Fiction is not for the Fire

Art teaches us not through its message – for it has no message as such – but through its awakening of sensibility and awareness.

(From Geoffrey Nash Restating the Idealist Theory of Art, page 168 in The Creative Circle edited by Michael Fitzgerald)

. . . . . fiction is not just a slice of life, it is a guided dream, a model that we readers and viewers construct in collaboration with the writer, which can enable us to see others and ourselves more clearly. The dream can offer us glimpses beneath the surface of the everyday world.

(From the Preface to Such Stuff as Dreams)

Keith Oatley‘s book, Such Stuff as Dreams, tackles the thorny and long-standing question of whether fiction is pointless and a nuisance or whether it has some value. I won’t rehearse the arguments he quotes from Plato onwards to suggest that fiction should be banned. Most of us have heard them all too often already. More interesting by far are his reasons for feeling this is unfair and the reasons for attacking fiction are basically unfounded. So, what justifies my relief that I need not burn all the novels on my shelves?

He doesn’t take a simple-minded approach to this topic. He is all too aware that there are issues. He accepts that more than one kind of fiction exists and not all kinds constitute art. He quotes Robin Collingwood (page 174) who

regarded such genres as action and romance as non-art, because they are not explorations. They follow formulae, and their writers intend to induce particular kinds of emotion. If successful they are entertaining. That’s their intention. But they are not art.

He also recognises that not all kinds of fiction are beneficial either (page 177):

The literature on possible effects of violence and of sexuality in the media is huge, and this is not the place to review it. Recent articles are by Paul Boxer et al. (2009) on effects on adolescents of media violence, and Deborah Fisher et al. (2009) on effects on adolescents of televised sexuality. Although there are questions as to how conclusive these bodies of research are, there is cause for concern that some forms of fiction may have harmful effects.

So, clearly enemies of fiction can select either pointless or damaging examples. However, the fiction that corrupts and destroys is not the kind he is considering. Real fiction, in his terms, is an art and is not to be dismissed as merely a pastime, a waste of time or worse an inducement to destructiveness. He feels that true fiction at its best is an art form. Art, for him, leads to uncharted territory (page 174):

. . . . art – I’ll offer a criterion –does not recruit people to believe or act or feel in a particular way.

He unpacks this idea further in many places, for example (page 177):

In fiction that is art, one is not programmed by the writer. One starts to explore and feel, perhaps, new things. One may start to think in new ways.

Moreover the area of human experience fiction is best at exploring lies in the area of selfhood and relationships.

He sees fiction as prosocial and moral. How does it work that way?

Fiction, Empathy and Relationships

His case is richly expressed so what follows is a selection of the key points in it that most resonated with my own preoccupations.

One of fiction’s most important benefits is the fostering of empathy. He defines empathy as follows (page 113):

In modern times, and on the basis of recent research on brain imaging, empathy has been described as involving: (a) having an emotion, that (b) is in some way similar to that of another person, that (c) is elicited by observation or imagination of the other’s emotion, and that involves (d) knowing that the other is the source of one’s own emotion.

He asks a general question ((page 95):

If we engage in the simulations of fiction, do the skills we learn there transfer to the everyday social world?

In this book he sees  fiction as (page 99)

. . . . . a kind of simulation, one that runs not on computers but on minds: a simulation of selves in their interactions with others in the social world. This is what Shakespeare and others called a dream.

And finds that the research suggests that the skills we learn there do transfer to ordinary life. After explaining a carefully controlled study by Raymond Mar (see video below for an interview with him), he writes that when all other variables were controlled for (and could therefore be discounted as an explanation of the effects) – page 159:

The result indicates that better abilities in empathy and theory of mind were best explained by the kind of reading people mostly did. . . . . .

Other studies he quotes all point in the same direction (page 165):

Nussbaum argues that this ability to identify with others by means of empathy or compassion is developed by the reading of fiction.

Others have looked back into history and discerned the same patterns (page 168):

Hunt’s finding is that invention of the idea of rights, the declarations of rights, and the changes in society that have followed them, depended on two factors. One was empathy, which depends, as Hunt says, on “a biologically based ability to understand the subjectivity of other people and to be able to imagine that their inner experiences are like one’s own” (p. 39). The other was the mobilization of this empathy towards those who were outside people’s immediate social groupings. Although Hunt does not attribute this mobilization entirely to literary art, she concludes that the novel contributed to it substantially.

But empathy is not all there is to it. His discussion of these other aspects is equally rich but there is not space here to unpack them (page 169).

A second theme in potentially beneficial effects of fiction is in understandings of relationships.

(His third theme I’m not sure is very different from his second as it concerns the dynamics of interactions in groups and is for me an aspect of relationships in general.) There is one more (page 170):

The fourth theme of fiction that can potentially prompt self-improvement is in understandings of the self.

Other Complicating Factors

He admits very readily that this apparently straightforward and rosy picture has its complications over and above the issue of whether we can agree on exactly which examples of fiction are art and which are not, which are destructive and which are not. Prose that serves the kind of social function he describes cannot be quite boundaried by the idea of fiction in any case (page 177):

The idea that the essence of fiction is of selves in the social world, or of intentions and their vicissitudes, is I think, correct, but the category has untidy boundaries. The conventional definition of fiction excludes, for instance, memoir and biography, which can also be about these matters. Recent biographies of relationships by Hazel Rowley (2006) Katie Roiphe (2007) and Janet Malcolm (2007) have had all the characteristics that I am writing about, as does a memoir of growing up in Germany in the 20s and 30s by Sebastian Haffner (2002).

The Brontes

You’d also think that being a writer of fiction would confer amazing benefits for the writer in his or her own life. The reality is that being a writer of fiction sadly does not guarantee happiness or adjustment in the life of the writer. No surprise there then for readers of this blog  This has been an ongoing concern of mine in terms of all art forms (see links below). It concerns Oatley as well (pages 177-178):

The question arises as to whether, if fiction helps social understanding, writers of fiction should be especially understanding of others and themselves. The much-replicated research by James Pennebaker (1997), in which writing about emotional problems has been found to have therapeutic properties, seems to support this hypothesis. Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley and Jordan Peterson (2006) have shown that writers of fiction tend to write about emotional preoccupations, particularly negative ones. It may be that some writers increase their understanding, but writers are not known generally for attainment of states of contentment or social decency. Although this question has not been well researched, it seems most likely that many writers of fiction do write from a position of struggle with their emotional lives. Perhaps many of them start from a position that is rather far out on this spectrum. So although they may make gains for themselves, they don’t necessarily do all that well as compared with the non-writing population.

You could decode that to be saying that tormented lives are seedbeds for major fiction and perhaps the writers would be worse people if they did not write. That would be a hard hypothesis to test in practice and the funding might be hard to come by as well.

Still, on balance, I feel Oatley makes a very good case for the value of great fiction. Let’s hope no one gets killed in the boundary disputes where one person’s masterpiece is morphing into someone else’s potboiler.

Related Articles:

The Compass of Compassion

Practising Compassion 1/2 & 2/2

Perfecting the Life or Perfecting the Art (1/2) & (2/2)

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Art and Compassion

Today I noticed a interesting entry on the Charter for Compassion Website, posted by Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox on 17 December, 2011. It maps onto my current preoccupation with the relationship between creativity and compassion. She puts her point extremely well, I hope you agree.

In 2005 I held a solo exhibition of my paintings at the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation, UAE. I sat with the exhibition each day, and each day I experienced and shared conversations, triggered by my art, with people from all over the region, Africa and Eastern Europe. Whilst the conversations were triggered by my paintings, they did not end up being about my paintings. I learnt that art’s catalytic agency to stimulate agenda-less conversation opens up spaces where differences seem less different and similarities are revealed, thus leading to compassion for others, as well as for oneself.

The element in my paintings which I believe contributed to these wonderful conversations, was my depiction of the tree-of-life…that age-old transcultural/religious symbol. Because it needed no explanation, the conversations quickly bypassed explanatory chatter, and delved into deeper connections. Since 2005 I have focused on exploring ways to visually re-interpret the tree-of-life so that it means something to us in the 21st century, rather than simply being of historical significance. I sense its potency, as a symbol, to connect us compassionately to the planet, to others and to ourselves.

Related Post:

• Practising Compassion (2/2)

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A Different Spin on ‘Bounce’ (3/3): morality and giftedness

One of the themes that comes up a number of times in Freeman’s book, Gifted Lives, is morality. I’ve picked on this one to discuss, in preference to the others I haven’t so far touched on, because I have a quibble with her treatment of it.

The Bodhissatva of Compassion

For example, she picks up on the issue of moral character in her chapter on The Good Samaritan which tells Suzanne’s story. On the back of this story, she goes on to analyse the relationship between giftedness and empathy (pages 140-141):

The gifted, I suggest, have no greater claims to morality than anyone else, but what they do have is the capacity to intellectually understand moral conundrums in life and to perceive arguments for what they are, set in their social contexts. Suzanne practises a very high degree of Western morality, caring for others without obliging them to believe as she does.

She then makes a distinction that does not make complete sense to me (page 135):

Morality is as much a part of Suzanne as her gift of empathy. That is to say, she has principles by which she works, and at the same time a feeling for others with different views.

I need to unpick my unease with this distinction between morality and empathy. For a start, it seems more intuitively reasonable to see empathy as intertwined with morality rather than as something completely distinct, and this, for me, is not undermined by empathy – and its sister, compassion – being a feeling whereas morality is more language-locked, spelling out the ‘oughts’ which are underpinned by such fuzzy intimations as ‘fairness’ or ‘kindness.’

I’d like to take this further though. It will help if we start with Susan Neiman‘s discussion of Kant in her brilliant book, Moral Clarity (page 95):

Truth is a matter of the way the world is; morality is a matter of the way the world ought to be.

She is as aware an anyone, including Jonathan Haidt, that the idealism that stems from our sense of what ought to be can often be partially, and sometimes totally, lacking in empathy. He writes, in his humane and compassionate book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis‘, that, in his view, idealism, which he links with morality, has caused more violence in human history than almost any other single thing (page 75).

The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism. . . . Threatened self-esteem accounts for a large portion of violence at the individual level, but to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism — the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end.

Neiman tempers this with what for her is the other side of the coin (page 112):

. . . . contemporary suicide terrorists . . . are determined to kill others in the pursuit of their ideals. . . . . . But while focusing on the fundamentalist terrorists’ willingness to kill for ideals, we have paid to little attention to their willlingness to die for them.

The latter impulse she links to the desire for transcendence quoting Jessica Stern in support (page 113):

As odd as it sounds, a sense of transcendence is one of many attractions of religious violence for terrorists, beyond the appeal of achieving their goals.

So, there are clearly ways in which principles and values, abstractly conceived, can be antithetical to empathy and compassion. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy acknowledges that sometimes a client’s values are so different from the therapist’s that therapeutic work becomes impossible. This would presumably be the case in the unlikely event of a Western Liberal therapist treating a fundamentalist terrorist. It presumably does occur with the extremes of intractable narcissism and psychopathy.

In any case, I have come to prefer the word compassion because it has been pointed out that an effective torturer can use his ability to enter another person’s feeling state to enhance the pain.

Even when we see compassion at work, if the compass of the moral imagination is too narrow our compassion for one individual or group can cause us to inflict great cruelty on another.  The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, the book more effectively than the ITV drama, spoke to this kind of complexity in human motivation and the entangled moral maze that can result.

Constance Kent

It is probable, in the version of the story in Kate Summerscale’s book, that Constance Kent, the girl who finally confessed to the killing of her three-year old half-brother and who was aged 16 at the time of the murder, was motivated more by feelings of pity for what her younger brother, aged 14, had gone through than by some hatred of her own. Mr Kent had married again after the death of his first wife, and the children of his first marriage had apparently not fared well in the household of the second. William, the 14 year old, suffered the worst perhaps and Constance was very protective of him. It seemed almost certain that both Constance and William committed the crime together. Constance could never have done it alone.

At the original court hearing the case against her was thrown out, but six years later she confessed, insisting that she alone was responsible. Summerscale explains the likely reason for this delayed confession (page 301-302):

Though she had complained to her schoolfriends about how [William] was treated by Samuel and Mary [his father and stepmother] – the humiliating comparisons to Saville, the way he was made to push a perambulator around the village – she made no reference to this in 1865. She said of her father and stepmother, ‘I have never had any ill will towards either of them on account of their behaviour to me,’ carefully avoiding the ill will she might bear them on anyone else’s account. The answer to the mystery of Saville’s murder might lie in Constance’s silence after all; specifically, her silence about the brother she loved.

Constance gave herself up in the year before William’s twenty-first birthday, when he was due to inherit a £1,000 bequest from their mother. He hoped to use the money to fund a career in science, but was still hampered by the uncertainty and suspicion surrounding the family. Rather than both of them live under the cloud of murder, Constance chose to gather the darkness to herself. Her act of atonement liberated William, made his future possible.

So, it is obvious why empathy, and even compassion, in themselves, when divorced from some clear and wider standard, are not enough to ensure that cruel actions will not be committed and are therefore not the basis for a secure and adequate morality. But it is also true that all values are not good. How else would it be possible to say, ‘Evil be thou my Good’? Some compassion is far better than none, and some values are better than others. The question is how to ensure that receiving compassion is not conditional upon membership of an in-group and that values are not conducive to wrong-doing?

My own understanding, derived from Bahá’í scripture and supported by my reading of such searching thinkers as Robert Wright and Iain McGilchrist, is that only upon an unshakable sense of humanity as being one indivisible entity at the deepest level and upon our inextricable connection with all life, can a world enhancing morality be built. The best summary of all this entails comes probably in the statement from the Bahá’í International Community, The Prosperity of Humankind:

The task of creating a global development strategy that will accelerate humanity’s coming-of-age constitutes a challenge to reshape fundamentally all the institutions of society. The protagonists to whom the challenge addresses itself are all of the inhabitants of the planet: the generality of humankind, members of governing institutions at all levels, persons serving in agencies of international coordination, scientists and social thinkers, all those endowed with artistic talents or with access to the media of communication, and leaders of non-governmental organizations. The response called for must base itself on an unconditioned recognition of the oneness of humankind, a commitment to the establishment of justice as the organizing principle of society, and a determination to exploit to their utmost the possibilities that a systematic dialogue between the scientific and religious genius of the race can bring to the building of human capacity. The enterprise requires a radical rethinking of most of the concepts and assumptions currently governing social and economic life. It must be wedded, as well, to a conviction that, however long the process and whatever setbacks may be encountered, the governance of human affairs can be conducted along lines that serve humanity’s real needs.

We have come rather a long way from considering whether the gifted are more likely to be moral than the rest of us, and where empathy comes into the equation. Even though Freeman was not centrally concerned with morality she did press an electrode somewhere in my brain when she made that comment about morality and empathy. I hope the tangled paths of thought it led me down have been of some interest to more people than just myself. Either way I feel a bit clearer on the issue, till the next time some button in my mind gets pressed.

There are other themes in her book that contribute to its interest. I summarised them in the first post in this series. I may come back to them at a much later stage. I have written quite enough already on this book, I think

Russian Icon of the Good Samaritan

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Gleams of Hope

Occasionally you are given the heads up about something that confirms almost all your wildest suppositions about the world. This happened to me recently. Some time ago a good friend, who knows my weakness for this kind of thing, posted me a link to an article by David Brooks which I finally got round to reading last week. It said:

[A] growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

Every single one of those insights resonates powerfully with me.

I have already explored the way in which the comparison of the human heart to a garden, which you find in the Bahá’í Writings, is an image which conveys very effectively the idea that invisible processes in the ‘soil’ of our being produce remarkable results that can take long periods of time to emerge into the light of consciousness, rather in the manner of flowers and fruit. McGilchrist is a writer who pulls together a wide range of data to explain very clearly how functioning in a fully human way depends upon our recognising and fully integrating the emotional and intuitive aspect of our being with the logical and verbal one, rather than pretending it does not exist or is fundamentally undesirable. And this blog is littered with posts referring to the fundamental centrality of empathy and compassion in the complex pattern of human life.

What he goes on to say takes me further along this road. While the labels he uses may seem slightly abstract, even strange or dubious, what he goes on to describe integrates in one place those core human qualities upon which the future of our civilisation probably depends.

. . . . this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

The spiritual path I follow has at its heart the idea that all human beings share a core of being that is essentially the same regardless of differences of colour, gender, class, race or politics. When we encounter differences with this perspective in mind the idea of Attunement becomes not only faintly possible but completely natural. There is a quotation from the Bahá’í Writings that not only reinforces this but shows how it might link to the other talents that he refers to:

O CHILDREN OF MEN! Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest. Such is My counsel to you, O concourse of light! Heed ye this counsel that ye may obtain the fruit of holiness from the tree of wondrous glory.

(Arabic Hidden Words: 68)

Equipoise would seem to depend upon detachment which is in its turn linked to the capacity to reflect, which is a good word to use to describe the process behind Equipoise. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá unpacks some aspects of this relationship in Paris Talks, for example when He says (pages 175-176):

Meditation is the key for opening the doors of mysteries. In that state man abstracts himself: in that state man withdraws himself from all outside objects; in that subjective mood he is immersed in the ocean of spiritual life and can unfold the secrets of things-in-themselves. To illustrate this, think of man as endowed with two kinds of sight; when the power of insight is being used the outward power of vision does not see.

This faculty of meditation frees man from the animal nature, discerns the reality of things, puts man in touch with God.

Meditation, contemplation and reflection are closely related terms and depend upon high levels of detachment for their most effective operation. Detachment seems also to be necessary if we are to tune into the feeling states of others in a way that is conducive to high levels of empathy. It is not too difficult then to see how an ability to be in synchrony with others, which he describes as sympathy, is linked to the interaction of all these skills or qualities. This is partly at least what ‘being as one soul’ surely means.

The explanation in Paris Talks also suggests that both Metis and Limerence are rooted in this same combination of detachment, oneness and meditative reflection. ‘[T]he ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations’ at the very least overlaps, perhaps even maps completely onto, discerning ‘the reality of things’ just as being ‘in touch with God’ must be close in nature to those ‘moments of transcendence’ at the centre of what Limerence is according to Brooks.

McGilchrist’s comprehensive overview suggests that this is not ‘pie in the sky by and by’ but rooted in our evolved physical nature which has the capacity to bring these meta-realities down to earth. The holistic intuitive right-brain sees patterns in complex experiences that the analytical left brain is blind to. Silencing the chatter of the left brain, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá recommends in His discussion of meditation and Jill Bolte Taylor experienced as a consequence of her stroke, allows these fruits of a deeper processing to float into consciousness.

Whether you see them as coming ultimately from a spiritual realm, as I do, or from a wiser part of our physical being, is immaterial (no pun intended!). What counts is that both secular and spiritual insights, experience and systematic evidence suggest more and  more of us have to learn how to tune into our deepest levels in this way if we are not, as a society, to sink more deeply into chaos and a social entropy that will destroy all that we have created that is positive in our civilisation.

It is extremely encouraging to see how so many people of good will across the spectrum of beliefs are of one mind on this at least. This is why there is hope. The word ‘gleams’ in the title of this post is a rather feeble acronym to act as a mnemonic for the Great ‘Limerence Equipoise Attunement Metis Sympathy’ combination of ideas.

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Transcending Revenge

We, verily, have made music as a ladder for your souls, a means whereby they may be lifted up unto the realm on high; make it not, therefore, as wings to self and passion.

(Bahá’u’lláh - Kitáb-i-Aqdas: Paragraph 51)

Angus Batey, in the Guardian article from which the quote just before the video is taken, describes Emmanuel Jal‘s background:

At the age of 12, Emmanuel Jal was one of 400 children who managed to escape from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, which had turned them into soldiers. They fled through minefields, dodging helicopter attacks. “A distance that should have taken one month to walk took us three,” says the Sudanese rapper, now 28. “We ran out of food. Some turned to cannibalism. I was tempted to eat my best friend. Many times I tried to shoot myself.” Why didn’t he? “Sometimes the bullet did not work,” he says. “Sometimes something just stopped me.”

Today, he’s performing in a corridor in a London council estate, filming the video to his new single, Warchild. “I believe I’ve survived for a reason,” he raps, “to tell my story, to touch lives.” . . . . .

“My mum and my grandmother were beaten by government troops and my auntie was raped in front of me,” he says. “It’s only now that I can describe hating the people that did these things. Before, I didn’t know what name to give that feeling – I just wanted to kill as many of them as possible.”

It is difficult to reconcile the softly spoken Jal of today with the murderous figure he describes. His music and forthcoming autobiography are inspired by a desire to end the horrific abuse to which he was subjected.

I came across a YouTube video of his song for peace on the Charter for Compassion website. It had been tagged as inspirational and I agree. I thought it would be good to share it not least because his life is itself an inspiring example of a great change.

What he said of music, quoted by Angus Batey, is a brilliant insight and explains in part the power of what he does:

“Music is powerful. It is the only thing that can speak into your mind, your heart and your soul without your permission.”

(The Guardian)

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Practising Compassion (2/2)

I said at the end of an earlier post that I might, in addition to quoting from Karen Armstrong, risk revealing some of my own strange ways of holding onto the few spiritual insights I’ve acquired recently, hence the rough and ready cartoonish graphic at the head of this post (more of that in a moment).

So here goes on both counts.

The roots of what I am going to describe go back a long way but it would make for a very long post indeed to go into them as well. For present purposes what is important is a play on three words that were forced on my attention in some dreamwork I did and in my study of the Bahá’í Writings: heart, earth and hearth. Removing the ‘h’ from one or the other end of ‘hearth’ creates the other two words. This word play only works in English but its effect is powerful for me.

This is for several mutually reinforcing reasons.

Bahá’u’lláh reminds us of the value of the earth:

If true glory were to consist in the possession of such perishable things, then the earth on which ye walk must needs vaunt itself over you, because it supplieth you, and bestoweth upon you, these very things, by the decree of the Almighty. In its bowels are contained, according to what God hath ordained, all that ye possess. From it, as a sign of His mercy, ye derive your riches.

(Gleanings: CXVIII)

And He warns us of the dangers of taking it for granted, especially for those who profess wisdom but fail to practice it:

[Of those who profess belief but do not practice) . . . . . ye walk on My earth complacent and self-satisfied, heedless that My earth is weary of you and everything within it shunneth you.

(Persian Hidden Words: No. 20)

He refers to the earth in terms that remind us of how we should feel if we are true to our spiritual natures. He points out that acquiring the qualities of earth will make our being fertile for wisdom:

O My servants! Be as resigned and submissive as the earth, that from the soil of your being there may blossom the fragrant, the holy and multicolored hyacinths of My knowledge.

(Gleanings: CLII)

The same quotation goes on to make reference to fire. Both fire and earth are strongly related to the human heart in Bahá’í Scripture.

Bahá’u’lláh compares our hearts to a garden which needs seeding and tending:

Sow the seeds of My divine wisdom in the pure soil of thy heart, and water them with the water of certitude, that the hyacinths of My knowledge and wisdom may spring up fresh and green in the sacred city of thy heart.

(Persian Hidden Words: No. 33)

And He gives us more guidance still as to what else to plant there:

In the garden of thy heart plant naught but the rose of love, . . . . . . . . .

(Persian Hidden Words: No: 3)

Given that Buddhism regards wisdom and compassion as two sides of the same coin, there may be no difference between them at the spiritual level.

Also in the Hidden Words are references to the fire in the heart:

The candle of thine heart is lighted by the hand of My power, quench it not with the contrary winds of self and passion.

(Persian Hidden Words: No. 32)

So for me the idea that earth and heart are one is close to the surface and a dream gave me a potent symbol of that in the hearth, which is a symbol also evoked by the presence of fire in our hearts.

When I first became aware of all these links I dwelt more on the idea of fire than flowers and the earth. That was partly because a punning connection with my first name, Pete, suggested fuel (peat to burn) in the dream I had about a hearth, rather than peat as compost to grow flowers.

There was a lot more mileage in the hearth image than that, of course. For example, it combined the 'soft' right-brain qualities of peat with the 'hard' left-brain qualities of the iron grate in a way that resonated with what Iain McGilchrist suggests is the need to give both aspects of our being their proper role and function if we are to be balanced human beings creating a balanced civilisation. But I won't dwell on that just now: I've probably said more than enough in previous posts.

Later the other associations with 'peat' came more strongly to the surface, particularly as my second name, Hulme, is so close to 'humus'. They came through so strongly, in fact, that I have come to use the heart-shaped photo of the earth (see the top of the post) as my current reminder of all this. There were no hyacinths or roses handy in the clipart gallery I used, so I made do with tulips, but the point is clear enough. The earth-heart photo also calls to mind very usefully that the 'earth,' the dwelling place of all humanity, 'is but one country.'

Because the earth has a magnetic field that helps us find our right direction it wasn't hard to see that a compass, already more than half-way to compassion in its spelling, was a good way of remembering the key value that underpins every other spiritual value in all faiths, and which in Bahá’í terms emanates from the three unities of the essential oneness of God, religion and humanity, blurred as our perception of those may sometimes be. The other meaning of the word 'compass' is also a reminder, as is the image of our world from space, to widen the embrace of my compassion to include all life and perhaps even the earth itself, an imperative need as Robert Wright describes it.

Bahá’u’lláh also has a most interesting way of linking a compass with kindness that suggests I might be on the right lines here.

A kindly tongue is the lodestone of the hearts of men. It leadeth the way and guideth.

(Gleanings: CXXXII)

Exposing this personal approach to helping myself internalise and remember what I think I have learnt did seem a bit risky, hence my earlier hesitation. I was encouraged to persist by a moving and amusing TED talk by Brené Brown that my good friend, Barney Leith, shared with me (see the YouTube at the end of this post).

She speaks amongst other things about how our way of dealing with our vulnerability affects our relationships with others, even our whole attitude to life. Those who embrace their vulnerability, her research demonstrates, are more empathic, more authentic and better connected to others. Vulnerability is indispensable to a 'whole-hearted' life. So how could I continue to cop out in the light of that? ('I can think of a few ways,' said my craven part but I managed to ignore it.)

Well, I've left very little room for Karen Armstrong after all. I'll need to come back to some of the things she says in a later post. Just one quick thought for now.

In her discussion of mindfulness Karen Armstrong, in her book on the twelve steps to a compassionate life, is strongly implying a link between compassion, mindfulness and creativity (page 97):

When you are engrossed in thoughts of anger, hatred, envy, resentment or disgust, notice the way your horizons shrink and your creativity diminishes. I find it impossible to write well when I am churning with resentment.

It would be easy to leap in and say, 'But what about satire?' The response there might well be, 'What is fuelling the anger that drives the satire?' If it is petty spite arising from wounded vanity, for example, I doubt we would be talking about great satire and this, I think, is what lets down some of Alexander Pope's less effective moments. If it is outrage at some monstrous injustice or malpractice, such as led to the writing of 'Animal Farm', '1984' and  Swift's 'Modest Proposal,' then there's every chance the satire, rooted as it will be in a deep compassion for and identification with our fellow human beings, will be great satire, standing the test of changing times and changing tastes. Such works all have the capacity to demonstrate a control over difficult material which would be impossible in a state of intemperate rage.

This link she hints at between compassion and creativity has helped me make conscious an inner process that has determined which works of art I keep going back to, such as the plays of Shakespeare, and those I leave behind unrevisited. It is Shakespeare's compassion that is the flame that brings my moth-mind back to him over and over again.

Take these lines from 'Measure for Measure' (Act 1, Scene 3, lines 85-88):

The sense of death is most in apprehension,
And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.

This surely is the spirit that should permeate our entire lives.

My simple unskilled diagram is just the beginnings of my latest attempt to bring that about and realise its full potential in my life as a Bahá’í. It works for me but I can quite see that it might not do the trick for anyone else. I have put it as the home screen in my mobile phone, so every time I open it I'm reminded of how I wish to be. Preparing my mind in this way seems to attract opportunities to be helpful in small ways. Or maybe it just makes me more able to spot them and respond when they happen. Whatever the reason it has made my few small kindnesses that bit more likely.

Enjoy the talk on vulnerability.

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