing up those old experiences, and I’m relieved when they turn out to be not true.

In past lives I’ve no doubt made such a mess of my life, and now I fall back occasionally into those experiences in my dreams, but not often. In my dreams I can become angry, jealous, and not behave in an upright manner. But as soon as I wake up, I think, “Oh, dear God, what misery that action brought me.” And then I think, “Ah, thank heaven, it’s not who I am.”

But the art of living is to live with full energy and commitment. And, you see, this is where the masters help us with their example.

Master was totally enthusiastic. When we start our Sunday service, we say, “The voice of God calls us to awaken him. How will he find us when he comes?” And the congregation shouts, “Awake and ready!”

It’s not something we’ve made up – it’s how Master was, when he came to America and began speaking to audiences all over. It was the 1920s, and he had long hair and wore flowing orange robes.

It was not the 1990s when East and West were starting to blend together. He was considered a total freak, is the only way to put it. He seemed to be from another planet, and he didn’t hold back. He didn’t try to sort of sidle along and hope people would accept him. As Swamiji described it, he would come charging onto the speaker’s platform with his robes flowing behind him and his long hair streaming, and he would shout to the crowd, “How feels everyone?” And he taught them to shout back, “Awake and ready!” Because with the life-transforming message he came to give them, they wouldn’t be able to receive if they only had half-horsepower energy. He needed to prepare them for a high-voltage teaching.

Master was speaking to a packed hall, and two people who were sitting in the front row got up and started to walk out. And Master said, “Sit down! Take your seats. Do not leave. You’ll never hear another lecture like this in your life.” And they had to turn back and sit down.

He was no shrinking violet. Everything he did, he did with that divine energy and power. And, as a result, he had many failures. When he tried to speak in Miami, for example, because he was a dark-skinned man and he was speaking to mixed audiences, they kicked him out of the city for breaking the segregation laws. You can go back and read the newspaper accounts of his time in Miami, when he was thrown out of town and subjected to all kinds of ridiculous accusations.

It wasn’t as if everyone welcomed him with open arms. He was subjected to lawsuits and various scandals, all of which were trumped-up and ridiculous. But he engaged with life in such a way that he created a cutting wave.

One of our friends said, “If you aren’t being persecuted, you’re not doing enough good.” Because you have to put out great energy. And you’re being yogically “detached” if you’re only putting out low energy. It’s not the same thing. Detachment comes from doing everything for God, and doing it with full awareness that the real body you’re moving through your life with is your consciousness.

It doesn’t matter what apartment I live in. It doesn’t matter what body I live in, it doesn’t matter what age I live in, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a high age or a low age on the planet, and whether we’re at war or at peace. It’s my consciousness that’s living in this body and growing. And then I can watch my circumstances from that central reality.

David and I have carried dozens of boxes between apartments, and now I’m putting it all away. I’m setting up a new system that I’ll probably become attached to. But there’s a part of me that is a little bit less attached than before, and there’s a sense that this is a place where we’ll pass some time. But we have to do it well, and we have to do it with full energy.

These are the experiences the masters give us, to help us understand where our reality is. And it’s the ultimate answer to the stock question that people often ask when they start out on the path – “Do I really need a guru?”

The answer depends on what you want from life. If you want the satisfaction of remaining as you are, and if you have no higher aspiration than what you can generate on your own, then, no, you don’t need a guru.

But if you don’t want to only have a pleasant life but a victorious one, where you don’t just express your little self, but you transcend that self and become the true self behind it, then you’ll definitely need a guide. How can we do it on our own, if we can’t even see the goal, much less the path that leads to it.

For a while, I took ballet classes from a professional ballet dancer who was part of Ananda. As a beginner, I had no hope of reaching his level. But I took the classes, in part, because it was a cheap ticket to a great performance at every practice. Every movement that the ballet teacher made was exquisite. Even the way he moved his hand was deeply inspiring. And for several years I got a little bit better, because he told me how to do it.

He would turn his arm, and I would move my arm. But he would move his arm like an angel, and my arm would just move, and I couldn’t understand the difference. And this was merely ballet – it wasn’t a question of unraveling the fathomless tendency of the ego to defend itself. I couldn’t begin to figure out how my arm should move, but slowly, by example and magnetism and teaching, I began to learn.

And so with us – we don’t even realize we’re attached. We think we’re just being “sensible.” If someone had asked me, “Are you attached to the apartment you’re leaving?” I’d have said, “Of course not!” Because it was the right thing to say.

But, you know, I got to move and find out for myself. “Don’t kid yourself, honey, you don’t even know your own desires.” The ego loves to look good, so it gives the right answer. But the guru looks at you and sees what’s really there. And he guides you slowly along the path, inspiring you inwardly and outwardly, through others and through your intuition, until you can get to be what you really are, which is like him.

But most of us frankly don’t want to be that big. We don’t want to be that good. We like it where we are. David and I knew we needed to move, because it was the right thing to do. But I didn’t want to leave my maple tree. And then, of course, I thought, “Hm, maple tree or spiritual duty? Which is more important?”

But, honestly, I had to persuade myself to leave the maple tree, and that’s the straight truth of it. And when God says it’s time to leave this body, it’s easy to imagine that you’ll be able to say, “Yes, of course, here I am.” But because our vision is obscured and thoroughly confused by all things we’ve become attached to, through vast vistas of incarnations, it takes constant vigilance and the grace of God and guru to find our way.

(From a talk by Asha at Sunday service on July 23, 2006.)