Manifesto - About this blog

What about compassion?

This is a blog about compassion. Many things have been said when it comes to compassion. It is often seen as soft and weak. It is believed to be overly emotional and passive. This is not how I see compassion. Compassion is not just a feeling. For me, it is an active quality that drives the way we look at the world, the way we act and how we construct society around us. To be compassionate means to have a solid determination to relieve suffering and bring well-being to all humans, living things and our planet Earth as a whole, in all aspects of our life. Real compassion to me, is nothing short of a revolution. It is not a melodramatic response that tries to soften up the hard edges of a cold world. It is a fundamental shift, to let go of narrow self-interested mindsets and to make the happiness of all beings center to our thinking, our acting and our world. 

So how do we create compassion? Compassion begins inside. We cannot manifest in the world what we do not carry in our heart of hearts. 'Be the change,' as the saying goes. Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti says:

What you are the world is. And without your transformation, there can be no transformation of the world. Unless in the very essence of our being there is a revolution, a mutation, I do not see how a good society can come about.

Through introspection, mindfulness and meditation, we can start rooting out the seeds of anger, violence and fear within us and nourish our capacity for patience, kindness and benevolence. As long as we carry these negative seeds inside of us, they will taint our actions, and make them counterproductive. As Martin Luther King famously said: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hatred cannot drive out hatred, only love can do that." So what we need is a deep inner transformation.

We have to stop seeing ourselves as the center of our universe. Instead of looking at things from our own narrow perspective, we should practice to always put ourselves in the other's shoes. If we do so, our responses to the problems around us will not be driven by a desire to judge, destroy or retaliate. Rather, our actions will be based upon an aspiration to heal, reconnect and understand deeply. As Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says: "To love our enemy is impossible. The moment we understand our enemy, we feel compassion towards him or her, and he or she is no longer our enemy." Rather than finding fault in others, we will see the innate goodness in them and have a profound aspiration to try and create the conditions that allow this goodness to come out and flourish.

We need only to have a deep understanding of our neighbor, we also need to deeply understand society around us. Violence and oppression are deeply rooted into the way societies and cultures function. They can be so deeply ingrained in the way we think, that it can be hard for us to see them, no matter how compassionate we try to be.We can be nice to each other all we want, if we do not address the systemic causes of inequality and discrimination, we are only scratching at the surface of the suffering of our world.  If we fail to address them, our compassion will be incomplete. We will act kindly in certain ways, but unknowingly support violence in other ways. We have to decolonize our minds and break through these ideological barriers, so our compassion can become truly all encompassing.(1)

Talking 'bout a revolution

So, what does all this mean for this blog? I will write about all said aspects of compassion. We will look at ourselves, and how we can nourish peace and empathy inside of us. And we will look at society. We will talk about today's pressing issues, trying to come from a space of non-judgement and a deep understanding of our shared humanity. We will also address systemic causes of inequality and how we can overcome them and build systems that are inherently compassionate. These are some of the -isms and their respective possible antidotes that we will discuss(2):

• Sexism, racism, fundamentalism and nationalism. Counterpart: human unity and community living
• Capitalism: the belief that our world is marked by scarcity, and therefore we are forever in competition for resources, inevitably leading to inequality between those who have and those who have not.(3) Counterpart: gift economy
• Adultism: the belief that the interests and opinions of adults are more important than those of children, and that adults are superior to them. Counterpart: unschooling
• Speciesism: the belief that the interests of humans are more important than those of
  other forms of life, and that humans are superior to them. Counterpart: veganism and deep ecology

(1) We will also need self-compassion. We cannot put this into practice all at once. We will have to acknowledge that we are limited and imperfect. Instead of beating ourselves up for that, we can use it as fuel to work towards improving ourselves and our environment. The ideal of compassion that I describe is not something we can attain today. We might not even reach there this lifetime. That is okay. It is an ideal we aspire to. We do not have to be perfect, as long as we are determined to keep learning from our mistakes, and to keep growing and serving our entire lives.
(2) I do not in any way claim for this list to be exhaustive. I probably still have some blind spots of my own. These are just the topics I have some experience with and feel most comfortable writing about. 
(3) I am not against capitalism as such, but in some aspects it has gone too far, and we need to counterbalance that.