Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life - Couverture souple

Armstrong, Karen

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1847921582 ISBN 13 : 9781847921581

Editeur : Bodley Head, 2011

Synopsis

Drawing on a wide range of material - ranging from the spiritual character of the world religions to the findings of contemporary neuroscience - Karen Armstrong argues that compassion is hardwired into our brains, yet is constantly pushed back by our more primitive instincts for selfishness and survival. Since time immemorial religion has enhanced our altruistic tendencies: all faiths insist that the Golden Rule is the test of true spirituality - 'Always treat others as you wish to be treated yourself'. Taking as her starting point the teachings of the great world religions, Karen Armstrong demonstrates in twelve practical steps how we can bring compassion to the forefront of our lives. These steps both reveal the inadequacies of our knowledge of ourselves and others and enable us to unlock our potential for understanding, empathy and altruism that can be translated into acts of kindness and charity. They culminate in the most radical and challenging of all religious maxims - love your enemy. Yet in today's world, compassion in no longer a luxury but, in the words of Martin Luther King, 'an absolute necessity for our survival'.Practising these steps will not change our lives overnight and turn us into saints or sages: the attempt to become a more compassionate human being is a lifelong project. Yet Karen Armstrong argues that compassion is inseparable from humanity, and by transcending the limitations of selfishness on a daily basis we will not only make a difference in the world but also lead happier, more fulfilled, lives.

A propos du livre

Extrait

THE FIRST STEP
Learn About Compassion
 
 
All twelve steps will be educative in the deepest sense; the Latin educere means “to lead out,” and this program is designed to bring forth the compassion that, as we have seen, exists potentially within every human being so that it can become a healing force in our own lives and in the world. We are trying to retrain our responses and form mental habits that are kinder, gentler, and less fearful of others. Reading and learning about compassion will be an important part of the process and should become a lifetime habit, but it does not stop there. You cannot learn to drive by reading the car manual; you have to get into the vehicle and practice manipulating it until the skills you acquire so laboriously become second nature. You cannot learn to swim by sitting on the side of the pool watching others cavort in the water; you have to take the plunge and learn to float. If you persevere, you will acquire an ability that at first seemed impossible. It is the same with compassion; we can learn about the neurological makeup of the brain and the requirements of our tradition, but until and unless we actually modify our behavior and learn to think and act toward others in accordance with the Golden Rule, we will make no progress.
 
As an initial step, it might be helpful as a symbolic act of commitment to visit www.charterforcompassion.org and register with the Charter for Compassion. The charter is essentially a summons to compassionate action, and the website will enable you to keep up, week by week, with the charter’s progress in various parts of the world. But the charter was a joint document that does not reflect the vision of a particular tradition, so it is important to integrate it with a mythos that will motivate you. No teaching that is simply a list of directives can be effective. We need inspiration and motivation that reach a level of the mind that is deeper than the purely rational and touch the emotions rooted in the limbic region of the brain. It is therefore important to explore your own tradition, be it religious or secular, and seek out its teaching about compassion. This will speak to you in a way that is familiar; resonate with some of your deepest aspirations, hopes, and fears; and explain what this journey toward compassion will entail.
 
In the Suggestions for Further Reading at the back of the book, you will find titles that will help you expand your knowledge about your own and other people’s traditions. You might find it useful to form a reading discussion group with whom you can go through the twelve steps. It might be interesting to include people from different religious and secular traditions, since the comparative study of other faiths and ideologies can enrich your understanding of your own. You might also like to keep a private anthology of passages or poems that you find particularly inspiring and make notes of what you have learned about the mythos that introduces us to the deeper meaning of compassion.
 
The concept of mythology needs explanation because in our modern scientific world it has lost much of its original force. A myth is not a fanciful fairy tale. In popular speech the word “myth” is often used to describe something that is simply not true. Accused of a peccadillo in his past life, a politician is likely to protest that the story is a myth—that it didn’t happen. But in the premodern world, the purpose of myth was not to impart factual or historical information. The Greek mythos derives from the verb musteion, “to close the mouth or the eyes.” It is associated with silence, obscurity, and darkness. A myth was an attempt to express some of the more elusive aspects of life that cannot easily be expressed in logical, discursive speech. A myth is more than history; it is an attempt to explain the deeper significance of an event. A myth has been well described as something that in some sense happened once—but that also happens all the time. It is about timeless, universal truth.
 
If somebody had asked the ancient Greeks whether they believed that there was sufficient historical evidence for the famous story of Demeter, goddess of harvest and grain, and her beloved daughter, Persephone (Was Persephone really abducted by Hades and imprisoned in the underworld? Did Demeter truly secure her release? How could you prove that Persephone returned to the upper world each year?), they would have found these questions obtuse. The truth of the myth, they might have replied, was evident for all to see: it was clear in the way that the world came to life each spring, in the recurrent burgeoning of the harvest, and, above all, in the profound truth that death and life are inseparable. There is no new life if the seed does not go down into the ground and die; you cannot have life without death. The rituals associated with the myth, which were performed annually at Eleusis (where Demeter is said to have stayed during her search for Persephone), were carefully crafted to help people accept their mortality; afterward many found that they could contemplate the prospect of their own death with greater equanimity.1
 
A myth, therefore, makes sense only if it is translated into action—either ritually or behaviorally. It is comprehensible only if it is imparted as part of a process of transformation. 2 Myth has been aptly described as an early form of psychology. The tales about gods threading their way through labyrinths or fighting with monsters were describing an archetypal truth rather than an actual occurrence. Their purpose was to introduce the audience to the labyrinthine world of the psyche, showing them how to negotiate this mysterious realm and grapple with their own demons. The myth of the hero told people what they had to do to unlock their own heroic potential. When Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung charted their modern scientific exploration of the psyche, they turned instinctively to these ancient narratives. A myth could put you in the correct spiritual posture, but it was up to you to take the next step. In our scientifically oriented world, we look for solid information and have lost the older art of interpreting these emblematic stories of gods walking out of tombs or seas splitting asunder, and this has made religion problematic. Without practical implementation, a myth can remain as opaque and abstract as the rules of a board game, which sound complicated and dull until you pick up the dice and start to play; then everything immediately falls into place and makes sense. As we go through the steps, we will examine some of the traditional myths to discover what they teach about the compassionate imperative—and how we must act in order to integrate them with our own lives.
 
It is not possible here to give an exhaustive account of the teachings of all the major traditions. I have had to concentrate on a few of the seminal prophets and sages who developed this ethos. But this brief overview can give us some idea of the universality of the compassionate ideal and the circumstances in which it came to birth.
 
We have seen that there are brain mechanisms and hormones that induce such positive emotions as love, compassion, gratitude, and forgiveness but that they are not as powerful as the more primitive instinctual reflexes known as the Four Fs located in our reptilian old brain. But the great sages understood that it was possible to reorient the mind, and by putting some distance between their thinking selves and these potentially destructive instincts they found new peace. They did not come to this insight on lonely mountaintops or in desert fastnesses. They were all living in societies not unlike our own, which witnessed intense political conflict and fundamental social change. In every case, the catalyst for major spiritual change was a principled revulsion from the violence that had reached unprecedented heights as a result of this upheaval.3 These new spiritualities came into being at a time when the old brain was being co-opted by the calculating, rational new brain in ways that were exciting and life-enhancing but that many found profoundly disturbing.
 
For millennia, human beings had lived in small isolated groups and tribes, using their rational powers to organize their society efficiently. At a time when survival depended on the sharing of limited resources, a reputation for altruism and generosity as well as physical strength and wisdom may well have been valued in a tribal leader. If you had not shared your resources in a time of plenty, who would help you and your people in your hour of need? The clan would survive only if members subordinated their personal desires to the requirements of the group and were ready to lay down their lives for the sake of the whole community. It was necessary for humans to become a positive presence in the minds of others, even when they were absent.4 It was important to elicit affection and concern in other members of the tribe so that they would come back and search for you if you were lost or wounded during a hunting expedition. But the Four Fs were also crucial to the tribal ethos, as essential for the group as for the individual. Hence tribalism often exhibited an aggressive territorialism, desire for status, reflexive loyalty to the leader and the group, suspicion of outsiders, and a ruthless determination to acquire more and more resources, even if this meant that other groups would starve. Tribalism was probably essential to the survival of Homo sapiens, but it could become problematic when human beings acquired the technology to make deadlier weapons and began to compete for territory and resources on a larger scale. It did not disappear when human beings began to build cities and nations. It surfaces even today in sophisticated, wealthy societies that have no doubts about their survival.
 
But as human beings became more secure, achieved greater control over their environment, and began to build towns and cities, some had the leisure to explore the interior life and find ways of controlling their destructive impulses. From about 900 to 200 BCE, during what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age,” there occurred a religious revolution that proved pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. In four distinct regions, sages, prophets, and mystics began to develop traditions that have continued to nourish men and women: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism on the Indian subcontinent; Confucianism and Daoism in China; monotheism in the Middle East; and philosophical rationalism in Greece.5 This was the period of the Upanishads, the Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Ezra, Socrates, and Aeschylus. We have never surpassed the insights of the Axial Age. In times of spiritual and social crisis, people have repeatedly turned back to it for guidance. They may have interpreted the Axial discoveries differently, but they never succeeded in going beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were all latter-day flowerings of this original vision, which they translated marvelously into an idiom that spoke directly to the troubled circumstances of a later period. Compassion would be a key element in each of these movements.
 
The Aryan peoples of India would always be in the vanguard of this spiritual and psychological transformation and would develop a particularly sophisticated understanding of the workings of the mind. Aggressive, passionate warriors addicted to raiding and rustling the cattle of neighboring groups, the Aryan tribes, who had settled in what is now the Punjab, had sacralized their violence. Their religious rituals included the sacrificial slaughter of animals, fierce competitions, and mock raids and battles in which participants were often injured or even killed. But in the ninth century BCE, priests began systematically to extract this aggression from the liturgy, transforming these dangerous rites into more anodyne ceremonies. Eventually they managed to persuade the warriors to give up their sacred war games. As these ritual specialists began to investigate the causes of violence in the psyche, they initiated a spiritual awakening.6 From a very early date, therefore, they had espoused the ideal of ahimsa (“nonviolence”) that would become central to Indian spirituality.
 
In the seventh century BCE, the sages who produced the earliest of the spiritual treatises known as the Upanishads took another important step forward. Instead of concentrating on the performance of external rites, they began to examine their interior significance. At this time Aryan society in the Ganges basin was in the early stages of urbanization.7 The elite now had time to examine the inner workings of their minds—a luxury that had not been possible before humans were freed from the all-absorbing struggle for subsistence. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad was probably composed in the kingdom of Videha, a frontier state on the most easterly point of Aryan expansion, where Aryans mixed with tribesmen from Iran as well as the indigenous peoples.8 The early Upanishads reflect the intense excitement of these encounters. People thought nothing of traveling a thousand miles to consult a teacher, and kings and warriors debated the issues as eagerly as priests.
 
The sages and their pupils explored the complexity of the mind and had discovered the unconscious long before Jung and Freud; they were well aware of the effortless and reflexive drives of the human brain recently explored by neuroscientists. Above all, they were bent on finding the atman, the true “self” that was the source of all this mental activity and could not, therefore, be identical with the thoughts and feelings that characterize our ordinary mental and psychological experience. “You can’t see the Seer, who does the seeing,” explained Yajnavalkya, one of the most important of the early sages. “You can’t hear the Hearer who does the hearing; you can’t think with the Thinker who does the thinking; and you can’t perceive the Perceiver who does the perceiving.”9 The sages were convinced that if they could access the innermost core of their being, they would achieve unity with the Brahman, “the All,” the indestructible and imperishable energy that fuels the cosmos, establishes its laws, and pulls all the disparate parts of the universe together.10
 
The sages and their pupils claimed that their mental exercises, disciplined lifestyle, and intensely dialectical discussions had uncovered the atman and introduced them to a more potent mode of being. The way they described this experience suggests that it may have originated in the brain’s soothing system, which takes over when an animal is at rest and free of threat. A person who knows the atman, said Yajnavalkya, is “calm, composed, cool, patient and collected.” Above all, he is “free from fear,” a phrase that runs like a thread through these texts.11 But the peace discovered by the sages was more than bovine relaxation. They distinguished carefully and consistently between this new knowledge and a temporary, contingent contentment that is repeatedly overwhelmed by the Four Fs. The peaceful mood of a calf resting quietly beside his mother cannot ...

Revue de presse

"A profound and lucid mixture of philosophy, theology and self-help. It's a perfect detox for the soul... Spry, eloquent, pacy.... Armstrong has a knack for grappling with complex ideas in the lightest of ways" (The Times)

"It sees Armstrong combine in this brief volume both her usual high quality historical scholarship and an explicit self-help programme that echoes her rousing lectures... Challenging, persuasive self-help book that seeks to distil the very best of religion" (Independent)

"Straightforward without being simplistic...frequently fascinating" (Metro)

"Flashes of sheer brilliance" (Scotland on Sunday)

"One of the charming things about Armstrong's book is its deliberate descents into bathos. We move from the high thoughts of the old sages to the demands of everyday life...from an exquisitely intelligent exposition of Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus to a meditation upon how we might overcome a personal dislike of a colleague or family member" (Financial Times)

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Bodley Head
• Date d'édition: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1847921582
• ISBN 13: 9781847921581
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 224