How to be Fearless: The Four Kinds of Friendliness (Part Two)

As mentioned in a previous post, in Buddhism, there is something called The Four Immeasurables. They are:

Lovingkindness
Compassion
Sympathetic Joy
Equanimity

In this post, we’ll discuss the second immeasurable, Compassion, and how it helps quell fear.

What is fear? One way to look at it is that fear is an unwillingness to open to reality the way it is. When we’re afraid, we fight the object of our fear, try to ignore it, or become desperate for someone or something to save us. None of these things help. The opposite of fear isn’t boldness, it’s openness. Tolerance. Curiosity. Fearlessness is the ability to remain open and observant, even in the face of very strong feelings or difficult situations. This doesn’t mean you are emotionless. It simply means you are awake. When you’re receptive and wakeful, you’re in the best position to figure out what to do with your fears and their causes.

The Four Immeasurables are four ways of remaining open. The second one, Compassion, has gotten a bad rap. People think it means some kind of saintly ok-ness with everyone, no matter how they act. It conjures an image of some long-suffering person who puts everyone else first. But true compassion is much more skillful than that. I wrote about all this in my book, How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life.

Compassion arises when you allow someone else’s pain into your own heart without a personal agenda. This has an automatic affect: You automatically want to free her or him from that suffering, no matter what. We are each capable of this. This is how we’re built.

When I was about seven years old, I was given a kite to fly during our vacation at the beach. My father taught me how to hold it, how to cast it into the wind, and what would make it dip or soar. He held on to the kite with me until I was ready to fly it by myself and then he let go. I ran up and down the shoreline by myself, following the currents of the wind. He could see how overjoyed I was. He was so touched by my delight. Suddenly I lost control of the kite, and it blew away. I ran down the beach trying as hard as I could to catch it as it blew higher and higher. I stopped only when the kite was no longer visible. Many years later, my father still remembers how torn up he was by the look on my face. If he could have flown up in the sky to retrieve the kite for me, he would have.

My father didn’t feel my pain by sitting down and considering it. His compassion just happened, on the spot, beyond theories, values, or beliefs. A child’s pain finds its way to a parent’s heart. The door is simply open.

Lovingkindness cultivates this sense of kinship with all people and leads to the ability to feel this compassion for everyone. When you practice holding your heart open to everyone, from your loved ones to your enemies, you are training to feel for all beings the kind of compassion my father felt for me.

Sometimes, though, it seems impossible to feel compassion. It can be really, really hard when you think about all the people and situations that you find ridiculously infuriating. But acting compassionately doesn’t necessarily mean being sweet and nice, or giving all your stuff away. In Buddhist thought, compassion is synonymous with skillful action, action that is rooted in seeing reality from the largest perspective possible. When you have the proper perspective, you know without thinking what the next right action is. If you see a child with a badly cut finger holding onto a band-aid he can’t figure out how to apply, you patch him up pronto. It’s obvious what needs to be done and doing it is considered compassionate. False compassion, or “idiot compassion” as Chogyam Trungpa called it, would be, in this case, bursting into tears at the child’s predicament or sitting him down for a lecture on self-care. These behaviors clearly lack intelligence and are an“idiotic” version of this sophisticated skill.

Acting compassionately doesn’t mean refusing to admonish people who make you feel terrible or sticking with hopeless situations because you feel sorry for the others involved. Putting an end to abuse or moving on from futile endeavors may be the most compassionate—and intelligent—thing you can do. One good way of testing whether your motivation is rooted in skillful action or stuck in emotional sludge, fear, or co-dependence is to check for your sense of humor. If it’s still there, there’s a good chance that you are grounded, sane, and courageous.