Mercy; The Radical Practice of Non-Harming with Noah Levine

Feb 8, 2021. The definition of mercy is to not cause harm in a situation where we have the power to cause harm.

If you feel like I did, that compassion is pretty elusive a lot of the time.

The definition of compassion, I think, is caring. Caring about pain – our own pain other people’s pain.

If compassion feels like too high of a bar, mercy is this middle place. It’s this place where you don't even have to care that much, you just are not making it worse.

It's not like, “I'm so loving and empathetic and tender towards the pain”…it's more of… “I'm just going to choose not to make it worse than it already is. I'm going to – as an act of mercy on myself, or on you, or on the world – I'm going to refrain, to the best of my ability, from causing harm on top of an already difficult circumstance, or an already painful phenomena.

Ultimately, we are trying to develop compassion…Mercy is a way station. It is a good sign. It is part of our practice, but ultimately, we're going towards compassion, towards loving kindness, towards equanimity and appreciation, towards deep forgiveness of ourselves and others.

And so, I truly think that mercy is such an important thing to practice, to reflect on, to understand; that in order to go from, “I hate pain to I care about pain”, we have to get into this place of, “I don't quite care about it yet, but I'm in this middle path, this middle place of, I'm just trying to not make it worse. I’m just trying to not hate it. I'm just trying to not hate them. I'm just trying to meet even my enemies with mercy. I don't love them yet. I don't have compassion for them yet. I'm just trying to be merciful enough on myself and on others to not meet the experience with hatred, with aversion, with judgment, with ill will, with wishing harm upon whomever.”

The Buddhist perspective on mercy is so different than our cultural idea of mercy. As Buddhists, we're not so interested in these ideas of theism and external powers. Were interested in this humanist psychology, this empowering understanding that you have the power, that I have the power to ruin my ******* life. I have the power to cause all of this harm to myself, to cause harm to other people, and that as part of our path of awakening, we're going to choose to incline, to develop, to influence our own mind, our own speech, our own actions to have mercy for ourselves and for each other. We’re going to not make it worse.