The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness

Marc Barasch has written a fascinating, readable and, at times, deeply affecting survey of how kindness works. You do not have to share his belief in an imminent popular uprising of the heart what he calls the subversive innervation of some neural net of kindness to appreciate his own carefully woven net of biology, wisdom literature, pop culture and interviews with altruists from around the world. Nor do you need to be moved by everything he has to say about kindness (I wasn’t) to wind up feeling rather kindly disposed toward him (I did). Barasch brings several enviable strengths to his subject. He shares with the best science writers an ability to make you feel the excitement of scientific discovery. He is also able to re-create dramatic scenes with engaging vividness, as when, in a chapter on forgiveness, he goes to interview both a murderer and the father of his young victim. Not surprising in a practitioner of Buddhist meditation, his keen attention to his own states of mind, whether in a shopping mall or during a long-delayed attempt at reconciliation with an old enemy, will interest anyone who struggles to be kinder in a not-so-kind world. According to Barasch, that world is actually kinder than we think. He offers an array of examples, not confined to our species, ranging from the reconciliation strategies of bonobo apes to the public response to Sept. 11, 2001. With the exceptions of two kidney donors, one overbearing and one underappreciated, Barasch is zealous to show that simple kindness never fails to live up to its billing.His appreciation for human potential is boundless…. Barasch strikes us as a man humanized by suffering (cancer, divorce, multiple betrayals) who has chosen to believe in — and to go beyond many of us in working for — a more humane world….With a deluge of post-election treatises about to overwhelm us by the sheer weight of their pomposity, Barasch’s plea for practicable human kindness may prove a revivifying gulp of fresh air. –The Washington Post

Marc Barasch is an explorer. In all of his books, he takes a subject he s keenly interested in from his own experience– such as healing from cancer, extraordinary dreams, and here, compassion–and finds fascinating people who exemplify it. Like a journalist, he does a great job of listening to and reporting on real folks. But beyond most reporters, he makes it intensely personal. To both himself and us the reader, he emphasizes the relevance of the material to our lived lives. His reporter nose and self-deprecating analysis keeps the book from being sappy. In fact, in some places, he articulates the very argument us ‘average Joe’s’ might give. And yet, at times his sensitivity cuts to the quick with essential wisdom. Always he writes in a seemingly effortless, conversational style. Barasch meets with people who are actively living or examining lives of compassion in a variety of ways. He visits primatologist Frans De Waal, whose research showing that our closest cousin, the bonobo ape, displays a great deal of empathy for others, raising issues as wide ranging as how we define our animal nature to animal testing. Barasch explores the altruism of organ donors, asking what compels them to give to people they don’t even know? He focuses on individuals such as Zen activist Bernie Gassman, who started a bakery-training program in one of the rough and needy neighborhood of one of the poorest cities in New York State. He parlayed it into a major social service agency serving people in multiple ways. And Melody Feldman, who started two successful programs that bring together teens from enemy sides of hostile areas in the world Israelis and Palestinians, Protestant and Catholic Irish, Black and White and Indian South Africans. She gets the kids to really listen to, learn from and understand one another. Barasch writes about Hector Black and the man who murdered Hector’s daughter, in attempting to understand the power that forgiveness has to transform lives. Barasch also reports on the neuroscientific and psychological research on compassion, empathy, and forgiveness. MRI’s can show, This is your brain on compassion.A group called HeartMath, is investigating through numerous studies, just how invaluable the heart is to emotional well-being.. Psychologists study the biological causes and effects of doing or witnessing good deeds. Throughout the book, Barasch weaves together the wisdom from an array of religious and literary traditions. He uses quotations, stories, philosophical ideas and exemplary figures — some well known, some less known but equally important — to nourish our understanding of compassion. In the chapter entitled Heart Science, Heart Mystery,which is primarily about the scientific research on the heart, Barasch refers to: the prophet Ezekiel; Anton Chekov; Thomas Hobbes; Carl Jung; Blasise Pascal; Chief Mountain Lake; Mother Teresa; Teilhard de Chardin, Shakespeare; J.D. Salinger; Mattieu Ricard; the Dalai Lama; the philosophies of Sufis, Eastern Orthodox, ancient Egypt, Tibetan Buddhists, early Christian saints, Hindu yogis and his orthodox Jewish grandfather! By connecting these wells of wisdom to cutting edge science, real people and his own experiences, Barasch reminds us that compassion, empathy and forgiveness are inherently human traits that make us and our world a better place when we practice them. I have successfully used the book in a bioethics and religion course on a unit on compassion and forgiveness. The students liked his style and found many of the stories compelling and thought provoking particularly as they find the idea of forgiveness If we wish to understand both the ethics and the biology of human beings, we must understand compassion, and here is the ultimate map. –Newsletter of the Council for Spiritual and Ethical Education