The Compassion Renaissance: Science, Mind & Spirit
Richard K. Stephens
December 17, 2021
(11,000 words / 36.7 minutes)
***
1) The Compassion Renaissance
Compassion is our subject – specifically the art of cultivating compassion as an enduring trait that is rooted in neuroscientific research on the brains of mental discipline practitioners who have achieved a high capacity for the compassion trait. In the past 15 years, or so, of a new field of study called Contemplative Science, America has seen a proliferation of secularized compassion cultivation trainings, based on neuroscientific findings of research of traditional Buddhist meditation practices, come forth and gain widespread attention and an increasing adoption. We are in the midst of a rapidly developing Compassion Renaissance.
Concurrent with the development of formal neuro-science-informed secular compassion trainings, a Christian practice making use of the same scientific findings but based specifically on Christian theology has been developed in parallel. Since this Christian method of compassion cultivation is not yet widely known outside certain regional contexts, we see a pressing need to include it in a survey of the constantly expanding influence of what has become a widening science-informed compassion movement.
This survey of the Compassion Renaissance touches on a number of related areas of knowledge, all of them complex and all of which involve specialized concepts and terms:
· A sketch of the history of the neuroscience that is germane to our subject· The Dalai Lama’s direct influence on science
· An outline of the history and key findings of specialized neuroscientific research on compassion
· The creation and proliferation of these secular compassion practices
· Parallel developments among Catholic monks informed by Buddhist teachings
· And finally, the recent development of a neuroscience-informed Christian compassion practice.
We aim to pull these topics together to tell a story, using as little technical language as is manageable, in order to give an overview of the develop of the Compassion Renaissance. Further, we will speculate on its progress in the near future, with particular emphasis on the recent, and still little-known, promising developments in the Christian context that have produced a comprehensive neuroscience-informed Christian cultivation practice.
Since only a minority of readers will be familiar with the scientific and cultural background that leads up to the recently developed Christian compassion-cultivation method, shaped, tested and implemented over the past thirteen years by the Center for Engaged Compassion (CEC) in California, the background overview offered here will be useful in understanding how the CEC’s method came into existence and, most importantly, what value it might hold for Christians everywhere.
2) Definition of Compassion
Dr. Clara Strauss, British psychologist and Research Lead for the Sussex Mindfulness Centre, offers this definition of compassion, which consolidates the varied definitional components that are in use by scientific researchers:
Compassion consists of five elements: recognizing suffering, understanding the universality of human suffering, feeling for the person suffering, tolerating uncomfortable feelings, and motivation to act/acting to alleviate suffering. [1]
It must be emphasized that the feeling of compassion for all mankind, or for the planet – without a fully developed faculty that causes one to be competent in manifesting compassion toward others in one’s proximity, including strangers and difficult others – does not fill the bill.
Nor does the term “compassion,” as discussed here, indicate empathy, sympathy, pity, or disengaged acts of generalized altruism. Nor is compassion the same as instinctually motivated love: romantic or familial love. Researcher Elaine Houston, writer for The Journal of Positive Psychology, explains how these forms of love are “functional distinct” from compassion:
The fundamental difference between the two is that compassion likely involves a complex combination of multiple positive and negative emotions. Where love is generally associated with positive affect and experiences, compassion is about being open to the experience of suffering. [2]
Compassion, as it is understood by those who specialize in its study, combines affective, cognitive, intentional and motivational interdependent components. Compassion researcher and trainer Hooria Jazaieri defines compassion as a “complex multidimensional construct” comprised of four components:
· The cognitive component (an awareness of suffering).· The affective component (sympathetic concern related to being emotionally moved by suffering).
· The intentional component (a wish to see the easing of that suffering).
· The motivational component (a responsiveness or readiness to help remove that suffering). [3]
Thus, one’s readiness to alleviate suffering is not sentiment directed to an anonymous population, but a ready-for-action responsiveness to the suffering one is proximate to.
As of 2021, the search term “compassion” in Google Scholar pulls up over 30,000 citations. From the time period up to 1990 there are 2,000.
We are prompted to ask, “Why, when and how did the explosion of scientific interest begin?”
3) A Neuroscientific Revolution
On October 23, 1987, in the living room of a home located in a small city in northern India at the foot of the Himalayas, Dharmasala, was planted the seed of a new scientific revolution. On that day the first of a series of many colloquies called Mind and Life Dialog, with the subject-name of “Dialogues Between Buddhism and the Cognitive Sciences,” hosted by Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Present were Western experts in computer science, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, cognitive science and cognitive psychology. In that week-long dialog the Dalai boldly presented the following challenge:
You scientists have done a remarkable job mapping the pathologies of the human mind. But you have done little or no work on the positive qualities like compassion, let alone their potential for cultivation. Contemplative traditions, on the other hand, have developed techniques to train our mind and enhance the positive qualities like compassion.
So why not use your powerful tools now to study the effects of these contemplative practices? Once we have better scientific understanding of the effects of these trainings we can offer some of them to the wider world, not as spiritual practices but as techniques for mental and emotional well-being. [4]
We can get a fly-on-the-wall view of this remarkable six-day-long meeting of Eastern and Western understandings of the mind from the book, Gentle Bridges, put out in 2001 by two of its participants.
We all know the Dalai Lama is a remarkable religious figure. But a most unexpected quality for a leader of an ancient religious tradition long segregated from the influences of modernism is his interest in science. This celebrated chief monk of Tibet has said that if he hadn’t become a monk he would have been an engineer and describes himself as “half Buddhist monk, half scientist.” [6]
Even more uncharacteristic of such a leader is his position that “if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.” [7]
The second Mind and Life Dialog came two years after the first, in 1989. Its theme was “Dialogues Between Buddhism and the Neurosciences.” It was during that dialog that the Dalai Lama was informed of an aspect of Western culture that left him astonished. Sharon Salzberg, a leading American proponent of Buddhist meditation, had informed him that it was common in the West for people to fell a loathing of themselves. The very notion of such a thing he had never heard before. He told Dr. Salzberg that he had always assumed that people naturally loved themselves.
This phenomenon of Western self-loathing, a form of suffering not recognized in the Tibetan tradition of mental discipline, was an important element in the shaping of the future of the science and practice of compassion cultivation that was to become widespread in the West in coming decades. It was understood by master meditators that without an acceptance of, and forgiveness of, oneself, genuine compassion for others could not be effectively cultivated. New practices that foster self-compassion, needed, therefore, to be developed.
From these modest origins in conversations among a small group of dedicated experts held in Dharmasala, in a time when the tools used by scientists to study the brain were still rudimentary – has grown a veritable cultural movement. That movement, inspired by the possibility, and increasingly by hard evidence, is dedicated to the proposition that science, through the examination of the world’s most experienced meditators, can “offer means to transform a person’s very being,” as the secular meditation movement’s chief documentarian, Daniel Goleman, puts it.
Precedents in Buddhist interest in offering a secular version of essential Buddhist practices exist. Before the Dalai Lama’s Mind and Life initiatives, the Burmese secularized Buddhist teachings of the S. N. Goenka had spread to the West – and were to become the seminal influence on the Mindfulness movement.
The origins of forms of Buddhist practices that focus on psychological techniques without religious trappings – an early “scientific” approach, in other words – are to be found in nineteenth century Burma, according to Stephen Batchelor, leading figure in contemporary Secular Buddhism. The Vipassana (“Insight Meditation, “Open Awareness Meditation”) form that came to the West derives from these innovations, eventually reaching Massachusetts, where Jon Kabat-Zinn was exposed to the method.
Yet it was the Dalai Lama’s personal influence and intense interest in modern science that catalyzed a potent movement of scientists that would invest enormous resources into an effort to decode the material workings of the wisdom of Eastern meditation masters. The results of this collaboration of East and West that was sparked in 1987 has initiated a revolution in our understanding of the brain’s physiology that has led to extraordinary practical applications.
4) Neuroscience
In 2021, neuroscience is still in its infancy, yet the field is booming, racing forward at a speedy pace on the back of new developments in technology.
The term “neuroscience” was coined in 1962 and it was only in 1975 that the first meeting of the Society for Neuroscience was convened (in New York City). Suspicion that the long-standing scientific dogma established in 1928 by Santiago Ramón y Cajal – holding that the human brain, once it has reached adulthood, “the nerve paths are something fixed, ended and immutable. Everything must die, nothing may be regenerated” – might be incorrect began to get solid traction by the early 1960s. [8]
In 1962, Dr. Marian Cleeves Diamond, later dubbed “the mother of neuroplasticity” (a term describing the mature brain’s ability to be altered by repeated experiences), discovered that the structure of animals’ brains could change in response to environmental input. In 1971 Dr. Diamond was the first to prove that the brain, regardless of age, actually shrinks with environmental impoverishment, yet grows in an enriched environment. [9]
In 1969, another monumental discovery provided evidence that argued against the notion of the fixedness of the mature brain. This was epigenetics, the capacity for genes to be “turned on” by environmental factors. Another breakthrough came in 1998, when Fred H. “Rusty” Gage of the Salk Institute, expert on age-related neurodegenerative disease, introduced another paradigm shift by publishing proof of neurogenesis – the growing of new nerve cells – in the brains of humans. [10]
By 2004, the reality of human neuroplasticity had become well-established. A TED talk titled “Growing evidence of brain plasticity” given by Michael Merzenich (UC San Francisco), at Monterrey, California, marked a new confidence that given that the human brain is highly plastic, then science-based novel interventions that would drive improvements in brain functions could be successfully developed. [11]
5) An East-to-West & West-to-East Integration
Dr. Richard J. Davidson, researcher at University of Wisconsin, Madison, has devoted his life to discovering how neuroplasticity can be understood for the sake of developing the healthy mind.
In 1992, Davidson, who today is known as the world’s foremost scientist in the study of the neuroscience of meditation, met the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. The Dalai Lama directly challenged Davidson to direct scientific research to study compassion, noting that scientists who studied the mind had long devoted their energies exclusively to the study of pathologies, the negative workings of the mind, and had ignored its positive capacities and potentialities.
The Dalai Lama’s aim to integrate his religion’s knowledge of psychology, developed over the course of centuries, and its practical application was not unidirectional. He matched his challenge to the West to put science’s tools to use in studying Buddhist practices by initiating a program whereby Tibetan monks would be taught Western science in a special curriculum that was to be developed for that purpose.
To realize these goals an ambitious East-West academic collaboration was initiated in 1998 – between Tibet's most esteemed academic institutions, Drepung Loseling Monastic University, and one of America’s, Emory University in Atlanta. [12]
Originally called the Emory-Tibet Partnership (now, the Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, CCSCBE) was established by Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, a former Buddhist monk involved in research on traditional Buddhist and contemporary Western approaches to emotions and their impact on wellness. The Center’s website describes their mission as promoting “Compassion-based ethics, also known as "secular ethics," simply means an ethics that explicitly values and promotes an orientation toward kindness and compassion.” The organization has published scientific textbooks in the Tibetan language – and science has been formally incorporated into the curriculum for training monks and nuns.
It is astonishing to think of how, the monk who had escaped on horseback in 1959 at the age of 19 from the invading Chinese Communists, with a few soldiers armed with rudimental weapons in a two-week trek through the Himalayas to India, had made amazingly strides to accomplish his aim to join ancient Buddhist knowledge with cutting-edge Western science. Within a mere twelve years since a brief impromptu meeting in 1986 in Paris between the Dalai Lama and eminent Chilean professor in Paris, Francisco Varela, which led to the first Mind and Live Dialogue, a genuine Compassion Renaissance was well under way. [13]
6) Monks, Machines & More Paradigm Shifts
The pathologies brain had long been the focus of scientists. They sought and still seek remedies for senility, anti-social behavior and depression – and they seek understanding of brain function that can be used in artificial intelligence technology. Now, with an understanding of neuroplasticity and the cooperation of the most advanced practitioners of highly refined mind discipline, the senior monks, vast new vistas of the possibilities that science can benefit all minds have opened up.
All of the scientists who joined together with the Dalai Lama’s initiatives to bring Buddhist wisdom traditions and science in harmony had already become influence with Buddhism. They were meditators, so they were already aware of, and interested in the goals that the monastic disciplines were designed to serve.
Scientists like Richard Davidson had long hoped to discover whether the elevated mental states that meditators achieved during meditation might, through neural plasticity, result in alterations of the brain that had lasting effect. In other words, the question is whether an essentially temporary state, repeated sufficiently in quantity and quality, might result in an altered enduring trait, a profound alteration of one’s very being.
Davidson’s initial interest in meditation came about simply when, as a student, he had met people whose character was radically different from what he knew and he wanted to discover how to become like them. It turned out these admirable people were trained in Buddhist mind discipline.
“I was meeting people who were kind and unusually friendly and I wanted to know what their ‘secret sauce’ was,” says Davidson. “It turned out they were meditators, and I began to recognize that meditation might be a strategy to help people manage stress. My scientific career had started with questions as to why some people are more resilient to life’s slings and arrows than others. It occurred to me that meditation could be a pathway.” [14]
As research by Davidson – and other Western scientists with similar aims – moved forward, benefitting enormously the cooperation of “Olympics-level” Tibetan monks who volunteered to subject themselves to the various tests used by neuroscientists – two states (and, it learned, traits) characteristic of seasoned meditators, mindfulness and compassion, came into sharp focus. What emerged from this inquiry was that there was an inseparable connection between the one goal: achieving individual well-being and resilience, and the other: embodying compassion, attentiveness the suffering of others. [15]
From the Buddhist point of view, a disciplined mind is one that is free from negative emotions. But this is not unique to that religion. The quest for inner-peace is prominent in every major spiritual tradition. In the mid-20th century, when a large number of secularized Westerners had come to be fascinated with Buddhism, an exotic import offering valuable benefits, the West’s own spiritual institutions were waning in influence on the culture at large. Yet, at the margins of its culture, the West too had its own monks, who would eventually have an important role to play in the East/West spiritual dialog.
By the twentieth century, the disciplines of the early Christian “Desert Fathers and Mothers” had been largely forgotten. Their practices were not carried forward in a continuous tradition, as was the case with Buddhism. The same goes for the great Christian contemplatives of the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. The links in the chain were broken.
The second greatest commandment which Jesus taught, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” [16] had in modern times been reduced to a naked command, a pleasant yet toothless maxim, unsupported a well-defined method of spiritual discipline by which to cultivate the capacity to achieve. Buddhism was, at least in contemporary culture’s terms, was fresh and unencumbered by centuries of baggage of heated controversy that Christian history was burdened with. Buddhism had an unbroken tradition of a highly articulated discipline of compassion cultivation.
Secularized, industrialized life, with its stresses and often overwhelming complexity, cries out for relief. To a weary West, the Dalai Lama’s message offered a refreshing clarity of vision:
The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater our own sense of well-being becomes. Cultivating a close, warm-hearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. This helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the ultimate source of success in life. . . . Thus we can strive gradually to become more compassionate, that is we can develop both genuine sympathy for others' suffering and the will to help remove their pain. As a result, our own serenity and inner strength will increase. [17]
There is no Eastern cosmology here, no requirement to adopt a doctrine of reincarnation. This statement is an open philosophy with universal appeal, not a closed system necessitating neither sectarian membership nor symbolic ceremony. The “ultimate success in life,” as stated, is unencumbered by institutional religious interests. It was up to scientists to determine whether the Dalai Lama’s traditional methods of “cultivating a close, warm-hearted feeling for others” could hold be proven to work for everyone, not just lifelong monks.
Fruits of the Mind and Life Dialogs collaboration initiated in 1987 have come forth with increased frequency as new organizations were established – and more and more young scientists decided to devote themselves to the science of well-being, which eventually came to be called Contemplative Science.
The Emory University project, in addition to creating a science curriculum for monastic Buddhist practitioners, designed and, in 2004, introduced to the general public a secularized form of mental practice for the cultivation of brain-capacity for compassion. It was named Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCI), and was based on traditional Tibetan “Lojong” mind-training.[18]
That same year the concept of neuroplasticity gained new attention, and credibility, in which Michael Merzenich (UC San Francisco), delivered his celebrated TED talk titled “Growing evidence of brain plasticity” in Monterrey, California. 2004 was also the year in which German neuroscientist, Tania Singer – who was to play an increasingly prominent role in neuroscience in collaboration with Buddhist meditator Mathieu Ricard – published her first paper on the results of her research on the neuroanatomy of empathy.[19]
7) The Difference Between Empathy and Compassion
Matthieu Ricard is a unique figure, the very embodiment of science conjoined with Buddhism. A Westerner who in 1972 earned a PhD in molecular genetics, Ricard walked away from a science-centered career path to become a Buddhist monk in Nepal. By 2004 Ricard had become one of the most seasoned meditators in the world. The press dubbed him “the happiest man in the world.”
His dual expertise
meant that not only was he an ideal subject for study but also he was
well-qualified to contribute to designing the parameters of experiments on
himself. This he did when his brain activity would be studied by Richard
Davidson in 2008. But even Ricard was surprised at the results of measurements
taken in 2007 by the scientist whose focus was in understanding the
neuroscience of empathy, Dr. Tania Singer. [20]
In a lab in Maastricht equipped with cutting-edge technological equipment, using the recently invented tool of real-time fMRA, Dr. Singer discovered, quite by accident, that the neural center governing simple empathy (feeling the suffering of another) and that governing compassion (empathy that transforms into unconditional care with a motivation to relieve the observed suffering) are distinct from one another.
Singer had asked Richard to engage in a mental practice that would induce feelings of identification with the suffering of others, which he did. Yet her equipment failed to register activity in the zone she knew to be the one governing empathy. Frustrated she prepared to end the session, but Ricard objected, telling her he was feeling depleted by having focused for some time on what is called "stand-alone empathy" (visualizing intense suffering affecting someone else and resonating empathically with that suffering). He asked to spend time on compassion meditation. It was during this second meditation that singer noticed intense activity in an area she had not been paying attention to. The anatomical locus of compassion – which involves positive feelings of care for another – was thus discovered. With the neural pathways now isolated, the science of compassion had a powerful new tool.
The discovery would profoundly affect the development of methods by which to reduce “empathy fatigue,” a serious problem experienced by professional caregivers in every category.
8) A Christian “Contemplative Reformation”
Around the same time
that Buddhist meditation practices began to influence American scientists, a
new interest in old monastic contemplative spiritual practices started to
emerge. In Christian writings of Spanish Priest, St. John of the Cross
(1542-1591), the Greek word kenosis is the concept of the “self-emptying”
of one's own will in order to becoming a receptacle for God’s divine will. In
psychological terms, Christian kenosis and Buddhist sunyata (emptiness)
are similar. As one scholar has written, “both the ‘mind of Christ’ and the
‘mind of Buddha’ are to be understood as an act of ‘self-emptying.’” (Steve
Odin, Buddhist-Christian Studies, 1989). [21]
Thomas Merton is the most well-known Roman Catholic to have made an effort to take monastic prayer and contemplation practices out of the monastery and make them available to the world at large. Merton, a Cistercian (Trappist) monk, had come into prominence in 1948, with the publication of his spiritual memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain. The book was widely celebrated and was compared by critics to Augustine of Hippo’s late fourth-century Confessions. It had appeared in the midst of a culture-wide “crisis of meaning” following the ravages of WWII and the looming threat of nuclear weapons. Merton’s writing was so powerful that the book prompted a surge in young men to seek out the Trappist monastic life.
But it was not until the closure of the Second Vatican Council on Dec. 8, 1965, that Catholic clergy were encouraged to study the advanced mental disciplines of masters of Buddhism.
In 1966, Another American monk, Father David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine, who held a PhD in experimental psychology, was officially delegated to pursue a Buddhist-Christian dialogue and began to study with Japanese Zen masters. Steindl-Rast’s gaze to the East, however, must be understood as a gaze backwards in time as well: back to Christian contemplative traditions that had long been neglected. It was not any exoticism, nor any non-Christian novelty, that was being sought after, but rather a retrieval of the lost thread of a rigorous Christian discipline of mind. Father David observed that religions tend to lose touch with their original inspiration:
[A]fter
a couple of hundred years, or two thousand years or more, what was once alive
is dead rock. Doctrine becomes doctrinaire. Morals become moralistic. Ritual
becomes ritualistic. What do we do with it? We have to push through this crust
and go to the fire that's within it. [22]
Over in England,
another Benedictine monk followed a similar path. Father John Douglas Main began
Christian meditation groups in 1975, teaching a form of Christian meditation
which employed a prayer-phrase or mantra. The World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) launched
in 1991 grew out of this. [23]
Not long after David
Steindl-Rast began his engagement with Zen masters, Thomas Merton, in 1968, traveled
to India to meet the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala for a three-day dialog on
religion and spirituality. Merton passed away later that year. Merton’s final,
and hugely influential, book, Contemplative Prayer, was published soon
after. The Dalai Lama was deeply affected by his talks with Merton, later
saying that it was he who introduced him to the real meaning of the word
“Christian." [24]
Merton’s new guide to prayer soon became the inspiration to other Trappist monks, three of them, at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, forming what came to be called “the Centering Prayer movement.” The most well-known of these, Father Thomas Keating (1923-2018), wrote, in words similar to Father David’s, that it was his aim to revive lost Christian contemplative practices that had been neglected for three centuries.[25]
Near the
end of his life in 1968, Merton stated plainly that what is essential is to be
sought in the area of self-transcendence, moving out of self and toward others. [26]
Keating challenged his
Trappist community to expand on Merton’s trailblazing and find a way to take
the hitherto rarefied contemplative experiences outside the cloisters and make
them available to the broader public: “Could we put the Christian tradition into
the form that would be accessible to people in the active ministry today and to
young people who have been instructed in an eastern technique and might be
inspired to return to their Christian roots if they know there was something
similar in the Christian tradition?” He envisioned a “contemplative reformation,”
using the word “contemplative” to indicate a practice that is “transformative.” [27]
Over the past half
century, a movement based on Christian
contemplative prayer, Contemplative Outreach, has spread Centering
Prayer internationally. But, while such prayer forms that revived dormant
Christian practices were indeed ones that cultivate compassion, they were not
specifically informed by the new developments in neuroscience. But in recent
years there have been new developments that advance one’s capacity for “moving out of self and toward others,” which
we will discuss below. [28]
9) Compassion as a Skill & Other Fruits of Research
“Over the last
decade [2011-2020], empirical research on compassion has burgeoned in the
biomedical, clinical, translational, and foundational sciences. Increasingly
sophisticated understandings and measures of compassion continue to emerge from
the abundance of multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary studies,” writes
Emory University researcher, Dr. Jennifer Mascaro. [29]
What has been learned is that compassion is a learnable skill at any age – and, as research has demonstrated, does not require thousands of hours of meditation. Studies also show that compassionate action improves both one’s physiology and sense of well-being.
It was in the early 2010s that researchers could make
such assertions with confidence, based on hard data. Dr. Helen Wang, of the
Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at U W-Madison published a study in 2013
in which the “fundamental question was, ‘Can compassion be trained and learned
in adults? Can we become more caring if we practice that mindset? … Our
evidence points to yes.” [30]
The key to this “yes” answer is the identification by researchers of the brain’s affective processing systems and the autonomic nervous system (responsible for regulating the body's unconscious actions, including the flight-or-fight response).
Researchers gained their knowledge through examining the brain processes of meditation masters, with tens of thousands of hours of experience. They were subjected to the most advanced brain-examination technologies – and then compared to novices trained to use some of their techniques.
The research procedures are complex and nuanced, requiring time-consuming data sifting and nuanced interpretation. The “Holy Grail” of these probes has been the discovery of how ordinary people might use mind-training to learn to acquire an enduring trait, such as compassion.
Four years after the publication of Dr. Wang’s Wisconsin study on compassion learning, Dr. James Doty, Director of the Centre for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE, founded 2008) at Stanford University, was able to report that his research had shown that: “when someone acts with compassionate intention, it has a huge, huge positive effect on their physiology. It takes them out of the threat mode and puts them into the rest and digest mode.” It is in that mode that healing and regeneration occur, allowing the body to detoxify and build immunity.
Compassion requires equilibrium, full attention and mental clarity since involves a motivation to act. Without a motivation to act, one is merely indulging the self. To know how to take effective action, one must be prepared to imagine the flourishing of another before taking action towards the fulfillment of that flourishing.
Self-concern, the overidentification with our feelings of fear, disgust, anger – natural responses to confrontation with a person in distress – stands in the way of embodying the compassionate mental state. Such negative feelings are impulses which arise from the primitive fight-or-flight mechanism centered in the amygdala that result in disengagement, in withdrawal. The withdrawal blocks one’s access to more nuanced capacities – insight, awareness, attention to detail – that are required for both self-compassion and compassion directed outward toward others.
Knowing how to tame one’s amygdala is the prerequisite for the calmness and focus on another’s suffering that must be in place in order to be prepared for compassionate action that effectively contributes to relief of suffering of the other. Compassion is the acquired predisposition – or trait – to act, without hesitation, to help a suffering person, the moment that person is encountered.
Acquiring and maintaining that trait requires deliberate effort. Without properly targeted effort, we cannot expect to be transformed from a mode of passive reactivity to others into a psychological mode open and ready to genuinely connect with others.
With the scientific data produced in the early 2000s through the study of highly trained Buddhist meditation masters, showing that certain traits can be acquired with certain techniques, even by novices, it was now possible to confidently begin designing secularized training programs to be offered to a broad public.
The origin and progress of the new field of study, Contemplative Science, is documented in the 2017 book, Altered Traits, by Goleman and Davidson. It’s a complex narrative, full of nooks and crannies, laid out with scrupulous nuance. One important aspect of compassion cultivation was, however, not given much attention in Altered Traits. This is subject of psychological resistance to compassion, a subject that is a specialization of British psychologist, Dr. Paul Gilbert.
10) Psychological Resistance to Compassion
A crucial element to the new field of the study and practice of compassion and its cultivation was introduced by clinical psychologist, Paul Gilbert, of Derbyshire, England: the study of resistance to compassion.
Through his clinical practice with chronically depressed patients, he found that standard cognitive therapy methods were of no use in treating patients who bore attitudes of intense self-loathing and pessimism regarding their ability to alter their attitude toward themselves. In 2006 he founded The Compassionate Mind Foundation in Derby.
The phenomenon of self-loathing was the very problem brought to the attention of the Dalai Lama by Sharon Salzberg in 1989 that caught him by surprise. Gilbert, himself an experienced meditator, set out to find a way to understand this intransigent pessimism that resisted treatment and to develop a remedy.
Many people, whether in childhood or adulthood, have developed a mental trait of robust resistance to compassion. Dr. Gilbert, through his research on the compassion-resistance phenomenon, has identified three “fear” categories associated with this trait: fear of compassion for others, fear of compassion from others, fear of compassion for oneself. Targeted training is required in order for these fears that block ordinary compassion cultivation techniques.
Compassion cultivation practices rely on “recall skills,” the ability to engage in mentalization involving “imaging techniques” that bring up images of positive affect. But for some, there are no positive images mentally available, or at least not available without having to work hard to overcome barriers hardened by habits of negative thinking.
The overstimulation of the amygdala’s fight-or-flight impulse can become not only a habit that frustrates awareness and thus makes an altruistic mindset impossible, but also can become both an entrenched personality trait that a person in such a condition will presume is unchangeable, a permanent essential trait. Standard cognitive therapy relies upon the patient being able to learn, understand then competently adopt a different way of thinking.
But the standard method fails to work on those who are compassion resistant. Gilbert discovered this when he observed that a patient can understand a “lesson” of different thinking, yet it could have no effect. He discovered than in these cases the very faculty of feeling reassurance, relief and safeness, was either inaccessible or just not physiologically functioning in the client’s brain.
Gilbert’s Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) is devised for such people, clients who are subject to severe and enduring mental health problems. CFT is designed to alleviate a person’s negative self-focus, which is a habitual mentalization that produces a sense of shame and high levels of self-criticism that undermine the patient’s ability to mentally grow. CFT recognizes that those who find it difficult to stimulate certain positive emotions are lacking a learned skill; they are not manifesting an immutable trait. The “cure” is to undergo a process of structured learning, to build those parts of the brain’s anatomy that are devoted to positive emotions. This learning comes about by engaging in meditative practices which foster compassion and self-compassion so that the learner develops the capability to engage with suffering in ways that lead to alleviation of suffering.
While not an atheist, Dr. Gilbert is no admirer of institutionalized religions, which he notes often take what was originally a religion of deep insight and wisdom and, over time, typically calcify its forms into shallow dogma and ritual. Gilbert nevertheless holds great respect for Christianity’s ethics – which indeed center on compassion – despite the reality so many of its sects which, in so many cases, fail to use their resources to inculcate Christian ethics through deliberate discipling in the “how to” aspects of becoming Christlike.
Gilbert’s insights on compassion resistance, nevertheless, need not be interpreted as falling outside religious considerations. Although much of Protestant Christianity has over the past century and a half become focused on “personal salvation,” on recruiting and on petitionary prayer practices, the modern contemplative Catholic monks have indeed rediscovered early Christian practices. Those revived practices actively cultivate the capacity to transform the mind and heart in the direction of gaining, though deliberate effort, the capability to follow Christ’s “Great Commandment”:
“’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (22:37-40)
“Love” – unconditional love (agape in the Greek original) is what is mandated in the commandment. The essence if such love is imagining possibilities. This love involves a creative process which results not just in general ideas or propositions about what can be achieved – for oneself and for others – but in inspired envisioning of the other which is acted upon. Compassion, we come to see, is the flowering of the imagination. Without one’s active cultivation of creative imagination, so that one delights in such imagining the way God delights in creation, one’s heart and mind simply do not transform into a state of embodied compassion.
Dr. Gilbert’s therapeutic approach, even though technically it has no “religious” basis, nevertheless meets the lofty demands of the second Great Commandment head on – recognizing that he who hates himself is not at all equipped for the higher mission of loving his “neighbor”:
The most pervasive problems in mental health are for people who struggle to build affiliative relationships and experience isolation; people who have little interest in the well-being of others and are exploitative and harmful to others, and of course people who treat themselves in pretty hostile, uncaring, and non-compassionate ways. [31]
11) Let’s Not Forget Mindfulness
Out of the marriage of Buddhism and science the two most powerful practical applications to come, so far, are those that show how to learn compassion and mindfulness. Of the two, it was mindfulness that first got traction within the West. More than two decades before neuroscience-informed secularized Buddhism-based compassion practices had been developed, Buddhism-based practices that taught mindfulness were proved to have practical value.
The word “mindfulness” is now so well-known that one might get the impression it is just a pop psychology fad. There are indeed a number of watered down or distorted self-help formulations that use the term, yet mindfulness, properly understood, is both a psychologically – and physiologically – sound concept which has been shown to be effective in improving the lives of those who experience chronic pain.
The English term for the Eastern concept, “mindfulness,” was coined in 1881 as a rough translation of the Sanskrit term for Buddhist practice called “Sati” (literally “memory,” but used with reference to the constantly repeated phrase “mindful and thoughtful”) in the ancient Pali language. The first time the English term “mindfulness” in the title of a book was in the late 1960s, when Westerners were focusing a great deal of attention on Buddhist psychology in (Nyanaponika Thera, The Power of Mindfulness, 1968). [32] Today, “mindfulness” is everywhere. An amazon.com book search for the term “mindfulness” gives 60,000 results.
What spurred this phenomenon? It started with one man’s inspired hunch, when Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD in molecular biology, a meditator since 1965, was studying muscle development at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and also teaching basic medical courses. It was on a meditation retreat in 1979, that he got the idea that the novel mindfulness techniques he was learning might be effectively applied to patients in chronic pain to reduce their suffering. In September of that year, his idea was given the green light by the Medical Center and a pilot program, the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Clinic (MBSR), was begun.
Almost immediately MBSR produced good results: for some patients it diminished pain, for others, pain remained, but their ability to cope with their condition – that is, their resilience – improved. The program was expanded and its innovative methods’ influence has spread across the United States. By 2014 there were close to 1,000 certified MBSR instructors teaching the method across the US and in other countries more than 300.
The specific traditional mind-training practice that Kabat-Zinn adapted from Buddhist meditators was what in English is called “Open Monitoring” meditation, or “Insight” (Vipassana in the Pali language). Insight meditation trains the mind to experience occurrences, feelings and situations “without evaluation, interpretation, or preference.” It strengthens selective attention, and, consequently, the crucially important capacity of resilience. The practitioner learns to roll with the punches. Kabat-Zinn describes this, when discussing MBSR, as "moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness.”
Research shows that such a mindfulness method will reduce the experience of pain by eliminating exacerbation brought on by a three-stage sequence of perception: a) anticipation of pain, b) a strong reactivity to it, and c) a lingering memory of the pain. Such a pattern of dealing with pain not only intensifies the sensation of pain but extends its duration. MBSR can, however, abrogate the mental activity associated with pain and, as Dan Goleman puts it, to “distribute the work of response to pain across widespread regions of the brain.” MBSR had been found effective in dealing with severe psoriasis, pain, anxiety, brain function, and immune function, by lowering cortisol and reducing inflammation-reducing cytokines (immunomodulating agents).
Since it was first introduced in 1979, mindfulness training spread like wildfire. But it was not until the early 2000s that compassion cultivation started its own dramatic trajectory toward widespread adoption.
12) Proliferation of Secular Compassion Cultivation Practices
It was in early 2008, that a milestone in public awareness in compassion cultivation focused worldwide attention on new possibilities, when former nun Karen Armstrong was awarded the TED Prize on February 28, 2008. In her acceptance speech, she presented her “one wish that would change the world”:
“I
wish that you would help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter
for Compassion, crafted by a group of leading inspirational thinkers...and
based on the fundamental principles of universal justice and respect.” [33]
The Charter came to fruition the following year and was unveiled by Karen Armstrong and the Council of Conscience on November 12, 2009, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. In Seattle, a five-day gathering including the Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu, Seeds of Compassion was held in Seattle from April 11-15, 2008, to involve the public in the crafting of the Charter. 150,000 people attended the event, and 44 million interacted with the event’s online broadcast.
In the years preceding the unveiling of the Charter for Compassion in late 2009, empirically-supported certified compassion cultivation training programs had begun to spring up around the US and in England.
At the request of the Dalai Lama, made at the 2000 Mind and Live Dialog, Dr. Paul Ekman (Psychology Professor at UC San Francisco), Dr. Alan Wallace, Dr. Mark Greenberg, and Dr. Richard Davidson created a secular training program to help people manage destructive emotions and cultivate a wholesome way of being. This training, called Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB) was launched in 2004.
Also in 2004, Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT)
had been launched at Emory University in 2004 and Compassion Focused Therapy
(CFT) had been launched by the Compassionate Mind Foundation in Derby, England,
by psychotherapist Paul Gilbert at in 2006. In 2005 in New York City, Joseph Loizzo, a
Harvard-trained psychiatrist and a Columbia-trained Buddhist scholar, founded the
Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science, offering Compassion-Based
Resilience Training (CBRT). In California, The Center for Compassion and
Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford U had been founded with the
blessings and cooperation of the Dalai Lama. From CCARE sprang what has become
the most widespread of these trainings in the US, the Compassion Cultivation
Training (CCT), designed by Thupten Jinpa, Ph.D., who for years was official
translator of the Dalai Lama.
In 2010, Paul
Makransky, professor of Buddhism and comparative theology at Boston
College and a meditation teacher within
the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, developed a secularized practice
called Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT), teaching the practice around the
country to non-Buddhists, including health care providers: doctors, nurses,
social workers. [34]
Beyond these comprehensive compassion trainings, self-compassion – a necessary foundation to altruistic compassion – gained its own specialized practice in 2012 with the founding of Center for Mindful Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff, Chris Germer in San Diego, California.
In that same year, Dr. Tracey Shors, professor in behavioral neuroscience, systems neuroscience, and psychology at Rutgers U, New Jersey designed a protocol which combines mental training with meditation and physical training with aerobic exercise, called MAP Training (Mental And Physical Training) to provide recovery from depression, trauma history, anxiety and HIV, as well as those living with the stress and trauma of everyday life.
The adoption of
meditation, in the general sense, has continued to see phenomenal growth in the
United States. In early 2021, The Good Body, a health website, published
an article presenting statistics gleaned from a range of sources on the growth
of meditation practice, stating that “since 2012 the number of people practicing
meditation has tripled.” The reasons given by those surveyed for taking up
meditation are stated as: general wellness (76%), improve energy (60%), aid
memory and focus (50%), anxiety relief (29%), stress relief (22%), depression
relief. [35]
Compassion training’s “cousin,” mindfulness training, has become so widespread that, in 2018, an estimated 52% of US employers have offered mindfulness training to their employees.
13) Toward a Neuroscience-Informed Christian Compassion Practice
It is now accepted, data-supported, fact that compassion can be taught. The task at hand now is the fine-tuning of teaching methods.
At the center of the science of compassion is the discovery that humans are – as Daniel Goleman famously phrased it twenty-six years ago in his book, Social Intelligence (2006) – “hardwired for compassion.” [36] With this in mind, we understand that its cultivation is not at all a matter of introducing, or constructing, something novel, but rather is a process of uncovering and strengthening something that is inherent, by learning how to uncover it by curbing those mental functions that interfere with one’s command of the already-present compassion faculty.
In terms of Christian theology, this understanding is consistent with the concept of following Christ by deliberately acting to transform one’s heart through a process of restoring it to the Image of God – which was its state before the Fall. Before the Fall, before the free choice was made to disobey God, the created human was at home and was fully competent in the created world. The goal of Christian transformative contemplation is to retrieve the memory from the deep recesses of the mind and to restore, as much as is achievable, that unfallen condition. In other words, the hardwired compassion potentiality that scientists have discovered is, in Christian terms, the lingering, somewhat occluded God-like “image,” and this image can be retrieved through developing the necessary skill to curb self-centered fear and self-interest, qualities of mind which short-circuit compassion processes.
Within many Christian traditions, however, that faculty which neuroscience now shows is a necessary foundation for growing the compassion capability has been allowed to atrophy: to atrophy both doctrinally and anatomically.
Self-loathing has, in many strands of Christianity, become a perverse replacement for awareness of sin followed by the transformative engagement that is what prayer is supposed to be and which is the means by which one becomes “reborn.”
Yet self-compassion is
a mandatory Christian requirement that grows out of the crucial transformative process of choosing
to radically change one’s mind – which is the actual meaning of the Greek word
metanoia (inadequately translated as “repentance”). “Radically alter your
mind!” (“Metanoeite!”) is the first command Christ makes in his
ministry. [37]
Acceptance of the forgiveness proffered by Christ correlates with the capacity for “self-compassion.” After all, Christ’s “second greatest command” – to love your neighbor as yourself – which is interconnected with the greatest command, to “love God all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind,” is meaningless if one loathes oneself, is lacking in self-knowledge, and feels psychically unequipped to overcome banal selfishness.
14) The Christian Compassion Practice
When we bring into this core theological consideration – the command to transform one’s mind – the awareness of the revolutionary neuroscientific discovery of neuroplasticity, the practical means become elucidated by which the deliberately engaged transformation of mind. Christian authors, Rolf R. Nolasco and R. Vincent MacDonald in their 2016 book Compassionate Presence, lay out this process of transformation of mind in detail:
The implications of a dynamic, experience-dependent, and plastic brain are far reaching on many levels. When this knowledge is paired with the Apostle Paul’s call for the renewal of the mind we come to realize just how important spiritual disciplines or habits of the soul (e.g. meditation) are in transforming our entire being – body, mind, and spirit – to reflect the character of God. More specifically, this landmark discovery casts light on the myriad ways we can transform our mind and rewire our brain to support and enhance our commitment to embody compassionate love to all. . . . Our entire being begins to pulsate with the heartbeat of God so that his ways become our ways not only outwardly through acts of compassion but inwardly through the transformation of the mind. In turn, this changes the structures of our brain by strengthening the synaptic connections of our altruistic brain so as to reflect the very nature of the compassionate heart of God. [38]
Such an apt Christian application of purely secular neuroscience as described by Nolasco and MacDonald, stands behind the recently developed method called Christian Compassion Practice. This Practice developed out of three friends’ search for a rigorous spiritual formation method.
In 2008 when the
three, all living on the West Coast – two of them professors of spiritual
formation – Andrew Dreitcer, a former Presbyterian minister and expert on
historical Christian spiritual practices, Frank Rogers Jr., professor of
spiritual formation and narrative pedagogy, and Mark Yaconelli, a youth pastor
specializing in pastoral narratology – teamed up to formulate a
Christ-following spiritual practice that would confront suffering. [39]
The trio formed an organization called Triptykos (which later metamorphosed into the Center for Engaged Compassion). The word “Triptykos” refers to the three-fold compassion, the basis of the organization: 1) the desire to be connected to a greater Source of compassion; 2) the desire to hold compassion for oneself and other persons; 3) the desire to become a compassionate presence toward the suffering that exists within the world. Yaconelli describes Triptykos’ purpose as “to re-claim Christianity as a spiritual path – a path that seeks to cultivate compassion rather than violence, personal vitality rather than self-hatred, and communion rather than alienation from the loving Source of all life.”[40]
Triptykos began its mission by developing and teaching “various spiritual exercises that involve contemplation, creativity, and compassionate action.” They took their teachings into environments fraught with pain and conflict, such as post-civil war Zimbabwe, where they assisted the process of reconciliation, into the Canadian prison system, and also into more relaxed environments where they taught workshop that demonstrated spiritual practices to inculcate the capacity to “love your enemy.”
In 2010 Triptykos changed its name when the organization became an official part of Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, California, to Center for Engaged Compassion (CEC). The following year, CEC, informed by extensive hands-on experience using the Triptykos practices, the team set out to deepen and concentrate their practice design. CEC put together a three-day conference that met at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, where Father Thomas Keating, co-founder of the Centering Prayer Movement that had expanded on the methods of Thomas Merton, with the purpose “to begin a conversation between Christian contemplatives and neuroscientists in hopes of designing future research projects.”[41]
The CEC team
recognized that Contemplative Science had thus far “focused, almost exclusively
on Buddhist forms of contemplative practice, ignoring the wealth of practices
that exist in Western religious traditions,” as Yaconelli explained. This state
of affairs was in need of changing so that the discoveries of Contemplative
Science and the wealth of practices that exist in Western religious traditions
would not remain segregated. [42]
The Snowmass colloquy’s goal was to deepen “the scientific understanding of the contribution Christian contemplative practice can make in the cultivation of compassionate action.” One of the key participants was Dr. Michael Spezio, like CEC’s Dr. Dreitcer, is a former Presbyterian minister. With a PhD in Cognitive & Systems Neuroscience, and Director of The Laboratory for Inquiry into Valuation and Emotion (The LIVE Lab) at Scripps Women’s College, Claremont, Dr. Spezio was equally at home with both Christian theology/practice and mind science.
Over the next four
years (2010-2014), Prof. Rogers focused on refining the Triptykos practices and
on putting together a “comprehensive, integrative compassion-forming practice.”
In parallel, Prof. Dreitcer made a thorough study of Christian formation practices
– from ancient times to the present – which contribute to compassion-cultivation.
Dreitcer found that “however profound the practices may be, each contributes to
compassion-formation in only a limited way.” [43]
Some of the practices highlight being grounded in an experience of receiving compassion: Desert Prayer, Recollection, and Centering Prayer, for example. Others focus on self-compassion: The Jesus Prayer. And still others highlight compassion for others, as well as for all creation: Meditations on the Life of Christ and “contemplation to attain Love.” More extended processes, such as the thirty-day retreat of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, draw together several of these dimensions through a combination of practices. But no single practice from Christian history explicitly leads us through the entire process of compassion cultivation, from being grounded in Divine Compassion to acting compassionately toward ourselves and others. This kind of comprehensive process is exactly what we need, if we truly are to live into the compassion Jesus invites us to embrace. [44]
The result of the CEC’s research was the Christian Compassion Practice, honed by Frank Rogers Jr. The Practice is explained and presented in its finished form the 2016 book, Compassion in Practice: The Way of Jesus, (Upper Room Books).
Dreitcer sums up the Practice – a refinement and consolidation of Christian compassion cultivation traditions, underpinned with contemporary scientific data:
It draws on historical roots and follows the circle of compassion shaped by Jesus’s invitation to love: grounding in divine compassion to acting compassionately toward ourselves and others. This practice, the Compassion Practice, moves us from compassionate understandings and feelings to wise, restorative, compassionate actions. It draws wisdom from contemporary research in psychology, neuroscience and spirituality. In other words, it gathers into one package key compassion-cultivating processes from Christian traditions and from current understandings that lie outside of religious traditions. [45]
A firm, Scripture-based, conviction of the Center for Engaged Compassion is embodied in the Practice – holding that the kind of unconditional love (agape in the New Testament Greek) which Christ commanded his adherents to become capable of manifesting is a matter of being, of embodying Christlikeness, rather than just a cognitive knowing, or mere adoption of truth-claims, and that its fruits are, and indeed must be, proximate and individual effective action.
Compassion Practice is geared to open up capacities, curiosity and imagination, that are prerequisites for being able to see the other – the “neighbor” who is to be loved, including those who are not easy to understand and tolerate – in a way that visualizes his or her flourishing state, seeing possibilities rather than reacting to limitations.
Rogers notes that:
“[A] precondition for compassion is seeing is a particular way of seeing others. Usually when we relate to one another we do so through judgements and reactions that are conditioned by our own needs, desires, feelings and sensitivities. We do not see other persons on their own terms; rather, we perceive them through the filtered lenses of our own agendas, [yet] compassion entails being moved by another’s experience. . . . Compassion includes restorative action. without it compassion degenerates into sentimentality – feeling bad for others’ pain but ultimately abandoning them to fend for themselves. Compassion walks towards, not away. [45]
Notes Prof. Dreitcer: “[I]n the Bible, genuine compassion contains three characteristics that inseparably intertwine: understanding, feeling, and acting. . . . We don’t have compassion, we become compassionate. This trait of compassion embodiment is a creative one, not a merely reactive emotional state – a mere emotion, as we so often see compassion mischaracterized. Compassion delights in flourishing. Prof. Rogers adds that,
Genuine compassion is not limited to moments of suffering, offering an empathic connection only as long as others are in pain. Genuine compassion takes as much delight in others’ flourishing as it feels pathos for their pain. Indeed, pathos, when soaked with compassionate care, gives rise to the yearning that wounded persons flourish with abundant life. [47]
This Christ-imitating interpretation of Christianity – involving open connectivity with both God and with fellow mortals, whether friend or stranger, or even foe – contrasts starkly with narrower forms of the religion which keep their focus on two points: one’s access to an afterlife, and gaining special favors from the Almighty.
Christian Compassion Practice is a process of transformation to be undertaken through free will. It allows one to build compassion bit by bit, one part of oneself at a time. One need not wait for the Holy Spirit to “zap” one with some instantaneous transformational experience. The Compassion Practice, in contrast, shows how one may quite literally (physiologically) change one’s mind (in the spirit of metanoia) so that it becomes a nest that is ready and welcoming and actively summons the Holy Spirit.
Dallas Willard, an influential Baptist minister and professor of philosophy, addressed this problem – the how of becoming a disciple with a reconstituted heart-in-Christ, competent in the capability to “obey everything [He] has commanded” (Mat. 28:16-20). Willard, in The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship (2006), fearlessly countered “easy-believism,” explaining that --
[t]he abundance of God to our lives, to our families, and our ministries is not passively received or imposed and does not happen to us by chance. It is claimed and put into action by our active, intelligent pursuit of it. we must seek out ways to live and act in union with the flow of God’s Kingdom life that should come through our relationship with Jesus.
There is, of course, no question of doing this purely on our own. But we must act. Grace is opposed to earning, not effort. And it is well-directed, decisive, and sustained effort that is the key to the keys of the kingdom and to the life of the restful power in ministry and life that those keys open to us. [48]
Willard expanded on
this point regarding the difference between an idea of trying to earn
forgiveness from God and an acceptance of grace that necessarily results in
deliberate efforts to obey His commands, in a 2010 interview: “Earning is an
attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do
with forgiveness of sins alone.” [49]
15) The Future of Christian Compassion Cultivation
Where does Christianity stand in relation to the science of compassion?
Will the Triptykos/CEC project that seeks to reclaim Christ-following as a transformative spiritual path succeed in influencing the faith?
So, far, the scientific community has given almost no attention at all to the Christian Compassion Practice. This is painfully exemplified in The Oxford Companion to Compassion, published in 2017, a massive tome of more than 400,000 words, which devotes precisely 7 words to compassion-cultivation Christian context. The reference is to the writing of Frank Rogers Jr.
In the popular press, developments neuroscience-informed compassion cultivation has been, and continues to be, given a great deal of attention. Yet Christianity is almost always ignored in articles on the subject.
A striking example
of this is an article, an excellent overview of compassion science for a
general readership, by Heather S. Lonczak, Ph.D., published in 2020. The author
poses this question, “What can I do to be more compassionate?” and then answers,
offering five recommendations: 1) “Be altruistic;” 2) “Avoid judgment;” 3) “Practice
gratitude;” 4) “Consider Buddhism;” 5) “Be kind to yourself.” This
painfully illustrates how we are in a cultural moment in which compassion is
simply no associated with the Christian religion by mainstream culture. [50]
Mark Yaconelli is well aware of the headwind that the Triptykos/CEC team is flying against.
I learned that although the Western scientific community has increasingly embraced the Dalai Lama and Buddhist practice, there is great resistance to explore the religious traditions of the West, Christianity namely. As one researcher told me, “God is a problem.” What I realized in my interactions with scientists both at the Snowmass conference and in other settings, is that a significant number of Western scientists have wounds from their own Christian upbringing that cause a kind of reactivity toward any conversation with Christian theologians.
At Snowmass, I heard stories by a group of researchers of childhoods scarred by dogmatic pastors, shame-based churches, and Christian elders unwilling to engage real questions and doubts. As I listened to one researcher in particular describe the kind of God he was forced to worship as a boy, I realized that I too would have left the Christian faith if I was forced to accept a God who is all-controlling, distant, and shaming. When he finished his story of the God he no longer believes in, my only response was, “I don’t believe in that God either.” [51]
If there is any reasonable means by which to reverse this “excommunication” of Christianity from the consideration of the greater portion of the scientific community – and most importantly, scientific research on the efficacy of compassion cultivation practices – then, it would seem, that the CEC’s Christian Cultivation Practice, if it were to proliferate beyond its present fairly localized spheres of influence and adoption, offers the best opportunity.
“Millennials
are leaving the church. Nearly six in ten (59%) young people who grow up in
Christian churches end up walking away.” In 2011, a study of youth (aged 18-29)
who have been leaving church, found the third most cited reason was that
“churches come across as antagonistic to science . . . . many science-minded young Christians are
struggling to find ways of staying faithful to their beliefs and to their
professional calling in science-related industries.” [52]
A recent study (Sep. 2021) conducted by George Barna surveyed Millenials, finding that “75% say they lack meaning and purpose in life.” [53] This is a startling finding. This, along with the widely acknowledged mental health trends: society-wide loneliness epidemic, suicide and clinical depression, ought to spur a deep reappraisal of approach in Christian leadership’s priorities in the way they communicate with, and behave toward, those outsiders (and those who leave the church) who find little enduring attraction to the forms the Church continues to expend its resources on.
Spotlighting the Second Greatest Commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and treating it not simply as a beautiful sentiment, but as a serious directive that implicitly contains a “how to” component – a spiritual practice that brings one closer and closer to the ideal of imitation of Christ – might just be the ticket.
As of yet, Barna Group, in their effort to measure what the non-Christian public and those who give up on the church, might have to say, has not yet collected data on compassion – its absence, and the possibility that churches might systematically promote its practical cultivation. Perhaps it is time for Christian researchers to take a hard and long look at such questions.
Even deeply engaged Christians have, in increasing number,
have grown weary of the limited vision of institutionalized Christianity. In
2015, Christian sociologist Joshua Packard coined the term “Dones” to describe
a growing population of committed Christians who, after years of failed efforts
made within their churches to bring about desired reforms, have exited – not
to quit the faith, but in order to live in a more Christ-imitating way. [54]
It is institutionalized religion that, in so many communities, is failing to inspire – not the message of the four Gospels that record the three-year ministry of Jesus.
16) Coda – New York City
This article is being written in New York City, where neuroscience-informed compassion cultivation is made available in a number of venues. Stanford CCT (Compassion Cultivation Training) is offered at two venues associated with religion, YHMWCA (“The Jewish Y,” or, “92nd Street Y”) and Tibet House US. The same is offered and two secular venues, Columbia University Office of Work/Life, and New York University Continuing Education. A New York City Center for Compassion Focused Therapy offers the protocol developed by Paul Gilbert in England. The Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science, also in the city, offers Compassion-Based Resilience Training. Both are secular neuroscience-informed organizations.
Yet no Christian form of neuroscience-informed compassion cultivation has been offered in the city as far as can be ascertained.
Scientific research on the neural mechanisms of compassion cultivation continues at a heady pace. In the cultural climate of religion decline in the US – precipitous in the case of Catholic and Protestant Christianity – featuring both decline in number, as well as decline in reputation – one might think the programmatic offering of a Christian compassion cultivation training, informed by scientific research and data, ought to be worth devoting close attention to.
Some critics within the faith have described contemporary Christianity as “boxy.” At this time, perhaps a fresh new approach to following the Great Commandment – through the deliberate science-informed practice of compassion cultivation might be an “outside the box” solution. I could be a solution that leads to both renewal of the Body of Christ and would furnish a luminous signal that attracts the notice of the skeptical community, proving concretely that there is significant value and great potential for reform within that faith which they’ve grown accustomed to dismissing as archaic and irrelevant.
Ecclesia semper reformanda est: “The Church must always be reformed,” said Augustine of Hippo.
The West is now in the midst of a science-informed “Compassion Renaissance.” This offers both opportunity and specific direction for renewal and flourishing. Compassion-cultivation practices now available may be the perfect way to get back to the Church’s roots in the living ministry of Jesus – which changed the world in the astonishing early decades of the first century.
A church that rigorously disciples its members in the cultivation of compassion – of Christ-imitation – is a church that radiates its founder's spirit and attracts the weary, the confused and the lost.
As Dallas Willard put it: “Church growth is not just more
Christians, but bigger Christians, flush with Christ’s character.” [55]
# # #
NOTES
[1] Clara Strauss at al., “What is compassion and how can we measure it? A review of definitions and measures,” Clinical Psychology Review, Vol. 47, July 2016, Pages 15-27.
[2] Elaine Houston, B.Sc., “12 Best Compassion Training
Exercises & Activities,” Positive Psychology, Jul. 12, 2021.
[3] Hooria Jazaieri et al., “Enhancing Compassion: A
Randomized Controlled Trial of a Compassion Cultivation Training Program,”
Journal of Happiness Studies 14(4), August 2012.
[4] Thupten Jinpa, A
Fearless Heart: How the Courage to Be Compassionate Can Transform Our Lives,
Hudson Street Press, May 5, 2015, p. xxiii.
[5] Jeremy W. Hayward & Francisco J. Varela, Gentle
Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind, Shambala,
2001.
[6] Carl Gershman, “Tribute to the Dalai Lama on His 85th
Birthday,” National Endowment for Democracy, Jul. 7, 2020.
[7] Dalai Lama XIV, The Universe in a Single Atom: The
Convergence of Science and Spirituality, Morgan Road Books, 2005.
[8] Santiago Ramón y Cajal; Raoul M May, “Degeneration
& regeneration of the nervous system,” London, Oxford University Press,
Humphrey Milford, 1928.
[9] Joyce Shaffer, “Neuroplasticity and Clinical Practice:
Building Brain Power for Health,” Frontiers in Psychology 2016; 7: 1118.
[10] Joyce Shaffer, “Neuroplasticity and Clinical Practice:
Building Brain Power for Health,” Frontiers in Psychology 2016; 7: 1118.
[11] “Michael Merzenich: Growing evidence of brain
plasticity,” lecture, Feb. 28, 2004, TED Conference, Monterrey, Ca.
[12] “Brief History of Drepung Loseling” and “The
Affiliation with Emory University,” About Drepung Loseling Monastery, Inc., n.
d.
[13] Jeremy W.
Hayward & Francisco J. Varela, Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the
Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind, Shambala, 2001, p. x.
[14] Michael Muckian, “For Richard J. Davidson, personal
experience led to meditation mastery,” Madison Magazine, April 28, 2021.
[15] Daniel Goleman & Richard J. Davidson, Altered
Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body,
Sep. 5, 2017, Avery.
[16] Matthew 12:31.
[17] Dalai Lama, Rajiv Mehrotra, In My Own Words: An
Introduction to My Teachings and Philosophy, Hay House, 2008, p. 2.
[18] Marcia Ash et al., “A model for cognitively-based
compassion training: theoretical underpinnings and proposed mechanisms,” Social
Theory & Health, vol. 19, pp. 43–67 (2021).
[19] Tania Singer, empathy research – Tania Singer et al, “Empathy for Pain
Involves the Affective but not Sensory Components of Pain,” Science, 20 Feb
2004, pp. 1157-1162.
[20] Matthieu Ricard, Matthieu Ricard, Altruism: The
Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, Little, Brown and Co.
(2015), pp. 56-64.
[21] Steve Odin, “A Critique of the "Kenōsis /
Śūnyatā" Motif in Nishida and the Kyoto School,” Buddhist-Christian
Studies (University of Hawai'i Press), Vol. 9 (1989), pp. 71-86.
[22] David Steindl-Rast, “The Monk and the Rabbi,” Lunch
With Bokara, Link TV, 2005; spoken word]
[23] "Laurence Freeman, O.S.B.," The World
Community for Christian Meditation, Oct. 18, 2006.
[24] Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, Herder and Herder, 1969] [25] [Dahli Lama, Freedom in
Exile, Harper Collins, 1990.
[26] Thomas Merton, notes for lecture, “Religious Dialog,” 1968.
[27] Joseph G. Sandman, “Centering Prayer: A Treasure for
the Soul,” America, The Jesuit Review, Sep. 9, 2020.
[28] History of Centering Prayer, “. . . shortly after the
first intensive Centering Prayer retreat in 1983, the
organization Contemplative Outreach was formed to support the growing
network of Centering Prayer practitioners.” Contemplative Prayer (website).
[29] Jennifer S. Mascaro et al., “Ways of Knowing
Compassion: How Do We Come to Know, Understand, and Measure Compassion When We
See It?” Frontiers of Psychology, Oct. 2, 2020.
[30] Jill Ladwig, “Brain can be trained in compassion, study
shows,” W News (University of Wisconsin–Madison), May 22, 2013.
[31] Paul Gilbert, “The origins and nature of compassion
focused therapy,” British Journal of Clinical Psychology (2014), 53, 6–41.
[32] Nyanaponika Thera (Siegmund Feniger), first published
in The Light of the Dhamma (Rangoon), in three parts in 1956 and 1957.
[33] Karen Armstrong, TED, Monterrey, Ca., Feb. 28, 2008, video.
[34] Correspondence between Paul Makransky and Richard K.
Stephens, Dec. 12, 2021.
[35] “24 Meditation Statistics: Data and Trends Revealed for
2021,” The Good Body, Jan. 25, 2021.
[36] Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science
of Human Relationships, Bantam, 2006.
[37] The inadequacy of any one-word translation of metanoia
has been noted as early as Tertullian; “Embracing the movement within metanoia
requires that we recognize regret and repentance as active states necessary to
the overall experience, but repentance can overshadow the transformative
dimensions of metanoia. For example, Matthew Arnold objects to the translation
of metanoia as “repentance,” stating that the “main part was something far more
active and fruitful—the setting up an immense new inward movement for obtaining
one’s rule of life. And ‘metanoia,’ accordingly, is: A change of the inner
man”. (178). [Arnold, Matthew. Literature and
Dogma: An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible. New York:
Macmillan, 1914, 178; Kelly A. Myers, “Metanoic Movement: The
Transformative Power of Regret,” CCC (College Composition and Communication,
National Federation of Teachers), 67:3, February 2016, 385-410; p. 391.
[38] Rolf R. Nolasco Jr. & Vincent McDonald, Compassionate
Presence: A Radical Response to Human Suffering, 2016, Wipf and Stock, p.
72.
[39] The practice had been embryonic, developing in classes
jointly taught by Rogers and Dreitcer in 2005-2007 at Claremont School of
Theology, and gelled as the “Compassion Practice” during an August 2008 retreat
in Sausalito.
[40] Mark Yaconelli, “Threefold Compassion,” Patheos, Nov.
4, 2009.
[41] Mark Yaconelli, “Science, Contemplation, and the God
Who Doesn’t Exist,” July 17, 2011.
[42] Mark Yaconelli, “Science, Contemplation, and the God
Who Doesn’t Exist,” July 17, 2011.
[43] Andrew Dreitcer, Living Compassion: Loving Like
Jesus, Upper Room Books, 2017, p. 106.
[44] Dreitcer, 2017, p. 106.
[45] Dreitcer, 2017, p. 106.
[46] Rogers, 2016, pp. 30, 31, 33.
[47] Rogers, 2016, p. 33.
[48] Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming
Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship, HarperOne, 2006, p. 34;
italics in original.
[49] Dallas Willard, Audio Interview with John Ortberg, June
(?),2010, Catalyst West conference.
[50] Heather S. Lonczak, Ph.D., “20 Reasons Why Compassion Is So
Important in Psychology,” Positive Psychology, Jan. 9, 2020.
[51] Mark Yaconelli, “Science, Contemplation, and the God
Who Doesn’t Exist,” July 17, 2011.
[52] “Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church,” Barna
Group, Sep. 27, 2011.
[53] George
Barna, “Millennials in America: New Insight into the Generation
of Growing Influence”, Cultural
Research Center, Arizona Christian University.
[54] Josh Packard Ph.D., Ashleigh Hope, Church Refugees:
Sociologists Reveal Why People Are Done with Church but Not Their Faith, Group
Pub., 2015
[55] Dallas Willard, foreword to: Kent Carlson and Mike
Lueken. Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church
Discovers Spiritual Formation, InterVarsity Press, 2011.
KEY POINTS of article, "The Compassion Renaissance: Science, Mind and Spirit" --
ReplyDelete1) The established scientific law which holds that the adult brain is fixed in form and cannot be altered or improved was disproved in the late 20th century.
2) There is a compassion renaissance which has grown out of neuroscience and guided by the efforts of the Dalai Lama to importantly assist neuroscientific research.
3) Compassion experience can be identified neuroanatomically and measured.
4) Compassion is a learnable skill.
5) Compassion competence can atrophy when left unattended.
6) The secular world (top universities, fields of psychology, education, political science, business management) has enthusiastically embraced new developments in what has come to be called "compassion science."
7) A secular form of certified CCT (Compassion Cultivation Training) has, beginning in 2009, become widely available.
8) Despite excellent work by expert Christian spiritual formation professors who have developed a certified compassion cultivation training method, the Christian world has, so far, not joined in with the compassion renaissance, but there is a very good opportunity for it to do so.