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

Chapter 5: The Good Eye

Whenever catching sight of others
Look on them with an open, loving heart. —Patrul Rinpoche

The great nineteenth-century Jewish mystic Levi Yitzchok, the Rabbi of Berditchev, was known throughout Europe as the Master of the Good Eye. It was said that he could see nothing of people's sins, only their virtues. He'd roust the local drunk from his stupor on High Holy Days, seat him at the head of the table, and respectfully ask for his wisdom. He'd noodge a man who'd publicly flouted the Sabbath by praising him as the only one in the village who wasn't a hypocrite. He extended his caring to all, whether powerful or impoverished, scholarly or simple, righteous or reprobate.

The rabbi's inspiration was a Talmud passage that calls for everyone to be weighed “on the scales of merit” (zechut, from the Hebrew zach or “purity”). The meaning of zechut, explains one scholar, is “to intentionally focus on what is most pure in each person—to see their highest and holiest potential.” It is a reminder that compassion is not just a gift but a path. The Good Eye is a shift of perception, a transformative art that takes some practice.

My friend Rhonda, a nurse by trade and by calling, is something of a zechut artist. When she is warm to you (and she is to most everybody), you feel like a rare edition of yourself. I've followed her on rounds, watching the crankiest patients brighten at her approach, seeing even the most needle-phobic relax and smile, as if her IV were an act of bestowal. She's another of those people who coaxes your petals open. Rhonda learned at the feet of a great teacher—her grandmother, Margaret, also a nurse.

One night Grandma Margaret was summoned to the obstetrics ward of her Arizona hospital. A Down syndrome child had just been born, unpredicted in those pre-amniocentesis days, and the distraught mother was threatening to kill herself rather than keep the baby. When Margaret saw the child, she made an impossible leap of faith. “I'll take that baby home,” she announced, “and I'll love her.” True to her word, she raised a foster daughter who bloomed into a high-functioning young adult. “I didn't see any defects,” she told Rhonda. “I saw a blueprint for perfection.” Grandma Margaret once confided her greatest secret: “When I look at people, I see only the best part of them.”

I used to think that people who regarded everyone benignly were a mite simple or oblivious or just plain lax—until I tried it myself. Then I realized that they made it only look easy. Even the Berditchever Rebbe, revered as a man who could strike a rock and bring forth a stream, was continually honing his intentions. “Until I remove the thread of hatred from my heart,” he said of his daily meditations, “I am, in my own eyes, as if I did not exist.”

He was a man who didn't take the Good Eye for granted. He believed in tending the heart, watering its roots, pulling ego's fibrous, prickly weeds by hand. The distinction between our ordinary eye and the Good Eye is, as is the one between ordinary sight and insight, a quotient of conscious cultivation. It is the gist of the scriptural predicament You have eyes, but you see not. We have the necessary parts, but as the label on the shipping carton says, “Some assembly may be required.” Luckily, all spiritual traditions concur that it doesn't take a lightning bolt on the road to Damascus or a blast of enlightenment under the bodhi tree. The soul is educable. Life off ers up its own daily catechism, even if it's just seeing people in a little better light. Why not just resolve to give everyone the benefit of the doubt? “If we treat people as if they were what they ought to be,” said the poet Goethe, almost nailing it, “we help them become what they are capable of becoming.” Or, more to the point: Treat them as they already are, if we but had the Good Eye to see it.

Once, at a conference, I noticed a man striding toward me, his face alight. He seemed really happy to see me. When he got closer, he pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, peered at my face, looked down at my nametag, and took a step back. “I'm so sorry,” he said, embarrassed. “You looked just like a friend I haven't seen for years. You even have the same fi rst name...” He trailed off ; the eff usive warmth seeped away. I told him it was fi ne. His Good Eye had enveloped me in a gaze of anticipatory delight that made me feel golden. We wound up having lunch. He told me about his research (which coincidentally dovetailed with my own); he talked about the happiness and the sorrows of raising a young daughter with multiple sclerosis (for everyone is fi ghting a great battle). We still stay in touch.

Maybe we should all take off our glasses and hope for more cases of mistaken identity. For that matter, it might be unmistaken. Why not welcome everyone as some long-lost cousin, sprung from our African mother, bumping into each other again aft er a fifty-thousand-year separation. Wonderful to see you aft er all this time—you look great!

A friend of mine, a psychologist, works at Arkansas' infamous Tucker Max Prison. She's well aware that most people look at her prisoner clients and see only dregs—“ugly toothless hulks,” as she puts it—but she claims she can see only “radiant bulbs with these big lampshades blocking the light. I know they're supposed to be ‘untreatable psychopaths,' but I feel like, Oh, take that fright-mask off !” She's remarkably successful. Around her, tough nuts crack open; even wary, death-row guards have been known to cry. “It's like there's this horribly thick suit of armor,” she explains, trying to make me see it through her eyes, “and I know someone's trapped inside, so how do we get them out?” I ask her why she even bothers. “The joy!” she says, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. “Just the joy of being with people when they show up as they really are.”

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.”

He turned to an old friend, Andre Delbecq, a legendary management consultant who also taught at a Jesuit college. Andre had recently gone on his own quest, taking a sabbatical at the height of the Silicon Valley's giddy ascendance to pore over the world's spiritual teachings, seeking “that paradox of perfect humility and perfect hope” that he believed was the hallmark of true leadership. Aft er returning from sailing the Turkish coast, Andre invited Ricardo and a select group of CEOs to hear a presentation of his findings, promising them a management course that would change their lives as well as their business practices.

It was certainly unorthodox. If most executive training is a regimen of psychological power-lifting and ego steroids, Andre replaced yes-I-can with not-so-fast and no-you-don't: Don't be enslaved by your own ambitions; don't think only of the bottom line; don't, for a while, think at all—especially about yourself. He scoured the world's religious practices, in the end deciding to teach his students the Buddhist meditation of tonglen—an imaginative exercise that calls for breathing in others' suffering and breathing out lovingkindness. “There was no other discipline I'd found,” he told me, “that enabled people to immediately grasp openness and humility for themselves.” Ricardo found the practice edifying, even elating.

Andre gave his students assignments that plunged them into places they feared, having them spend time with Alzheimer's patients, prisoners, or the homeless in what he called “I-Th ou encounters, just listening to and learning from, not judging anyone's value or worthiness.”

Andre had the executives tell one another their personal stories, asking if anyone in their own family was struggling with disease, drugs, or mental illness or had found themselves on the wrong side of the law. The Titanium Men of Silicon Valley were astonished to discover that their most formidable colleagues and competitors were grappling with the same mortal complement of weal and woe. Andre became a sort of heart-coach, urging them to widen their sympathies by considering how each of their employees faced similar diffi culties. He assured them that if they entered their workplace with what he called “compassionate presence,” they'd discover the hidden life of their company.

To put that vulnerability into practice in the business world, where dog really does eat dog and big fish swallow little fi sh and pick their teeth with the bones, had seemed like folly. But Ricardo tackled it with his usual full-on commitment. At the time, the fate of his entire company balanced on a single excruciating choice point. He had been negotiating to take over a large pharmaceutical company when discussions had turned hostile, finally reaching a bitter impasse. He put the talks on mental pause. “I decided I had to try to feel empathy for all parties, including the other side, the adversary. I needed an inner answer, not a spreadsheet answer.”

He had a realization that shocked him: “I saw it would be better for them to take us over.

“This would be traumatic for me because I'd be disassembling the business I'd built over decades. But when I put myself aside and considered everyone else involved—our shareholders and employees, the other company's shareholders and employees—I knew it was right.” The decision was pure intuition, he says. People inside and outside the organization thought he'd gone crazy. In 2000 his company's financial bellwethers were surreally bright; every indicator pointed due north. But three months aft er the deal closed, the tech economy went south, and as Ricardo says dryly, “It turned out in retrospect the direction I chose had been to everyone's benefit.” Ricardo found that his practice led him to more-generous policies for his employees. He backed benefits packages that cut into his profits because it seemed to him the right thing to do only to find that it also made the company stronger. Tonglen was, he realized, the spiritual equivalent of the catalysis at the very heart of his business. “You take in suffering, transform it to positive energy, and then offer that out into the world.”

I happened to be present one of the first times Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa sprang this bizarresounding practice on an unsuspecting Western audience. One student of yoga had raised his hand and asked, with some bewilderment, why it wouldn't be better to imagine breathing in love and light and breathing out all negative impurities. Ricardo, the creator of environmentally benign industrial processes, would have appreciated Trungpa's unhesitating reply: “Well, then you'd just be like a polluting factory, taking in all these good resources and spewing out your gray cloud on everyone else.”

The practice is decidedly counterintuitive. Sometimes when I begin tonglen meditation, I feel a wild surge of resistance, a fear of (there is no other way to put this) contamination. The unhappiness of others feels contagious: I don't want to inhale their cooties. But when it “works,” the practice is so rewarding that I'm ready to throw myself in again. To stop dodging people's misery and discord, to discover that I can give of myself with each breath and not feel depleted (in fact, to feel oddly nourished) is a revelation. When I can stay with it, I notice I don't feel so guarded; my borders seem more porous. I'm less inclined to hold people at arms' length. I admit to sometimes finding tonglen a challenge that I don't have the spiritual chutzpah to meet. But at best I find the technique radically simple and simply radical: an imaginative leap into otherness. There's a through-the-looking-glass moment, an almost audible pop, as I seem to find myself looking at the world through different eyes. It enhances what some psychologists refer to as “intersubjectivity” —a shared space of experience. If our usual ego-identity is maintained by keeping the good and estimable stuff in here and the yucky stuff out there, tonglen dissolves some of the rigidity of selfhood.

When my mind has some downtime that I'd normally fi ll by gossiping idly to myself, I try to remember to do tonglen. It's my mental screensaver. On the highway the other day, a college kid whizzed past at one and a half times the speed limit in a silver Hummer, honking wildly, blaring hip-hop from every window of his gas-hog, giving me the finger for good measure. I could feel my temper about to flare like a bottle rocket, my accelerator foot begin to twitch. Instead, I zeroed in on the back of his fastreceding head, breathing in his rage and frustration (which surely wasn't personal). I could almost feel his emotional claustrophobia, his agitated need for speed. I remembered being nineteen, riding the testosterone express.

What amazed me was that I didn't feel anger but some actual sympathy for the guy—along with a whoosh of inner freedom. Normally, when I feel hurt or aff ronted, my emotional choices seem to narrow. I can either absorb the blow and feel wretched or deflect it back to the other person (or later on some hapless bystander): It's like a choice between suicide or murder. With tonglen, I get to choose life.

Shambhala Mountain Center, an ink-brush painting of scrub pine hills, chattering magpies, and skittish prairie dogs near the Colorado-Wyoming border, has for decades been my place of retreat. It is dominated by the astonishing Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, a ten-story shrine whose gold-leaf spire suggests some unregulated spiritual broadcasting tower. Chögyam Trungpa, whose relics it houses, would have found it wondrous and maybe a bit absurd: an ornate memorial to his teachings about the simplicity of the present moment; a soaring monument to the enlightenment that's right under your nose.

On a recent visit, making my way down the hill after meditating before the stupa's gargantuan, faintly smiling Buddha statue, I fell in stride with an athletic-looking woman in khaki shorts, hurrying down the path. When I mentioned my writing topic, she slowed down to talk. She had a story, she said—a simple one about meditation and compassion.

“I fi rst started to meditate when my boyfriend dumped me,” she said as I huffed along beside her in the thin mountain air. “I needed to sort through all the bad feelings, but I was afraid that I'd look inside and find out one thing: that I basically sucked. Gradually, though, I found it didn't matter if I thought I was horrible or if I thought I was great: I could drop my whole story and just breathe. It was a chance not only to explore myself but to get over myself. Meditation became this tool to not react in my usual way.”

She was a ski bum, she told me, the “rabble-rouser and hellraiser” in a family of perfectionists. Her older sister was the one with the high-powered, big-city job and the fantastic two-career marriage, the one who would come to her house and “just criticize everything about me right down to the stinky sponges in the sink. She'd drive me crazy until wham! I'd get combative and we'd have some huge, screaming fight.”

During one of her sister's visits, they set out on a scenic drive. “Well, soon it was the usual: ‘You're driving too fast! There's a beer can on the floor; the car is filthy!' And I noticed my habitual response coming up inside: Who the hell are you to tell me how to live? Back off! But this time the words didn't come out of my mouth. For once I was able to just notice her, notice my own feelings, and breathe.

“When I didn't react, it made her even madder. She upped the ante. There was this onslaught of everything she could throw at me: ‘I make all the money in the family; it's me who'd have to scrape you up if anything bad ever happened to you,' blah, blah, blah. But even though I heard her anger and anxiety, I was able to slow down; and instead of getting defensive and lashing out, I just asked her, ‘Are you okay, Carol?' And I meant it. I wanted to know.

“Well, she was so caught off guard, she didn't even have a retort. Instead she started to blurt out everything about the screwed-up place her life had come to—how she was going to leave her husband, how she'd be alone in the city, how she was afraid she'd never have children—and then she just broke down sobbing! And all the snotty comebacks I'd stored up just evaporated. I could feel the whole burden of my personality, her personality, our history, fall away, and like some beautiful plant springing up out of nowhere, there was just compassion.”

Her story, like Ricardo's, confi rmed for me a spiritual insight— call it, To Find Your Heart, Lose Your Head—that's as close to a universal principle as you can extract from the mystical traditions. The ego is really a sort of trance state from which it is possible to awaken. And beneath its incessant inner commentary, behind the persuasive story lines and the beliefs that spawn them, beyond the passions that give those beliefs their emotional clout, there is a wellspring of pure compassion.

The great Hasidic rabbi known as the Maggid told his disciples that the best way to realize the love at the heart of the Torah is to “cease to be aware of yourselves. You must be nothing but an ear which hears what the universe of the word is constantly saying within you. The moment you start hearing what you yourself are saying, you must stop.” The Buddha, in a radical act of reflection, suggested we disbelieve our thought process entirely.

Easier said than done, of course. If you want a little aperçu on that subject, try sitting stock-still for a while on a cushion or a chair; just sit there, observing the old inhale and exhale, trying not to get carried away by those broken-record thoughts yakking in the background; just sit, dangling from a rope of breath above the morass of your charming personality, and you will soon be at one with a hundredfold generations of meditators who have discovered self-delusion's ripeness.

In seeking what Buddhism calls Big Mind, I confess I sometimes look inward and fi nd new vistas of smallness. But my practice, such as it is, hasn't been all eddies and doldrums. Sometimes I can forsake the drone of internal gossip, opt for the unadorned Now. Then I find myself gazing into a void where, moments before, the bustling manufacturing hub of selfhood had been on track to fulfi ll its daily quota. I get acquainted with my mental habits— tics, really. I start fi nding my neuroses less dramatic than tedious; enough to tell them, when I'm really not in the mood for entertaining, to just buzz off. Once, at a seminar, I heard a Westernized lama say that a meditator's state of mind should be like that of a hotel doorman. A doorman lets the guests in, but he doesn't follow them up to their rooms. He lets them out, but he doesn't walk into the street with them to their next appointment. He greets them all, then lets them go on about their business. Meditation is, in its initial stages, simply accustoming oneself to letting thoughts come and go without grasping at their sleeves or putting up a velvet rope to keep them out.

Similarly, Sufi teachings specify that a certain impartiality is required to mount the “thrones of compassion.” It is said one must remove the veil of wahm (“opinion” or “conjecture”). “The real heart,” said the Islamic sage known as the Prince of the Illumined, “is that heart which is neither on the right nor on the left , neither above nor below, neither far nor near” —that is, beyond ordinary cognition and its incessant parsing of differences.*

No one would claim it's not tricky business. Such work, the alchemists used to say, is opus contra naturum—work against our natural tendencies—here the mind's impulse to classify this person as near, that one as far; this one a beloved, that one a rival. Various traditions call for cultivating detachment from the potent cues presented by the outer world (or, for that matter, the inner one): Do you feel distaste when you see a particular person coming toward you on the street? If so, regard that distaste as a thing apart, disconnected from its object, generated in your own heart and mind. By the same token, don't just swoon over the feeling that refl exively arises when someone fl ashes her most attractive smile.

*A friend told me of visiting the Dalai Lama in India and asking him for a succinct definition of compassion. She prefaced her question by describing how heart-stricken she'd felt when, earlier that day, she'd seen a man in the street beating a mangy stray dog with a stick. “Compassion,” the Dalai Lama told her, “is when you feel as sorry for the man as you do for the dog.”

Both are (in this practice, at least) obstacles, obscurations; they get in the way of a lovingkindness beyond mere personal preference. It's not unlike the Christian practice of “discernment,” which a theologian once described to me as “learning to see in a way that is consonant with God's way of seeing. As long as there's ego-attachment,” she said, “we're seeing other people in a funhouse mirror. As long as our eyes are clouded by longing, needing other people to be this way or that for us, there's no such thing as compassion.” I'd always admired Christianity's emphasis on doing good, but here was a practice of seeing good that resembled Eastern-style meditation. I had always wondered about the relationship between this inner Christianity and more churchly forms of worship. If I wanted to get a real insight, I was told, I should talk to Father Thomas Keating, the monk who had almost singlehandedly revived the contemplative method of realizing God's illimitable love.

To get to Father Keating's monastery, you must pass, as all pilgrims must do, through a vale of temptation, in this case the Gulch of Glitz known as Aspen. I manage to ignore all its allurements (save a real New York–style Reuben with meltingly tender pastrami), heading out past the private airport where sleek personal jets take off and land with a purling roar.

All's quiet a few miles down a dirt road at Saint Benedict's Monastery, its soaring, carved wood architecture at once a psalm to the earth and a paean to whatever lies beyond. Father Keating emerges to greet me. An eighty-one-year-old man in a plaid wool shirt, watchcap plunked on his bald head, he could be an ancient mariner home from the sea or some ex-stevedore hired as keeper of the bell tower. For him, God's love calls for workmanlike practice. “Jesus had a formula,” he tells me as we sit practically knee to knee in his cramped office. “In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, ‘Pray to your Father, your Abba, your Daddy, in secret.' Go into your inner room at the center of your being. Close the door, not just to the external noise and distraction but to the inner dialogue too.”

Keating speaks in lovely, loping, run-on sentences. When I close my eye, his deep, creaky voice conjures some old cricket sachem, sawing a rhythmic evensong on long bowstring legs. “You have to silence the emotional programs that sustain who you think you are,” he says, “allow the ego's self-reflective apparatus to fade out, put aside that false self based on childhood emotions—the reaching out for happiness, security, approval, affection, esteem, all those exaggerated needs we impose on others—and just do nothing. “But not just nothing. Rather nothing of our own but everything of what God proposes we do. God prefers this kind of love—not what you're willing to do but what you're willing to receive. Our lack of confidence in his great love is the only problem.” Although this isn't a particularly funny remark, he smiles with such gentle irony that I can't help but burst out laughing, feeling some perfusion of high seriousness and puckish joy.

“We say that when you enter prayer, nothing is worth thinking about,” he says, peering out through his enormous round glasses, “whether it's a sense perception, memory, plan, concept, or image. It doesn't mean no thoughts but to disregard them. They're placed in the ‘cloud of forgetting,' which contains the ultimate knowledge of what is but which is unknown to the intellect.”

I suggest that it must be hard for someone who is so clearly an intellectual to relinquish all thought and center himself in the heart. Father Keating smiles. “All you need is a willingness to suffer and a willingness to love.” All the rest of it, he stresses, is the false self and its gnat cloud of petty thinking that obscures love's ultimate Source. So far as he's concerned, organized religion has too often swarmed with the gnats instead of soared with the angels. “Such a shame what we've done to the Mystery,” he murmurs with a sigh, “with all our naive loyalties!”

The history of religion is not an uninterrupted purview of the Good Eye. Alongside its numberless good deeds are uncounted (and unaccountably) bad ones. It's tragicomic to hear, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, imams promising Paradise to infidelslayers, pastors invoking a Prince of Peace who sounds more like Rambo, rabbis sanctifying biblical land-grabs, Buddhist priests blessing military juntas. (I recently heard a cleric, who surely spoke for sectarians everywhere, decree from the pulpit, “Everyone is created by God, but not everyone is a child of God.”) A good organizational consultant would counsel the world's major faiths to reexamine their original mission statements: The core business of Jesus Inc. or Allah Ltd. or Moses Corp. or Buddha LLC is surely not to sell tickets to heaven or peddle get-out-of-hell-free cards but to distribute every kernel of wisdom from their ancient storehouses that might help us love one another.

We are slowly emerging from millennia of holy know-it-alls beaning each other with their Infallible Books, passing judgment with their Divine Laws, and trying to enforce competing copyrights on Ultimate Truth. The God of our times is no longer some Big Eye in the Sky but the Good Eye itself. He is turning into what Friedrich Nietzsche, who preferred deities of blood and thunder, once sneeringly called a “changed god...Now he counsels ‘peace of soul,' hate-no-more, forbearance, even ‘love' of friend and enemy... Now he is merely the good god.”

I'll take him. So will, it seems, a lot of other people. In churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques around the world, there has been a quiet revival of the inner traditions for transforming the heart. Just as the formula for baking a loaf of bread is similar across cultures, the same techniques for compassion seem to crop up everywhere: loosen the bonds of discursive thought, extend the circle of caring, cease armoring against suff ering, wish for others the same happiness you wish for yourself.

“Religious stories are training,” a rabbi once told me, “not just rulebooks.” At their best the practices we call spiritual are triedand-true ways to unplug from the ego's matrix and awaken from delusory life, to shut the biased and nearsighted Squinty Eye and open the Good Eye wide. The Little Prince said it as well as anybody: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.”

Such seeing, however, may require deliberately redirecting the gaze. Awhile back I decided to unplug my television. I wanted to clear my head of mass culture with its endless parade of imaginary characters who not only clutter the mind but, I began to think, subtly sidetrack the heart. In my TV's old corner, I've created a small shrine, an experimental compassion lab. Arrayed among the candles, incense, and homemade icons are photos of friends and loved ones, little endorphin triggers, jump-starts for the heart. There's also a photo of Juan, the seven-year-old Salvadoran I've started sponsoring through an international aid agency. Th is little boy, in his faded Spiderman T-shirt and dirty blue pants, has become part of my orbit of caring, a link to the larger human family. I've also included some pictures of people I really don't like. I try to breathe in their suffering and breathe out my goodness. I remind myself I don't need to reserve a stash of happiness for my exclusive use. Like digital data, infi nitely replicable because it has no substance or extrinsic cost, I can aff ord to give it away, even to those whom I deem undeserving. There's more where that came from.

To all this, you might well say, “So what?” Don't just sit there, do something. The world is on fire, or it's drowning. Too many people are tragically dying, too many lucklessly born. And it's true: The Good Eye should guide the Good Hand, set the Good Feet in motion. But I believe that old existentialist Albert Camus had it right: “We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.” Inner transformation doesn't supplant outward action but nourishes it. I project less on others of my own need for redemption. Do-gooding becomes more alloyed with be-gooding. The Good Eye is not merely a gaze but a creative force, like the penetrating sunlight that quickens a buried seed. Am I getting anywhere? Is there anywhere to get? These days I can feel unexpectedly pierced by something I hear, something I see, some stray thread of feeling I might have overlooked. I've placed a few eye drops in the Good Eye. I'll sometimes feel a soft explosion of warmth or ache in my chest and think that it's my heart shaking off its torpor. I hear it murmuring; maybe someday it will shout.

Reprinted with permission from Berrett-Koehler