At our core, at our essence, we are born with the programming for empathy and compassion. We are wired to sense and connect with the embodied emotional responses of our fellow human beings. Wisdom traditions have known this from our earliest human times. We are relearning this in modern times. Recent studies have demonstrated that newborn infants demonstrate affective empathy. Essentially, babies cry more when they hear the cries of another infant. It isn’t just the noise. One study compared real baby cries to computer-generated cries. Babies responded far more to the real baby cries.
In Chinese medicine, we have this very important concept of inherited essence. Inherited essence may be viewed as the totality of the potential we come into the world with. Some aspects of our inherited essence are very personal and predispose us to particular physical, emotional, and character traits. Our strengths and vulnerabilities. These we inherit from our parents. On a deeper level, our inherited essence is the product of the evolution of our entire human and planetary family. These are the more primordial aspects of our being human. These are the powers that make us human. Our deepest human programming. This is our human inheritance and I experience compassion as an integral part of that inheritance.
Compassion is our capacity and our tendency to sense, understand, and feel another’s suffering (empathy) and the drive to spontaneously act upon that suffering.
It is the force of this connection that compels us to act to alleviate discomfort or suffering when we become aware of it in other members of our human (or Earth ) family. It is who we are at our essence.
If this is the case, and modern science and many ancient wisdom traditions are beginning to concur on this point, why do so many individual human beings spend so much time not acting from this compassionate place? What is the source of this dissonance and disconnect to our connection to our deepest, most primordial, most compassionate self?
The answer appears to be in what happens to us AFTER we are born. Our capacity to access that limitless space of inherited compassion relies on our ability to sense and feel our universal interconnectedness to all beings. Our oneness.
What happens to us that creates this disconnect from our birthright?
We are born into a world of others’ habituated dissonant patterns. This is why we seem so often to be on automatic. We are run by a collection of old habituated patterns.
These ways of being in the world were programmed into us, after our birth, either intentionally or unintentionally. We were born into and live in a world filled with habituated thinking patterns, habituated imaginative patterns, habituated sensory patterns, habituated emotional patterns, and habituated patterns of the breath and spirit. This programming distorts our relationship to the world and to ourselves.
This congestion, this dissonance, inhibits our access to our sense and our feeling of interconnectedness. It creates a context where we feel alone, separate from the world. When we feel separate from the world we can no longer sense and feel our connection to others. We can not connect to the universality of joy and fear and grief and worry and anger. We can not feel compassion.
If our species is to survive now is the time for us to dissolve these old habituated patterns. To re-enliven our senses and liberate our bodies from their emotional prisons. To reclaim our primordial connection to compassion. To reclaim our rightful human inheritance of life lived in compassion.
:)