I have a challenge for you – but first I want to write a little about universal compassion.
Many religions and philosophies hold “universal compassion” as a moral value that we should try to practice in our everyday life. It is best defined as a desire to alleviate the suffering of others, and it is often a byproduct of empathy (our ability to understand another’s perspective) and altruism (valuing the welfare of others).
I have to be honest, when I was younger I used to disregard a lot of empathy and compassion as meaningless and superficial. I remember watching news stories that seemed designed to tug at my emotions and manipulate me to feel a certain way. It seemed that if I didn’t sympathize or want to help others, I should feel guilty and ashamed of myself.
In reality, I just wanted to take care of myself and discover my own values in life.
Over time, I learned to minimize my empathy and compassion for others. They were values that felt forced down my throat, and as a reaction I decided that I wouldn’t practice them. I wasn’t a moral nihilist, I just wanted to discover my values for myself, like most people want to.
Everyone’s morality needs to be discovered for themselves – blindly following other people’s values is always a recipe for disaster.
Then as I got older, and perhaps a bit more selfish, I noticed I couldn’t find happiness living this way.
I used to harbor really negative feelings towards others. I found many people to be cheaters, liars, idiots, guilt-trippers, haters, and just plain evil. I developed a strong case of mean world syndrome, where I believed the world was an inherently cruel and evil place.
By this point, I was already starting to get into personal development and trying to find my own version of happiness – but then things began to change.
I had learned a lot of useful personal development techniques already (how to think more effectively, set goals, and so on), but there felt like something at my core was missing. I felt more rational than ever, but emotionally lost. I couldn’t make any sense of it.
Then I started getting more into meditation, Buddhism, and eastern philosophy.
I started to meditate and reflect more on what my “self” was and how it related to others. Over time, I felt a wave of wisdom and clarity slowly crashing onto me. I found that I was not as independent of a self as I thought I was. I was intimately interconnected to the people around me.
I experience a sense of “oneness” between me and my environment.
I found that when I harbored negative feelings toward others, it was actually a reflection of my own insecurities and personality flaws. I didn’t like other people mainly because I thought they could never like me. The changed the way I treated others, which changed the way they treated me, and it turned into a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy.
The more I understood and experienced “interconnectedness,” the more I realized how important empathy and compassion were to living a good and meaningful life.
Because when people did things that caused me pain, I knew that was actually a reflection of their own suffering as well. I knew it, because I had been there myself.
With this understanding, I practiced becoming more empathetic and compassionate toward others. Not because someone on the news, or at church, told me that this is what I had to do (or I was evil). I did it because I could see clearly why I should value and contribute to the happiness of others.
As Plato once said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
That thought has always stuck with me. It taught me how to love someone you don’t like.
You can wish for people to find happiness in their lives, even if you never want to spend another second with them. You can even love your enemies.
With that in mind, we can all practice a little more “universal compassion” in our lives.
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