--by Pod Volunteers
Transcript of talks given by Tim Harrison and Yuka Saionji during the Interfaith Compassion Week 2 call, September, 2023
[These transcripts, as with all aspects of Servicespace Pods, are created as a labor of love by an all-volunteer team located around the world. They are a collective offering, born from a shared practice of deep listening and service. Diverse and spontaneous teams emerge each pod to create and support these offerings.]
Tim Harrison (with intro by Marilyn)
Marilyn: I am honored to welcome our first speaker today, Tim Harrison. Tim Harrison is joining us from Emory University's Compassion Center, where he's the Associate Director for CBCT, which is Cognitively Based Compassion Training, a contemplative protocol for cultivating compassion in a secular context.
He oversees the teaching and research programs of CBCT, coordinating the teacher certification program, and the provision for research studies. Over the last decade, Tim has been sharing a compassion training practice with a wide range of communities, from students to doctors to chaplains, and participants in numerous research studies with transformational results that can be tracked through brain scans.
As both a teacher and a researcher, Tim has a unique perspective on compassion. He brings an understanding of what compassion is, how we can deepen our practice, along with knowledge of the latest scientific research about compassion. Tim has joined us in all of our Interfaith Compassion Pods, and there's so many things that are memorable about his talks.
One of the things that I'll share is in his last talk, Tim told us about different flavors of empathy. And how those different kinds of empathy can be seen with MRI scans in the brain, what the effect is. Empathy for pain, where we're mirroring the pain of others, lights up the pain centers in the brain in the same way as if we're experiencing the pain ourselves.
But if we shift that empathy toward compassion, toward the wish that they can be free from pain, it lightens up those pain centers and it turns up the neural signature for pleasure, the same neural signature that we would experience if we're eating chocolates. So that was a fun fact that many of us remember.
Tim is also a participant in the Interfaith Compassion Challenge, and he's the author of one of the modules that you'll be seeing in the next few days in the pod, the Secular Ethics module. I am deeply honored to welcome Tim Harrison.
Tim: Thank you so much, Marilyn. That was a wonderful introduction, and I feel like you should give the talk on it.
It was so clear on the science of compassion, though that's not really what I'm here to talk about today. So everyone can hear me okay? Good? All right, wonderful. Thank you so much for inviting me, Marilyn, Nipun, and the ServiceSpace team. As Marilyn mentioned, I am sitting here in Atlanta, Georgia, southeast United States, sort of a subtropical area, and a few miles from my house is Emory University, where we research compassion.
And if you're thinking to yourself, why, what does research have to do with compassion, you know, you may be right. Maybe, maybe they're not related so much, but we're giving it a try here. It's only in the last, really 25 years that the word compassion would even show up in an academic textbook, or a research project.
But already there are thousands of peer reviewed, published articles on compassion, so I think it's a great, wonderful sign that this world, the science world, is turning its attention to something so important. I should mention that our program in Compassion Training here at Emory University was established based on some ancient Indo Tibetan Buddhist practices, the practices that really grew out of northern India some 2,000 years ago, they are intentionally distinguished from any, kind of belief system that they came from, which again, you may question the wisdom of that, but it's the experiment we're doing, and it's an experiment that is supported by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He's very much a collaborator with our programs here, and, in his view, religion and science have the same goal, which is to find the truth.
And so he doesn't see a contradiction in these two different, if we want to even call them different, approaches. So what I'd like to do in my time with you in the next 10 minutes is explain one of the –science you could say is a belief system of its own sort of faith tradition of its own sort, one that believes in cause and effect and forces and laws, and prediction, predictability.
So I'd like to share the basic premise that we come from, for what, where does compassion come from? And if we know that, and we want to challenge ourselves to cultivate compassion, be more compassionate, or include more others in our field of compassion, then it's really helpful to understand where does compassion come from, what are its causes, because that then gives us insight of where to put our attention, what do we focus on.
So I want to share what I, what we, see as the primary, we as, our center and other places researching compassion. What are the two primary factors or conditions that lead to compassion? And then tell a story from my own life about a faith encounter–an interfaith encounter–that I found powerful and it really illustrates these two conditions.
So, the two conditions for compassion, well, first of all, the definition of compassion that researchers are coming to is that it is, as we've talked about today, a motivation to relieve the suffering of others. And as Aidyn used this phrase about bridging our inner and outer world, to me the word motivation kind of points to that.
This motivation is an internal thing we feel that leads us to act. So that is at the heart of compassion, but that motivation is not, to help others. There are reasons to help others that may not be so compassionate, that might not be so genuine. So to make it genuine, we need a sense of the affective component of the emotion.
Compassion is this warmheartedness. This tenderness that we feel with others. Many religions use different words for that: belonging, belovedness, preciousness, and we have many ways to cultivate that and tap into that sense of tenderness or warmth toward others. Inclusiveness.
The other ingredient of compassion, if you will, or the key condition is to be aware of suffering. This is more of a cognitive component. It's literally just knowing. It's the knowing that others are struggling. We can have all the tenderness in the world towards someone, but if we don't see the ways that they're struggling, the ways that they're suffering, the challenges they have, compassion cannot arise because compassion is the wish that they be free from those things.
So, what we find is that, and I think what all these faith traditions we've been studying help us to do, is we find that we often are blind to one or both of these situations, either not aware of the preciousness of others, boundaries we put – maybe there's an in-group, out-group bias. And sometimes we're just not seeing how others are struggling, suffering, and there are many reasons that that may be difficult to do, but it doesn't mean we can't aspire.
So, the insight from the ancient Tibetan, Indo Tibetan tradition is that when these two conditions come together, a sense of preciousness, warmth, and this awareness that the other person is suffering or struggling. Compassion is naturally arising–like a match striking a stone. The fire will come.
So then these two things come together. So, from there, let me shift to the first encounter I had with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in the early 90s, some 30 years ago, when I was young, with a politically active, activist kind of mindset, 20 something. I still am that, by the way. I consider myself that. But I had just discovered that I could stand up for a cause.
I could fight for a cause. And I had traveled in the Himalayas and Ladakh in India and met the Tibetan people on this kind of sojourn, classic young-person-finding-myself trip. And when I came back to the United States, I came back with a sense of purpose that I wanted to help the Tibetan people who had been struggling, from kind of a civil and human rights issue in China where they, their culture, was being choked. The monasteries and religions were being threatened in sometimes very, reportedly, very horrific ways.
So when I realized I had this opportunity to go hear from His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Montreal, and I was living in Massachusetts, I said, “I'm going.” I got in my little Toyota and drove four hours to hear this, what I expected to be, a call to arms. You know, I heard that 10,000 people would be there, and I wore my Free Tibet t-shirt, you know, big Free Tibet, yellow, bright t-shirt.
And I thought this was kind of joining the army. How do I fight back against this oppressive regime that's choking our culture? When I arrived, I realized this event was in a cathedral, the Catholic Church, the biggest one in Montreal at the top of this hill. I don't remember the name of it. I need to look it up.
It was just absolutely beautiful. I'd been trained as an architect, so I was just, wow, this gothic cathedral, it was so incredible. It was full of people, 10,000 people, and I could barely see the altar up front where he was going to be speaking, and I was so excited. And, all of a sudden, there's this commotion in the back of the room near where I'm sitting.
And I look back and this little old man comes in and starts walking up the aisle, sort of saying hi to everyone. And I thought, well, this is a waste of time for this. Why do we have to wait for this little old man to walk all the way up to the front? And then I realized this was the Dalai Lama. And he was so gentle and soft, he had his robes on, and he was just saying hi to everybody.
I was a little too far away to get to touch him, but I could see him. And he made his way all the way to the front. And he got up on the podium, and he said, “Thank you, my friends, for your prayers for the Tibetan people. We appreciate them so much. Thank you for your support.” And I was thinking, yes, here we go. How do we fight? And that's what – you know, I don't know if I'll be able to tell this without tearing up a little bit. He said, “but as much as you pray for us, I think it's even more important we pray for our Chinese brothers and sisters, the people in the military who are causing these harms and who are doing this damage.” He said, “We Tibetan people, we're strong. We're resilient. We will grow from this. But people who cause harm, they have to live with that the rest of their lives. They will have a very hard time getting over that.” And, you know, something just opened in me at that moment.
And the really amazing thing is, I've been raised a Christian in the South. Almost all of us are Christians here. And I looked up in the stained glass in these cathedrals. It was so beautiful. And there was this one image of Jesus on the cross. And his final words came to me, which I'd heard my whole life, his last words of Christ on the cross as he was being persecuted, killed.
You forgive them. They know not what they do. And it sunk in, in a way that it just never had before. And in a way I've been trying to make sense of that moment for the last 30 years. And it led me to leave architecture, my profession of choice. and join the center here 10 years ago, and just put my effort, my organizational efforts, my intellectual efforts, my people skills, to support what they're doing here at Emory in this collaboration with the Dalai Lama.
And I don't consider myself an expert in it in any way. I'm a follower, but I feel in a way more Christian and more Buddhist and more human than I ever have before all those things. So, I think that I'll end here soon, but just to bring it back around, both of these factors that lead to compassion–the sense of closeness and tenderness, and this awareness of what people are suffering from–were present in that moment for me. I had been othering people I'd never met and considering that I had nothing in common with them. And in this moment, I realized that they too were human like me. They too could get caught up in these emotional states that might be harmful, even though they feel right.
And I became aware of what they were up against, how they too might be suffering and struggling. So, in our program, and if you want to train in compassion, these are the two conditions we try to cultivate. Our capacity to identify with others, to see that they're like us, so that we can sustain this, include others, more and more others with, in this view of seeing how precious they are, everyone, everyone.
And the other is, what are they up against? What are their struggles? Because again, when those things come together, we naturally wish them to be free from their suffering. Thank you very much for letting me share my story. I hope that makes some sense. And I'll end there.
Marilyn: Thank you, Tim. That's such a beautiful, such a powerful story. I know you moved me to tears, and I'm sure many others in this room as well. We're going to skip the question, but you know, I think you already answered the question that I was going to ask you. And the question I was going to ask you was about how do we hold compassion in a world that's so divided?
And you just answered the question in such a very powerful, moving way that I think many of us won't forget and will be holding for a long time to come. So, so thank you. Thank you for that powerful story.
We'll be posting some links so that you can follow up with Tim's program and if you'd like to find out more about it. I'm sorry, I'm a little choked up from that story. It's just so moving.
Yuka Saionji
Yuka Saionji: I'm so honored to be here. Thank you so much. I was asked to speak a little bit about interfaith, and so I just was looking back about my experience. And I think there were three things that I wanted to say. And the first is when I was in my early 20s, I went to The Parliament of World Religions, where many religious leaders and religious members and people from different faiths all came together for a week to have discussions and dialogues, and conferences and workshops.
And I was so excited – our organization, we pray for the peace of the whole world and for each country – so it was just so natural for me to just join and learn about other religions and to connect with other religions. But when the conference started, there was a protest outside the building.
I was very naive. I was like – What? Why? Why would there be a protest for something so beautiful of people with different religions and faiths coming together? And when I looked at all the boards of saying what evil this is…or how I then realized, because in Japan, the Japanese national religion is Shintoism, and we believe in 8 million gods, and okay, so 8 million plus 1 or 2, that's totally fine, we're accepting. But I once again realized the difference of religions and the deep, deep teachings that each one carries, cherishes so much that they can't coexist because of it.
And so I then realized the people inside the building, some people are coming here to learn about each other and to have peace with each other, but also having this hatred energy come towards them because of what they're trying to do. And at that time I realized the difficulty of interfaith. But at the same time, and this was 20 years ago, I was so grateful and thankful for the people who were in the building, whether, whatever situation, environment, circumstances, or responses they may be getting outside, that they were willing to come. But that was my first kind of experience of interfaith. A few years later, we, as you saw in the video, started hosting an interfaith event. And what we do is we ask each religious leader to offer their peace prayers, but not a prayer for their country or their people, but for the whole world.
And the audience, first time, it was just our members, but then more and more different people came in. But no matter what belief you have, we invited them to pray together with different various religious leaders of the Peace Prayer for the Whole because we wanted to create a Symphony of Peace Prayers. And what was so beautiful was in the audience – and in the beginning, it was our members – one person would come up to me in tears saying, “I've never prayed an Islamic prayer before.”
But for some reason, when I started praying, I couldn't stop crying. Or another person was just so moved by the Christian prayers. And it's not about how it looks from the outside. Like, I always say we have different fingers. And when you look at the fingers from the outside, it's all different shapes and forms and all that. And we can say they're all different. It's not right or wrong or whatever. But when we really tap into the essence of each tradition and religious prayers, it's just all so beautiful, and so loving.
It just reminded me when the tsunami hit, and we all went and took a bus together with the religious leaders and some young people, like Madhusan, to the affected area where the whole town was washed out and there's still like a big boat in the middle of the street, and many, many people died there. I was so moved in tears to see everyone stepping out of the bus, going in different directions, and they were all offering their own traditional prayer. Some were kneeling down and offering their prayers, and the way they prayed was so beautiful. It's so different, but I still remember the energy of what the land was receiving. And it's not about how you pray, it's about the energy of the love, of the compassion. For me, the event is only a one day event, and it's beautiful, it's really wonderful to experience the power of prayer.
But at the same time, it is just a once a year event. But then I wanted to speak about this compassion of this interfaith pod, because this is – each day we learn and we listen and we use our hands and head and hearts to really learn about it. And I thought, okay, this pod is not looking at fingers and seeing which one is longer, whatever, but we're actually becoming the blood cells that go into each finger, right?
And we receive and we give back, and we offer. And then the fingers don't become a finger anymore, but we're using 10 and 20 fingers to become a hand, become a hand that becomes a service of compassion. And I was so amazed to see when we come together in compassion, that we become a hand that works together so beautifully, most powerfully, and when we use our whole hands with all our fingers, we can serve.
And I think every day I feel like I'm using my hands from different religions to kind of brush my compassion bowl that I used to have, that somehow was hidden, or broken, or lost somewhere inside my body, but now every day these 10 fingers, 20 fingers, are helping me find my compassion that was inside, deep inside, and I'm just cherishing it.
And so this pod was really one of the most powerful ways to see interfaith from the inside, not from the outside, to become the blood cells that run each interfaith, because we're becoming one with the teachings, because we want to be the essence of the teachings. We don't want to be the former of the organization, but we really want to, and for the purpose of bringing out compassion.
And I really believe that compassion isn't something that we learn. It's always in us, but we sometimes forget it, and we sometimes lose it in us. But it's there, and we have so many traditions and religions that help us, remind us, that we are compassionate. Your existence taught me so much that it's true that we are all compassion and that we are all one and in the core.
And just like Aidyn said in the beginning, it's like a heartbeat that we're creating together and each heartbeat of each day, we're passing out blood around this whole universe like the body of love and kindness, and not just finding our own compassion, but finding our own compassion to serve for others around us.
And so, to me, really, this pod was really the biggest learning of interfaith that I've experienced. And because I get – we get – to learn from each other. And in our breakouts, we were just sharing about how amazing it is to read other people's feeds. To learn and be inspired, and to also get comments back about what you wrote, and how we can inspire each other, and more and more I always feel whenever I'm in a pod that we're like a bloodstream going around the vessel and offering love to all the organs and places and countries and religions around the world. And I also just wanted to share that, with this year's interfaith event Symphony of Peace Prayers, we had Kristen Hoffman, who's a singer who sang for us on the occasion of the interfaith event and I really love her music. She sings about going back to the core, and I think going back to the core is realizing that we all have this deep compassion. But sometimes we're hurt, and sometimes we experience pain and separation, and we forget. But there are so many ways to bring that back.
And I think your existence helped me bring that back. So I wanted to share this song of going back to the core. Thank you.