Ghandi, King, Ahimsa: To Experience WITH

(A dream of Ahimsa and compassion brought about my King's ability to understand, by entering others' experiences, the suffering of his people.)
As we mature, our circle of care (hopefully) expands beyond our egocentric demands to incorporate family, then community, nation, eventually all people, and possibly all sentient beings and all of manifestation. Krishna describes the culmination of expanding compassion as “the perfect saint who, taught by the likeness within himself, sees the same Self everywhere” (Swami, Bhagavad Gita, 55). This is the saint who has cultivated the consummate sympathetic imagination by accessing that spirit, or consciousness, that pervades us all. Doing so inspires not only internal piece but global piece as well. “I propose that sympathetic imagination is the root of all peace—peace with society, other people, your roommates and yourself” (Julie C.). I believe this statement conveys a profound truth. In order to be compassionate, one must “suffer together with” (OED, Course Anthology, 126) another person. (I will qualify this definition below.) Sharing a common experience intimately and meaningfully requires that we heighten our “natural and instinctive sympathy” (Anthology, 132, “The Sympathetic Imagination”) by “pentrat[ing] the barrier which space puts between [us] and [our] object” (Anthology, 131, “The Sympathetic Imagination”). Our ability to feel others’ suffering relies on our ability to conjure or remember a similar experience within ourselves.

This is also why compassion can be difficult: We interpret others’ experiences through our own. We assume that we know how they feel, that they are feeling just as we have before. And this is partly true because all humans have experienced suffering. But the individual experiences of suffering are unique. If we can simply be with another, allow her or him to have her or his experience without having to label it, we can enter that common experience of just suffering without getting as tangled in the relative details of an individual experience.

According to the OED and our discussion in class, compassion means to suffer with or “suffer together with” (OED, Course Anthology, 126). But as I have been reading Ram Dass’ How Can I Help, I have realized that “suffering” can mean many things and that it is not necessarily the proper way to think about compassion. I think compassion is more to experience with or experience pain with someone. And pain need not be suffering; suffering is the fear of and resistance to pain. Ahimsa teaches a way to experience pain while decreasing suffering. As Ahimsa and many other devotional, spiritual practices advance, a cultivated mind experiences a world that “hurts more, bothers you less” (Ken Wilber, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TUr949kmZk). (Ken Wilber addresses the increase in pain that comes with heightened awareness. Though you are more sensitive, you are not attached to pain in so painful a way.) In his “I Have A Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. uses the term “creative suffering” (King, Anthology, 122) to describe faith-based suffering aimed at creating a vision of peace and equality. (King's passionate cry to unite behind peaceful suffering.) Behind this lies the idea of creative emergence or evolution. Through “creative suffering” rather than physical violence we align with the natural progressive flow, or Eros, or synthetic drive of the universe. Existence is naturally creative – look where we are today, walking and talking and sending people to get married on the moon; we used to be dirt. Something happened. By acting through peace (though with the fiery persistence of King and Gandhi) and expanding our circles of compassion, we become conduits for the natural creative flow to which we owe our lives. This is “creative suffering.”

(Ghandi protests by disobeying the salt laws - peacefully.)
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ghandi were fearless in the face of suffering. Indeed, “Ahimsa is not possible without fearlessness” (Sivananda, Anthology, 115). To continue with a dream in the face of immense adversity, without succumbing to the instinctual fear and anger that leads to violence, is truly admirable. The Qur’an says, “oppression is even worse than killing” (Ali, 167). Even though Ghandi and King experienced the worse of these two, neither resorted to killing. Fighting with compassion, with vision, with Ahimsa, they managed to overcome oppression I can’t even fathom.