Book Excerpt: The Compassionate Life, by Marc Barasch

Ode presents an exclusive book excerpt from The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness (Berrett-Koehler, 2009), by Marc Ian Barasch.

Marc Ian Barasch | June/July 2009 issue

If we can't see who people really are, say possessors of the Good Eye, it's just our ordinary eye playing tricks on us, focusing on diff erences and defects, blind to deeper connection. If we mistake each other for strangers, it's just blurry vision. The Good Eye is the corrective to Einstein's “optical delusion of consciousness.” As with the rearview mirror that cautions “Objects may be closer than they appear,” we might be much closer than we think. Sixteenth-century Tibetan meditation master Wang-ch'ug Dorje recommended a practice he called “the Activity of Being in Crowds.” Walking through a throng, he said, is a “good opportunity to check your progress and examine the delusions, attachments, and aversions that arise.” A bustling mall is an especially good place to check my Good Eye for jaundice. With everything winking merrily, beckoning with come-ons for instant gratifi cation, I go into a sort of trance. The mind itself gets into the spirit of things, hawking its tawdrier wares; my fi nicky responses to the goods on display merge with my reactions to the people I pass—little covetous twinges, subtle fl ickers of attitude, petty judgments on how people walk, talk, dress, and chew gum. Here a surge of superiority; there a defl ating thought of inadequacy. Here a lurch of desire for a sleek, well turned-out woman; there a picador's lance of envy at her undeserving boyfriend in the slobby polo shirt.

The Koran describes envy as a veil that beclouds the eye of the heart. It's one of Saint Augustine's seven deadly sins (which I interpret as “biggest obstacles to selfl ess love”). Envy turns other people into sources of resentment: If I had what you have, I would be happy. It tints everyone in bilious shades of green. It's a zero-sum game. Envy's only hope is that the other person will be diminished, as if that would free up proportionately more for itself. (It extends all the way to that uniquely German coinage, schadenfreude, gloating over another's misfortune, the Good Eye turned into the Evil Eye itself.)

But just as there are emotional toxins, there are also antidotes and remedies—what the apothecaries of yore called “specifics.” In Buddhism the supreme medicine for envy is said to be mudita, or “sympathetic joy,” which calls on us to feel happy about another's success. Easy enough when it comes to rejoicing for those we really care about: Every parent kvells over his or her kid's triumphs; a teacher exults when her favorite student aces the math exam. But to expand this feeling from a narrow circle to a wider arena is like pulling wisdom teeth.

I once witnessed an exchange between a Tibetan lama and a questioner on this subject. “Rinpoche,” inquired a pleasant middleaged man in a checked sport shirt, “my son is a linebacker for his high school football team. I find myself rooting for him to cream the opposing quarterback. Is there anything wrong with that?” “Of course not,” the lama replied. “You love your son, and you want his happiness, and he's happy when he beats the other team. This is only natural.”

There was an audible sigh of relief in the room. The spiritual path may be challenging, but it's not unreasonable.

The man smiled. “Thank you, Rinpoche,” he said, making a brisk, reverent folding gesture with his hands.

The lama laughed sharply. “I was only joking! Actually, this is not at all the right attitude. In fact,” he said, glancing at the man mischievously, “a good practice for you would be to root for the other team. See them winning, see them happy, see their parents overjoyed. That is more the bodhisattva way.”

I have a wildly successful acquaintance who's in my field. I've seen him on magazine covers, a smug, airbrushed grin on his face. I've been training myself, as an antidote to a fulminating case of green-eye, that whenever I feel that little twitch of envy, I wish for more bluebirds of happiness to come sit on his eaves. “Don't you mean,” asks a cynical friend, “come shit on his sleeves?” But the fact is, my good wishes provide an unexpected sense of relief. It's an unknotting, expansive feeling, as if what's his and what's mine suddenly, metaphysically, belong to both of us and to neither. (I recently came across a line from Yoko Ono: “Transform [jealousy] to admiration / And what you admire / Will become part of your life.” )

Try it for yourself. Root for the other team. Visualize someone who makes you envious. Think of them in all their irritating splendor, enjoying the perks and accolades you no doubt deserve. Then wish sincerely that they get even more goodies.

Isn't this the mortal sin of “low self-esteem”? Well, not exactly; it's more like a metaphysical jujitsu. In rooting for someone else's happiness, we tune to a different wavelength. We feel more benefi cent, less deprived, more capable of giving. The focus on another person's satisfaction becomes a lodestone that paradoxically draws us closer to our own. (And isn't most envy just our own potential disowned?) Seeing the world through another's eyes (you in me, me in you) makes one feel there's at least twice as much to go around; not more money or fame or square footage but the foundation of the whole pursuit: love.

It could be argued that this approach might work in a monastery or on a mountaintop, but not in real life, where the game is tooth-and-nail and rooting for your own team is what keeps the opposition from eating you alive. I recently saw a quote from megamogul and master of the Squinty Eye, Donald Trump, extolling the benefi ts of pure paranoia: “People you think are your friends in business will take your money, your wife, your pets... Life's a vicious place. No different than a jungle.” Yet there are people who swim in the piranha-infested corporate waters for whom the Good Eye has not only been good karma but good business. A t the incandescent turn of the century, when every tech stock was a fireworks display and bubbles popped only in champagne flutes, Ricardo Levy's star shone bright over Silicon Valley. The son of a Jewish father who had fl ed Nazi Germany to settle in Ecuador, Ricardo was CEO of a bricks-and-mortar company selling real goods amid the valley's vaporware vendors. In the 1970s his startup had been an entrepreneurial shot in the dark, but Ricardo had parlayed a newly minted doctorate, a knack for discovery, and a drive to excel into what he calls “a nonstop adventure of continuous transformation.” Soon his company was racking up a half billion dollars in annual sales.

His product was literally transformative: The company designed and produced essential industrial catalysts. Ricardo can discourse happily about them for hours, sounding more like an alchemist than a chemical engineer—how they enable magical conversions of materials, serving as facilitators (or, as he calls them, “midwives”) for disparate substances to join together and give birth to something new. Business was good, and, as a bonus, the company did some good in the world. Ricardo felt proud to have patented a process that produced more energy with minimal pollution, a happy union of the bottom line and his environmental concerns. But by 2000 he found himself stretched to the breaking point. Through a series of acquisitions, his company had turned from a midsized shop into a lurching industrial titan. “I was trained as a researcher to discover things,” he says, “not to manage thousands of people.” He decided he needed guidance.

There is no shortage of advice for the entrepreneurially perplexed. Stacks of business bibles reveal how to turn companies into lean, mean, no-fixed-limit cash machines; armies of consultants feed CEOs' obsessive drive to play king of the mountain. But Ricardo was after something else. “I'd always been a seeker of depth, not height,” he says in his lightly accented English. “I'd seen enough to be suspicious of the shadow side of power. I knew some of those Enron guys.”

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