(gentle music)
- All right,
this is just my particular take on it.
It's not like it's reality, it's just
what I've distinguished in terms of
when I talk about compassion what do I mean by it?
So passion means to suffer and com is means to suffer with.
So there's the passion of Christ, the suffering of Christ.
So,
in a certain basic sense,
somebody else suffers. wee suffer.
I mean, when you see a dog,
being beaten in the street, how do you feel?
You suffer.
When you see a child being mistreated.
So compassion is to suffer with.
And,
that's an inborn capacity of human beings
it's never not there,
although often enough it's completely blocked.
So that's what I call ordinary human compassion.
When I say ordinary, that's not a pejorative
I just mean that it's there.
That's our first level.
(clears throat)
And basically it comes down to somebody suffering,
and wish they weren't,
'cause it hurts me to see somebody suffer.
The second level is what I call the compassion of curiosity.
Now, if somebody is suffering and you wanna help them,
it's not enough to feel bad for them.
You also have to do some inquiry or why are they suffering?
What's going on?
There's a lot of people out there, you know,
one of my subjects, as you mentioned is addiction
and a lot of people feel bad for people who are addicted,
but they don't actually ask why.
They make assumptions,
that this person is just making a bad choice or
they got this disease, but they don't really inquire.
So,
the compassion of curiosity says,
what about this person's life?
What happened here?
What's going on?
If they're violent, if they're angry, if they're sad,
if they're
ill,
why?
So that's the compassionate curiosity.
The third level is what I call
the compassion of recognition, which is,
and this was simply my experience
in the practice of medicine,
but also in life is that
there's nothing about anybody else that isn't in me as well.
So when I was working with these really
benighted street-dwellers
in Vancouver
with HIV and hepatitis and their drug addictions,
well the differences between them and me were obvious
in terms of class and clout and education and,
all that.
But if I was really honest with myself,
that hungry ghost, that empty self,
that just wants to be fed from the outside all the time,
which is what the addiction is,
that characterize me as well in significant ways.
And I played it out through my work
and through my shopping habits and so on.
So that's the compassionate recognition
when you realize that you're not
different from these others,
you know, and,
when I talk about this,
people come to that part of my book
about my compact disc addiction,
people sometimes will
this dude turned me off,
how can you compare himself to, you know,
I think they have a problem, the dinner is obvious,
sorry, the differences are obvious.
It's the similarities that are interesting,
I would lie just like they would,
I would manipulate just like they would,
I would pursue the habit
despite the harm that it caused to myself and others,
just like they would.
That's much more interesting than the differences.
So that's the compassion of recognition.
And interesting enough,
when I tell them about my patterns,
I'm talking about my downtown inside patients
with their HIV and their heroin habits,
they never said,
that's ridiculous, they said,
Oh, doc you're just like the rest of us aren't you?
And that's the whole point.
We're all just like the rest of us.
That's the compassion of recognition,
by the way, that's where the judgments come in,
because that's what's really interesting
'cause when you explode the judgment,
you'll find out just exactly
how much you're like that person that you're judging.
So that once you have the compassion of recognition,
you're no longer up here and they're down here
and you're looking down on them, it's not,
it's two people engaging
equally.
The fourth level is what I call the compassion of truth.
Now you may think on the surface of it that
it's compassionate to protect people from pain,
not necessarily.
It's compassionate to protect people from unavoidable pain,
sorry, from avoidable pain.
You gonna protect somebody from avoidable pain,
it's compassionate to do that,
that's ordinary human compassion.
But sometimes, the truth actually really hurts
that's why we protect against it.
That's why we're afraid to grieve
'cause we're so afraid to accept the loss.
So when you work with people mindfully or
therapeutically or whatever way,
you're not being compassionate
if you stay away from asking questions
that might bring up pain for them.
You're not asking the question ever to bring up pain,
that's manipulative,
But you're also not avoiding a question,
even if it might bring up pain.
So that's what I call the compassion of truth,
'cause people just wanna know the truth.
Like what was your experience when you were grieving?
I mean just the truth of it, is what really
was so healing for you.
Oh yeah, there it is.
Would it have been compassionate when somebody spoke to say,
don't do the ayahuasca
'cause you don't wanna feel all that grief.
You know?
So that's what I call the compassion of truth.
And then
there's what I call maybe for lack of a better phrase,
the compassion of possibility, which is,
when you see a suffering being,
which is to say, when you see another human being,
do you see only their suffering and their dysfunction,
which is a response to the suffering
and the defenses
and their reactions
or do you see the perfection that they are
underneath all that, the true self?
That's important because,
none of us can see ourselves without a mirror,
outside of our spatial expanse
we can't see ourselves without a mirror.
Well,
if somebody presents with dysfunction and say addiction or
reactions or negativity of any kind,
and all I do is I mirror them to view themselves,
I'm not helping them.
But what if I mirror back what I do see,
which is their possibility,
which is not in the future, it's in the present?
Now they get to see themselves differently.
So that's what I call the compassion of possibility
and those are the five levels.
Now,
needless to say,
if you're gonna be a mirror,
guess what you're gonna have to do.
You're gonna have to do a lot of self-cleaning,
otherwise you'll be a very murky smudgy mirror.
And that's of course where the compassion for the self
comes in as well.
- [Narrator] We provide you with the certification
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And I look forward to seeing you on the inside.