This talk tonight is part of a four week series. I began last week with love,

loving kindness, loving presence. The four together are sometimes described as

the divine abodes and they are love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. So tonight is

about compassion and it's really the inquiry that a lot of us have you know what

helps us to awaken our heart, what helps to cultivate a compassionate heart.

Part of what I'm finding really interesting is that in the last maybe five years that inquiry has

moved from the you know just the spiritual and religious communities into the larger culture

in a very active and immediate way. It's become a real secular kind of inquiry and I'm unaware of it

in I have many friends that are involved with conflict resolution, with mediation,

how alive it is there, how the criticalness of having this capacity for empathy and compassion

and of course it's in so much communications, nonviolent communications in education and psychotherapy

as you know. I mean in psychotherapy if you look at what's really going on with ourselves in the

world there's no healing, there's no healing without this capacity to soften and widen a heart,

make it more inclusive. Sometimes think of that there's a Gary Larson cartoon and there's two

women that are hiding behind a locked door and they're kind of peering out through a window and

one of them is saying to the other calm down Edna yes it is a giant hideous insect but it might

be a giant hideous insect in need of help you know. And there's some sense that you know if we can

see past the initial presentation of ourselves of each other and get that whenever somebody is

behaving in a way that doesn't appeal to us it usually has to do with an unmet need that

there's some cry for help. So we're seeing as I mentioned in the secular world there's research labs

at tons and tons of major institutions I'm thinking right now of Harvard and University of Wisconsin

at Stanford I'll give you an example there's a research lab there but there's also here's a

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