Part of A Philosopher's Guide to Working with the Medicines of Our World, this is the single most important recommendation I can make, for those facilitating work with the medicines of our world, and also for those seeking healing and insight from those medicines. This is a two-part discussion of compassion as a skill that requires training. Learn how compassion differs from empathy, and how it presents a revolutionary challenge to central aspects of the dominant culture. This is part of the shift from conquest consciousness to a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

The Most Important Training for Working with the Medicines of Our World: A Philosopher’s Psychedelic Practice Guide

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

In our last contemplation, we tried to touch our need to think deeply about the nature of ethics, the central importance of ethics in our work with the medicines of the World, and the way the medicines of our World gesture to an ethics of consciousness.

This time we’ll turn to perhaps the most important training we can begin with in our work with the medicines of our World. In a sense it’s the strongest recommendation I can make as a philosopher. If you want the single most important practice to start with in relation to working with any of the medicines of our World, this is it.

This is such an important topic, and it’s so wonderful to think about these sorts of powerful teachings together, and in this contemplation we want to somehow get a feel for the fullness, the richness, and the incredible importance of compassion training in particular—which means a holistic training of heart, mind, body, and World—and how that relates with an ethics of consciousness and the work we do with any of the medicines of our World.

One thing we should touch on again at the outset, and then let it rest in our hearts, is the fragmentation of our context. As John Dewey pointed out, this is one of the greatest fallacies of the mind: To ignore context.

We live in a fragmented and fragmenting context, and in this context we have to put in some extra effort.

For one thing, we need to integrate our view of the medicines of the World, so that we don’t think of psychedelics as separate from other kinds of medicines, and so that we relate with all of the medicines of our World in a manner that moves from and toward wholeness. That includes bringing our healing into fuller mutuality, so that our healing and the healing of the World go totally together.

We also want to honor the healing experiences that people have had with various medicines of the World. How do we honor those experiences?

And related to that, we can ask, How do we honor these medicines? Can we really honor the medicines of our World?

Because this medicines may want us to heal, but if we go to them, sort of saying, “Heal me,” then this can perpetuate fragmentation. It’s magical thinking in the unskillful sense, and it leads us to act as if our healing arises separately from the World, and that our illness, too, in some sense arises separately from the World.

We think, “I am sick,” and then this “I” has to go to the medicines of the world and ask them to heal “me”.

But the medicines of our world may need us to do our part. To honor them, we would have to enter into a more holistic and consistent training of the heart, mind, body, and World, and a more visionary attunement with the Cosmos.

Part of the central issue here goes directly to the heart of our contemplation today, which involves looking at our suffering as an opportunity for liberation.

This means we relate to the suffering not as a problem needing a cure, but as an opportunity for liberation.

We could think of this as part of how we differentiate healing from a cure. We could say in the case of a cure, our symptoms are removed. We feel great. We feel that our suffering has passed.

In the case of healing, we feel something has transformed in us, that we got rid of ignorance rather than a set of physical or psychological symptoms. And in that case the cure becomes totally beside the point.

If the cure doesn’t happen—for whatever reason—then whatever afflicted us may kill us, and yet we will die having experienced healing.

We can be healed but not cured, and we can be cured but not healed. The ego will take the latter. The ego will take the cure. But the soul longs for the healing. And in the best case, the healing will go along with a cure. However, we should still take the orientation of healing, and then do our best to let that healing help the whole World as much as possible.

The wisdom traditions encourage this approach because they teach us that the only true illness is ignorance. Everything else is relative from this standpoint.

When we confront our ignorance, we become more dependable.

And that brings us into mutuality with the medicines of our World. We want to depend on these medicines. But the medicines have to be able to depend on us. We have to become dependable, because the whole community of life is depending on us.

I was just speaking to a fellow philosopher about this, about how the ethics of consciousness makes us aware of how much the whole community of life depends on the human psyche, and I remembered Jung’s famous line that, “the world hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the [human] psyche.”

He said, “There is no such thing in nature as an H-bomb . . . We are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger,” and he felt that in our time “the power of the psyche” has become quite obvious, and he felt we should also recognize with equal clarity “how important it is to know something about” our psyche. But Jung felt we basically “know nothing about” the psyche.

That kind of knowing takes practice in a holistic ecology. But our general ecology is fragmented and fragmenting.

And one great danger for us is that we can think Jung is wrong—we can think that we know a great deal about our psyche. After all, a psychedelic is a mind-manifesting medicine.

And so we may work with the mind-manifesting medicines of our World, and we may get some taste of the vastness of the mind, some taste of the silence of the mind, some taste of the radiance of the mind, some taste of the interwovenness of life, some taste of visionary experience—anything like that, and we can basically think that we’re enlightened.

I was thinking about a silly example of this, and then I recalled that David Dunning had written about it in a piece for The New York Times. Dunning co-authored a paper with Justin Kruger in which they noticed an aspect of a very ancient philosophical teaching. They just looked at it in a more narrow way.

Their finding has become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Maybe we can go into all of that in another contemplation, but Dunning’s piece for The Times doesn’t require us to go into it now.

This is a slightly longer quote, so I’ll let you know when it’s over. Dunning wrote,

“If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, it would be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody’s field of ignorance. . . .

“People often come up with answers to problems that are o.k., but are not the best solutions. The reason they don’t come up with those solutions is that they are simply not aware of them. Stefan Fatsis, in his book “Word Freak,” talks about this when comparing everyday Scrabble players to professional ones. As [Fatsis writes in that book] “In a way, the living-room player is lucky . . . [They have] no idea how miserably [they fail] with almost every turn, how many possible words or optimal plays slip by unnoticed. The idea of Scrabble greatness doesn’t exist for them.” (p. 128)

“Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge. The average detective does not realize the clues he or she neglects. The mediocre doctor is not aware of the diagnostic possibilities or treatments never considered. The run-of-the-mill lawyer fails to recognize the winning legal argument that is out there. People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents and people simply because they are not aware of the possible. This is one of the reasons I often urge my student advisees to find out who the smart professors are, and to get themselves in front of those professors so they can see what smart looks like.”

That’s the quote.

Dunning shares these concerns with many other scientists, but in fact many of them may not realize that the ancient sages dealt with it and understood it more holistically. Socrates and other philosophers knew intimately that ignorance is not merely a lack of information. Rather, ignorance in the spiritual or philosophical sense becomes most dangerous when it presents itself as knowledge.

We have voiced this concern several times in our contemplation of the medicines of our World. We have suggested that, because of our context, we might be like the people Dunning describes who just have no idea what they’re missing. They may think they can play a pretty fine game of Scrabble, but that’s only because they never met someone who really knows how to play.

The lines that maybe stand out the most in Dunning’s reflections are these: “people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of . . . People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents and people simply because they are not aware of the possible.”

That’s a central issue in all of the Dangerous Wisdom podcasts. If we don’t know what’s possible, we may think what we’re doing is as good as it gets.

Dunning says he wants students to find out about possibilities they might not even imagine. So he sends them out to find examples of excellence.

Similarly, we have consistently suggested that we all need to seek out examples of excellence in the wisdom traditions, since it may be hard for some of us to imagine what we might be missing out on, and it might be hard for us to guess what a human being is actually capable of, and thus what our culture and our World are capable of. If we don’t get clearer about this, then capitalism will remain in our mind the best way to organize our activity, the political system we have will remain in our mind the best way to codify that activity, and we will continue to degrade the conditions of life.

And our culture keeps philosophy away from us precisely to make sure we don’t start imagining new and better possibilities.

And so I encounter people all the time who behave as if they don’t need training from the wisdom traditions, and they seem disinclined to put in the efforts that LoveWisdom demands.

Here we can name two of the major forms of self-deception we have to face in the dominant culture: Either thinking that LoveWisdom is too much for us, or thinking that we are too much for it.

When we think LoveWisdom is too much for us, we say, “It’s abstract,” “It goes over my head,” “It’s too hard,” “I don’t want to do all this stuff,” and so on. We reject parts of the wisdom traditions, or we reject some of the central teachings, and we basically avoid critical reflection and study. We don’t always avoid it completely, but we make sure to steer clear of anything too threatening. The ego dismisses that stuff as too much for us.

Sometimes this goes hand in hand with the other side of the duality, when we act as if we are too much for LoveWisdom.

We may have had some seemingly big experiences, or we may think we have a very old soul, or whatever it may be, and we say, “I don’t need these practices,” “I don’t need any more teachings,” “I already know everything within myself,” “All the answers are within me,” or, “I trust this deeper way of knowing.”

And that may sound good to our ego and to some of the people around us, but from the standpoint of the wisdom traditions, it could be that we haven’t even made much of a start, and what we think we’ve discovered might remain rather shallow, wobbly, and unreliable. Nor do we know how to move forward in a skillful way that will truly benefit the whole community of life.

In light of these kinds of challenges, our effort here has to do with expanding dialogue and offering a respectful view of the evident power that the medicines of our world have—that’s why they’re medicines: they have a tremendous amount of power.

So, can we revere that so much that we could say that maybe we have a lot more to learn about how to work with them?

The medicines have power, but maybe the power and potential they have goes far beyond what we think. And maybe in some ways we also have a kind of bad magical thinking in relationship to these medicines, that there are certain aspects of their magic that we have misunderstood.

We want to tap into the fullest power and potential in ourselves and in the medicines of the World, for the sake of our own highest values, and for the benefit of all beings, including the beings nearest and dearest to us already.

And in order to do that, in this contemplation in particular, we want to look more directly at a core ethical concept and set of practices in a holistic ecology of wisdom, love, and beauty. As I said, this is one of the strongest recommendations I could make to anyone wanting to work with the medicines of our World.

If someone came to me and said, “I have suffered with PTSD for years, and I have signed up to work with a psychedelic medicine. What do you as a philosopher think is the most important thing for me to do in order to prepare to work with this medicine?”

And the first thing I would say is, “Can we pause? Can you postpone working with the medicine, until we can get you grounded in the basics of a holistic philosophy of life?”

So holism still remains the principle recommendation.

We don’t even have to pick a particular tradition to work with right away. We can begin at least to root ourselves in the common ground of all traditions first.

And that’s part of the importance of cultivating a common ground: to know that it’s there, that we can draw from it like a spiritual commons we all benefit from and take care of. It’s a place of kinship.

And this correlates with places in our ecologies that we all benefit from and that we must all take care of. These things go totally together.

Through our spiritual commons, we can learn some of the core elements, and then we can eventually find a teacher and a lineage of practice.

If the person said, “Ok, that sounds great. Where do we begin?” then I would begin with basic teachings, and the first practice would be compassion training. That’s the place I begin with everyone.

When I was in the university system, I wouldn’t even teach a course in logic without grounding it in compassion training,

and when I work with clients of any kind, and also when I work with horses, compassion training serves as the common ground. That’s where we begin.

And horses love it, so we know it’s good. That’s the real gold standard.

We can say there are a few key aspects of compassion that matter for our work with the medicines of our World.

One of the central issues has to do with the nature of knowing or experiencing anything at all. When we work with the medicines of our World, we can do so in a manner oriented toward insight. We want reality. We cannot depend on delusion. Self-deception and delusion of any kind will eventually cause suffering for us and for others.

But what we know and what we experience depends on what we have practiced and what we have become.

Buddha put it very well in one of the great moments of LoveWisdom. I share this one all the time, so forgive me if you’ve heard it before.

This brahmin came up to Buddha and said, “Buddha, you’re the medicine for so many people. And you went into the forest to become that medicine. But isn’t it hard to go into the forest like that? Don’t people lose their spiritual focus?”

Keep in mind, Buddha wasn’t a Navy SEAL or a wilderness survival expert. He was basically raised in the equivalent of a royal family, with not much training about staying in a wild forest with tigers, snakes, and all kinds of other challenging beings and situations. And this brahmin asking him about it would have been no better off. A brahmin is a priest, not a wilderness guide.

So Buddha says to the brahmin, “Well, you’re right about that.” He says, and this is my favorite line, he says, “Any driveller can go into the forest.” I love that. Any idiot can go into the forest.

Anyone at all can wander into the forest today. Anyone at all can take ayahuasca, or peyote, or MDMA. And nice things may happen.

The forest is still a source of medicine. Today we have begun to recognize that going into the forest can make us feel really nice. It can feel profoundly therapeutic for some people.

We want to honor that. And, as always, we want to ask what we might be missing simply because we have no idea it’s possible anymore.

In a way, so-called forest bathing is a good example of how the dominant culture waters down everything that could reconnect us with reality. Forest bathing usually involves the tamest experience of Nature. No tigers, no snakes . . . nothing more threatening than mosquitos and poison oak.

And it’s not that we require dangerous wildness for the forest to offer us healing. It’s that, when we follow the fragmentation of conquest consciousness, then we don’t need to do anything more than forest bathing.

It doesn’t require a holistic ecology of practice. It’s not threatening to us in the sense that we might have to submit to practices, rituals, ceremonies, spiritual vows, and a holistic training of the mind, heart, body, and World. And it’s not threatening to any of the ignorance of the culture either.

Forest bathing doesn’t demand entry into a path of mystery, a path of ethics, a vision of our vast potential, and a sense of what our mind is, how it works, and how we can work better with it.

Instead, forest bathing as we tend to encounter it allows us to keep everything in our life the same, and just go to our local park a few times a week, and we get to feel better. The culture will stay the same, the wild forests will continue to be killed, the levels of pollution will continue to rise, but we will feel less stressed out by it all.

But this is precisely what Buddha says to the brahmin. He says, “I didn’t just wander into the forest like any old driveller. No. I went into the forest with a mind of love, a mind of compassion, a mind of peace, a mind of joy. I went into the forest with a well-put-together mind, a stable mind, a clear mind.”

He basically tells the brahmin that, if we want to see reality in the forest—if we want to experience the mutual illumination of ourselves and the forest, if we want to experience the mutual nourishment of ourselves and the forest, if we want to experience the mutual liberation of ourselves and the forest—then we need holistic training before we go into the forest.

If we want to receive the medicine of the forest, and also become the medicine in return, then we need training, and that includes love and compassion.

So that’s central to our contemplation together: How do we train our mind so that the psychic forest, the psychic wildnerness that the medicines of our World can show us, can become a place of mutual nourishment, mutual illumination, and mutual liberation?

To take up this kind of training means we have to relate with compassion in a holistic way, relate with it as an aspect of a holistic ecology. It is not a “tool” in our “toolbox,” it’s not a technique, it’s not a hack—and we want to try to transcend that kind of thought.

When we take a more holistic approach, we see compassion as related to the ethics of consciousness. The questions of an ethics of consciousness include, “How do I use my consciousness? How do I use my life? What am I here for? What is this consciousness capable of doing—both the good and the bad, so that I can understand?”

And fragmentation is itself bad use of ourselves, bad use of the mind and body, bad use of the World, and bad use of awareness—because, at the deepest level we’re just asking how we use awareness, how the primordial mind manifests itself.

And as we said, it manifests as an interwovenness, including the interwovenness of wisdom, love, and beauty. Compassion as a practice helps us to see the interwovenness of all things.

Compassion practice holds a central place in the cultivation of ethics. And that’s part of how it goes far beyond empathy. We’ll talk about that in a moment, but keep in mind: compassion is not empathy.

In the dominant culture, because we have so marginalized LoveWisdom and the teachings of all wisdom traditions, so that a lot of the wisdom available gets filtered and co-opted in countless ways, and then we don’t realize that we don’t really understand what compassion is,

and we often mistake it for sympathy, empathy, being kind . . . and compassion includes and transcends all of that.

And compassion as we mean it goes together with ethics, including the ethics of consciousness.

Just as Thich Nhat Hanh has worked on the ethical common ground of the mindfulness trainings, the Dalai Lama has focused on this same ethical aspect of the common in the form of compassion. He’s done a lot of work on this.

And the idea is the same as with Thich Nhat Hanh: In order for a future to be possible, we don’t all have to follow the same religion or philosophy—we each have our own utterly unique path—but we need to find a common ground of wisdom, love, and beauty.

They both focus on the love, the compassion, but they integrate it with wisdom and beauty. So they move from and toward wholeness.

Other teachers do this too, but these are two giants in our global wisdom-field.

The Dalai Lama in his work has encouraged dominant culture scientists in particular to verify the power of compassion, by the standards of dominant culture science—so that there, too, we can begin to see it as a common ground, and see how powerful it is, because wisdom is what works, without negative side-effects. So, we can see how well compassion training functions.

And the Dalai Lama has pointed out that all venerable religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions have a special place for love and compassion. No serious tradition teaches us to refrain from compassion, to be cruel, merciless, to hate. That’s not a teaching in any venerable tradition.

Love and compassion have a special place in every venerable tradition.

The Buddhist traditions are fairly unique in the way they have developed and elaborated concrete practices for working with compassion as the skill that it is. It’s not a mere emotion in the conventional sense. It’s a complex skill that requires training.

Of course, our emotional lives are more nuanced and complex than the dominant culture has so far educated most of us to understand, but even if we acknowledge that, we can see compassion as a kind of special case.

And this is part of why we can benefit from dialogue with the Buddhist traditions. Because we had to learn about compassion by getting Buddhist monks into our laboratories and studying them. We didn’t really understand what our own hearts, minds, bodies, and World are capable of.

We’re fully in line with where we began. We can remember Dunning’s words here: people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of . . . People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents and people simply because they are not aware of the possible.”

We in the dominant culture had no conception of compassion, and therefore we had to learn what was possible from people who understand it far better than we did.

And it turns out to be revolutionary for our culture. It threatens the whole thing.

For instance, in the dominant culture, our entire economic system is based on a certain view of human beings. In that view, we aren’t homo sapiens. Instead, we are homo economicus.

It’s a terrible version of ourselves. And he’s the reason we have to have the society we have.

The story the culture forces us to tell ourselves goes something like this: We are all homo economicus, which means we act selfishly, and we need the capitalist marketplace and the anti-democratic institutions we have, or else we would have mob rule, and people would just take advantage of each other.

It all sounds very reasonable. We can’t have a more cooperative, collaborative, and democratic culture, because we’re too self-centered, and people will take advantage of each other, and we’ll have chaos and violence and laziness.

But the philosophy and science of compassion provides a clear proof that this is false. It overthrows our basic justification for many aspects of our lives. We do not have to remain trapped as self-centered, atomic individuals, and we can establish a more creative, vitalizing, cooperative, collaborative culture, a culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty.

Compassion science demonstrates this as a possibility, because a compassionate orientation makes us more skillful in our whole style of relating, which means it makes us more rational altogether with making us more kind, caring, and conscientious.

All of this has to do with going beyond what we know, and beginning to discover the mysteries we as of yet have no real conception of.

In a related vein, I remember going to a conference where Richie Davidson gave a talk. And he spoke about taking EEG measurements on advanced Buddhist monks while they practiced compassion meditation. And Davidson said that at first they thought the EEG machine was broken, because no one had ever seen an EEG machine do what it was doing while those monks were practicing compassion meditation. So, we’re in the realm of the unknown as far as most people’s experience.

We have to keep in mind that these were highly trained monks. Any of us can learn these things. We can take up this holistic training. But we still have to understand that we’re talking about something outside of what most of us know.

One of the things we can become aware of is that, without the skill of compassion and the related attitudes that go with it, we can suffer from empathic distress and other symptoms of emotional contagion.

And that matters both for people facilitating work with the medicines of our World, as well as for those working directly with the medicines.

People working with any of the medicines of our World can become exceptionally vulnerable to emotional contagion and empathy distress or empathic distress.

They can end up feeling drained, risking burnout, and feeling they need to protect themselves. That may be true. But even more importantly, we all need training in how to dissolve the problem to begin with.

That’s part of the ethics of consciousness: How do we work with suffering, and how to we work with our own states of consciousness and the states of consciousness of others?

The Dangerous Wisdom website has free teachings on the basics of compassion, including how compassion differs from empathy, and how we can begin the practice. You can also find free meditations to get started, along with written instructions in the Dangerous Wisdom blog.

This is crucial training. We can’t emphasize this enough. As mentioned, it’s foundational for all of the work I do.

And one can spend many years mastering it, but we can also make it a foundation from the start. It’s both a beginning and advanced practice at the same time. It continues to unfold with us, and it continue to unfold us.

As we work with it, we can begin to see that it might not be ethical to work with any of the medicines of our World except on this kind of foundation. We could begin to see it as part of the foundation for all teaching and learning, all of human culture.

And now it has gotten verification by the lights of dominant culture science as well. We’re not dealing with this in dogmatic or narrow religious terms. We’re dealing with it as a philosophical or spiritual common ground.

We can be from any religious or philosophical tradition, and we know our tradition has teachings about love and compassion. But what does that mean?

What does it actually mean to cultivate love and compassion? What insights should come with it? What is the experience like?

What do we do to make love and compassion real in us, to nurture it, to bring it out into the World? Not as an abstraction. So we have to have a real set of teachings and practices,

and that’s the benefit of the Buddhist traditions: that they’ve elaborated such teachings and practices in such detail, with so much skill, in such a holistic way.

And we can integrate the practice with any other tradition. Wherever we’re coming from in our religious or philosophical orientation, we know we have a place for love and compassion.

Given that compassion is a skill, we need practices not only to get good at it, but to understand it as well. Life is not a conceptual affair.

But we can at least describe some aspects of compassion, and it may prove helpful to begin by giving a basic definition of compassion, and then contrasting compassion with empathy.

As far as a basic definition, compassion means a skillful response to life, the skillful means we employ in all our relational activity, on the basis of wisdom and beauty.

In particular, compassion has to do with our skillful response to suffering. Compassion arises as an energetic and engaged attitude, in which we actively work for the cessation of suffering anywhere in the universe. In the Buddhist tradition, compassion gives rise to Buddhahood, and a Buddha cannot be a Buddha without unshakeable compassion.

In other words, compassion itself arises as a great medicine. When we have fully awakened our compassion, we ourselves have become the greatest medicine for all beings.

Moreover, compassion nourishes our entire process of becoming enlightened. Without compassion, the landscape of the soul becomes parched. It needs the waters of compassion to bring the seeds of wisdom and beauty to life. Compassion brings vitality and also a measure of ease to our spiritual practice.

Again, this is all preliminary. We’re just getting a basic orientation. To go a little further, we can contrast compassion with empathy.

Empathy is part of our basic capacity for resonance. We are interwoven, and empathy goes together with experiencing that interwovenness.

So, if you yawn, I might yawn. If you smile, I smile. And if I see you getting pricked with a needle, the same area in my brain would light up, as if I were getting pricked by the needle.

Empathy seems to feel pretty nice if you smile, or laugh, or get tickled. But it’s not so great when you suffer, because if you suffer, then I will suffer too. So, instead of having an orientation to liberation from suffering, empathy has the orientation of getting pulled into suffering.

We find some important nuances here, because compassion training has to do with how we best work with positive states too. Even in positive states, empathy is too limiting, because empathy lacks wisdom and beauty. But we don’t usually notice the limits of empathy very well until we sense some suffering, and that’s part of why we start by talking about more obvious forms of suffering.

If we only know empathy, then, when others around us suffer, we can start to experience what’s called empathic distress or empathy distress.

And think how intense this can become when we see people who have to live in the streets, or when we see police violence against a marginalized group, or we sense ecological degradation, maybe even see an animal dead on the road because they got hit by a car, or we see a news story about birds dying with plastic in their bellies.

We feel that. And it becomes toxic to us.

Empathic distress used to be called compassion distress or compassion fatigue. Now we know better. We had to learn. We know the difference between compassion and empathy.

It’s precisely incorrect. There’s no such thing as compassion fatigue. There is empathy distress, and compassion is the medicine that heals that. There isn’t compassion fatigue.

Compassion is like a larger space. Empathy is like this little space where we just feel with.

We don’t want to give up on empathy. We need that basic resonance. But we need to mature beyond it, and be in the larger space that includes it. Compassion includes our empathetic capacity, but it goes beyond it, so that we don’t suffer the limitations.

If we don’t do that, a lot of things can go wrong, not least of which that we can begin to feel a victim to our empathy—at least when the empathy involves suffering.

We might not even know this has happened in certain situations. We can experience emotional contagion, and simply assume the negative feelings are our own. This happens in intimate relationships all the time.

Our dearest friend or life partner can come in the room, and suddenly we feel tense, and we get sharp with them, because we don’t realize that we have picked up on their tension.

And since they are indeed already tense, then when we get reactive to them, they might get reactive right back at us, and we find ourselves in an argument over nothing. Someone needed to be able to sense and respond differently.

Compassion helps us here, and in countless other situations of suffering.

Compassion is the larger space where we can be sensitive to what other beings experience without mistaking it for our own experience.

Similarly, that larger space of compassion allows us to feel sensitive to what part of us experiences without getting hooked on it and taking it as the whole of ourselves.

Because sometimes a part of us feels anxious about something, and another part of us feels excited, and we can experience significant conflict and stop enjoying our life.

In some cases, actually, we can just see the energy as energy, and not assume it’s anxiety. That can be helpful.

In other cases, maybe we really accept that a part of us feels anxious, and another part feels positive, and those two might exist at the same time, and we can acknowledge both without having to identify with either of them.

We may experience a clear sense of depression or fear, but we don’t have to get sucked into it and identify with it. We can rest in the larger space of compassion that allows things to arise with increasing clarity but without our getting so thrown off kilter or hooked by them.

We can become exquisitely sensitive to whatever arises, and become increasingly skillful at working with it.

The way I sometimes put it: Empathy is like flapping our wings; compassion is like flying. We can flap our wings a lot, and yet not get very far. Flying relies on our capacity to flap our wings, but it also requires more than that.

Compassion means liberating ourselves into the spaciousness of the sky, and knowing how to fly in it.

There are levels of compassion, and we’re touching on a basic level here. It’s essential to learn about the levels of compassion, and you can find introductory material on that as well on the Dangerous Wisdom site.

Even at the basic level of compassion, we can begin to liberate ourselves into a larger ecology of mind, into a spaciousness in which we have clarity about what’s happening, but we aren’t controlled by it, we aren’t forced to go with it, and we don’t get reactive and seek to manipulate.

We have contrasted empathy and compassion. We should also define empathic distress and contrast it with compassion. This matters for all of us, because empathy distress is a serious challenge for all of us. If we have a friend or life partner experiencing a lot of suffering, it can trigger empathy distress in us, and the climate crisis itself can produce empathy distress in us.

This also matters for care workers in particular. If our job demands that we get exposed to significant suffering on a regular basis, it can create burnout and other symptoms.

So, especially for care workers of all kinds—therapists, teachers, veterinarians, parents, nurses, and anyone working with the medicines of our World—we want to try to give a sense of how compassion differs from empathy in terms of the distress we can experience with empathy.

But we’ve already done a lot of work together. This is a good place to pause, and we’ll pick up with empathy distress in our next contemplation. We’ll also discuss tonglen, which is a powerful practice for our lives that can vitalize our work with any of the medicines of our World.

If you would like to learn more about compassion, go to the Dangerous Wisdom resources page. We’ll go over a few recommended books in our next contemplation.

If you have questions, reflections, or stories to share about the medicines of our World and your experiences with them, get in touch through dangerouswisdom.org We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until next time, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the World are not two things—take good care of them.