# Suffering, Sacrifice and Compassion — Part 3: The Flame 

By Peter Pink-Howitt, 6 November 2026.
Web page: https://compossible.blog/2026/11/06/suffering-sacrifice-compassion-the-flame/
Licence: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

---

*Continued from [Part 2: Fellow‑Mortals](#).*

## Sacrifice

> "I am the ritual and the sacrifice;
> I am the offering and the fire which consumes it,
> and the one to whom it is offered."[^103]
> (*Bhagavad Gita*)

Life and sacrifice are deeply intertwined, as the Sanskrit root[^104] of the word *god* shows. Whatever your persuasion, the idea of life as loaned, and therefore to be returned, has great force. Sacrifice is various: of ego, ambition, resources, time, opportunity, and of being alive.

Historically, sacrifice as an offering — a bargain with the world — was driven by the desire to have a more powerful entity on our side. That desire arose from an intelligence that quickly reached two painful, self‑conscious truths: *living is full of uncertainty — I do not know how I will live*; and *death is certain — I will die, and I do not know when, how or why*.

> "… From there developed the image of a God who intentionally designs and directs nature for the good of humankind, who expects worship in return and who rewards the pious and punishes the impious. The fact that 'conveniences and inconveniences happen indiscriminately to the pious and the impious alike' did not make them reassess their image of God, but led them to give up explaining God's purposes and to conclude that God's ways are inscrutable to man."[^105]
> (Beth Lord on Spinoza)

Human sacrifice shows plainly that the value of a human life is, in some circumstances, counted as less than the perpetuation of the code and the species. That is consistent with the view that the ultimate ethical driver is the perpetuation of life itself through its many forms.

### The oldest sacrifice

For women, sex with the possibility of birth has always been fraught with danger; until very recently childbirth carried a high risk of death. Here the need to procreate overwhelms the strong drive to self‑protection: women have risked their lives since the dawn of humanity to perpetuate our code.

![Gustav Klimt, "The Kiss", 1907–08](kiss.webp)

[^106]

Rearing children in civilisations increasingly dominated by men brought further demands — of time, personal interest and day‑to‑day freedom of action — and made women vulnerable to mistreatment through a deep asymmetry of freedom.[^107] Men did their part too, often injured or killed in the hunt or in invading or defending communities.[^108] Perhaps this very generalised distinction in roles — women have always been hunters and warriors too — makes women better at managing ethical conflicts, at attaching value to life‑forms, and at the practical trade‑offs (appropriate sacrifices) that life requires.

![Gustav Klimt, “Death and Life”, 1915, Google Art Project, public domain.](death-and-life.webp "Gustav Klimt, “Death and Life”, 1915, Google Art Project, public domain.")

The asymmetry persists and has a dark side: violence and subjugation, visible for instance in the far harsher treatment of women found to have slept with married men than of the married men themselves. In many countries women still pay a high price for being unlucky in love. Technologies that let women choose when to have children have released some of that pressure, and men are taking on more of the home and the raising of children, which should help make whole the masculine and the feminine.

> "I can feel the tug
> of the halter at the nape
> of her neck, the wind
> on her naked front.
>
> It blows her nipples
> to amber beads,
> it shakes the frail rigging
> of her ribs.
>
> … Little adulteress,
> before they punished you
> you were flaxen‑haired,
> undernourished, and your
> tar‑black face was beautiful.
>
> … I who have stood dumb
> when your betraying sisters,
> cauled in tar,
> wept by the railings,
> who would connive
> in civilised outrage
> yet understand the exact
> and tribal, intimate revenge."[^109]
> (Seamus Heaney, "Punishment")

![Chocho8, “Poloha_Tollundsk”, Wikipedia, 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0; see Wikipedia, “Tollund Man”. Robert Clark has taken the most beautiful photos of bog bodies; see Christine Dell’Amore, “Who Were the Ancient Bog Mummies? Surprising New Clues”, National Geographic, 19 July 2014.](adultress.webp "Chocho8, “Poloha_Tollundsk”, Wikipedia, 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0; see Wikipedia, “Tollund Man”. Robert Clark has taken the most beautiful photos of bog bodies; see Christine Dell’Amore, “Who Were the Ancient Bog Mummies? Surprising New Clues”, National Geographic, 19 July 2014.")

### Appeasing the gods

At a societal level sacrifice is justified on utilitarian grounds as payment by the few for the benefit of the many — though it all too often becomes payment by the many for the benefit of the few. In religion it was long a central act of worship, and rarely voluntary. Thousands of years ago a Buddhist king of what is now India had to issue an edict against it:

> "The beloved of the Gods, king Piyadasi, has caused this dhamma edict to be written. Here (in my domain) no living beings are to be slaughtered or offered in sacrifice."[^110](Ashoka)

Involuntary human sacrifice appears in nearly every culture, from Moloch to the Minoan Minotaur,[^111] from the Aztec[^112] removal of still‑beating hearts to the child sacrifices of the Incas. To be so widespread in time and place it must be a very old tradition indeed.

![Moloch for the Minotaur: https://compossible.blog/2025/03/09/moloch/](molochweb_hu_e384cfcbffe48257.webp "Moloch for the Minotaur: https://compossible.blog/2025/03/09/moloch/")

> "The sun God Huitzilopochtli was waging a constant war against darkness, and if the darkness won, the world would end. To keep the sun moving across the sky and preserve their very lives, the Aztecs had to feed Huitzilopochtli with human hearts[^113] and blood."[^114]

![from Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de Tierra Firme, vol. 1 (‘The Gods’), Plate 7](sacrifice.jpg "from Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de Tierra Firme, vol. 1 (‘The Gods’), Plate 7")

Such beliefs make atrocity easy. *What beliefs do we hold now that will one day look as atrocious and as wrong as the still‑beating hearts of Aztec cosmology?*

Not all sacrifice was to the gods. Early dynastic Egypt practised "retainer sacrifice", killing servants to serve the pharaoh in the afterlife,[^115] and similar practices appear in other early civilisations and in Neolithic and Palaeolithic communities. Upper Palaeolithic graves containing pairs or groups of the young or deformed, richly furnished, point the same way.[^116] Human sacrifice is so far‑ranging and so deep in our past that it looks very like a culturally necessary stage in the evolution of any life‑form that develops complex culture and belief.

### Self and hive

The human relationship with sacrifice goes to the heart of what it is to be sentient, social and sapient. At the individual level it asks whether we can overwhelm the biological drive to survive. In sacrifice for higher ideals, it hints that we perceive our true status as social animals with limited intrinsic worth apart from the community.

Some species — insects above all[^117] — are so wholly engaged on behalf of the colony that *self*, self‑protection and self‑sacrifice may have a different meaning or none, since their code so strongly conditions behaviour and their sentience is contested or on a different scale.[^118]

Sacrifice can also be a commitment to do something great together — extraordinary *collective* freedom of action — like going into space, or building a cathedral that will take more than a century and to which generations of the same artisan family give their lives without seeing it finished.

![Sagrada Família](sagrada.webp "C Messier, “Σαγράδα Φαμίλια 2941” (Sagrada Familia), Wikipedia, 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0.")

[^123]

For sapients, extreme sacrifice requires a difficult choice, coercion, or a still more powerfully coded imperative able to override self‑protection. Yet humans are coded for small sacrifices throughout life, and to give up life itself for close family. In its most advanced form, sacrifice is the individual calculating the best outcome for family, tribe, country or belief and paying with their life.[^119]

> "As Darwin noted, the virtuous and brave do what is right, regardless of consequences, as a moral imperative. (Indeed, we have suggestive neuroimaging evidence that people process sacred values in parts of the brain devoted to rule‑bound behavior rather than utilitarian calculations – think Ten Commandments or Bill of Rights.)"[^120]
> (Scott Atran)

It is not clear that bravery is a moral imperative distinct from a utilitarian weighing of good and bad; it may simply be a difference in the *strength* of the ethical opinion rather than its kind. A person may reckon their own death a reasonable cost against the payoff to those they save — or act instinctively with no calculation at all.

There is also a shamanistic sympathy between the ritual killing of a life‑form and the recognition that life and death are intertwined. The ritual offering of an animal may be, perversely, a plea for its continued existence, an acknowledgement of the uneasiness of the hunt — perhaps even of the possibility of the hunter being hunted in a next life.[^121] It makes the murderous nature of survival sacred.

> "Something to do with violence
> A long way back, and wrong rewards,
> And arrogant eternity."[^122]
> (Philip Larkin)

### Burnt in a holy place

Sacrifice is also the willingness to kill, hurt or punish those who believe differently. The cost of non‑belief, or slight difference of belief — in Christianity, Islam, communism — has shown an extraordinary propensity to sacrifice life and kill compassion in the name of absolute gods, when such philosophies have mostly been used to control people.[^124]

> "And standing on the altar high,
> Lo what a fiend is here! said he:
> One who sets reason up for judge
> Of our most holy Mystery.
>
> The weeping child could not be heard.
> The weeping parents wept in vain:
> They strip'd him to his little shirt.
> And bound him in an iron chain.
>
> And burn'd him in a holy place,
> Where many had been burn'd before:
> The weeping parents wept in vain.
> Are such things done on Albion's shore."[^125]
> (William Blake, "A Little Boy Lost")

The murderous persecution of unbelievers by a religion founded on the story of Christ is the zenith of this unholy doublethink.

> "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."[^126]
> (John 12:24)

Conversely, sacrifice can be the willingness to be martyred for a belief that does not accord with the demos or the authorities — Jesus, Socrates, Giordano Bruno, dying for truthfulness or love above hypocrisy. In modern times religions have moved from ending life to appease the powers to sacrificing material gain for spiritual "wealth". Giving something to receive something is a wholly utilitarian idea, however misguided people have been about the nature of the exchange.

### Abraham, Job and the jealous god

![Caravaggio, "Sacrifice of Isaac", c. 1603](isaac.webp "Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, “Sacrifice of Isaac”, c. 1603, Wikipedia, public domain. ")

[^127]

> "Take your son, your only son, whom you love – Isaac – and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you."
> (Genesis 22:2)

Abraham and Isaac connect the prehistoric religions to those still with us. Abraham begins to comply before a messenger interrupts: it was a test of faith — and no doubt a deliberate contrast with the old gods who required human blood. Caravaggio captures the cruelty and the visceral fear so well that Isaac's face still comes alive.

The God of the Old Testament is a jealous god[^128] — or gods, since the stories arose from a melting pot of beliefs (Yahweh, Elohim) in the long transition from tribal polytheism to national monotheism. He takes sides and requires appeasement, as with Cain and Abel.[^129] And he gives us the pitiable figure of Job.[^130]

> "One day, Yahweh made an interesting wager in the divine assembly with Satan, who was not yet a figure of towering evil but simply one of the 'sons of God' … Satan pointed out that Job, Yahweh's favourite human being, had never been truly tested but was good only because Yahweh had protected him … 'Very well,' Yahweh replied, 'all that he has is in your power.' Satan promptly destroyed Job's oxen, sheep, camels, servants, and children, and Job was struck down by a series of foul diseases."[^131]
> (Karen Armstrong)

Job cursed his fate and could not see the justice of it. After an unsatisfying, self‑aggrandising tirade from Yahweh — Job might have hoped for an explanation of life, death and the point of suffering[^132] — he was rewarded for not presuming to know God's ways, with seven new sons and three new daughters.

![William Blake, "Job's Evil Dreams", 1805](blake_job.webp "William Blake, “Job’s Evil Dreams”, 1805, Wikipedia, public domain.")

[^133]

> "Nature is none other than God in things."[^134]
> (Giordano Bruno)

A common belief in good in the universe, in compassion and the commonality of life — God as the life‑force — crosses every sect. Religions have also tortured and killed heretics, and in some countries certain statements are still punishable by death on religious grounds.[^135] It is time to abandon the unnecessary elements of religion, the archaic practices that no longer serve, and the leaders who do not encourage freedom of thought; to exalt compassion as the only ethical and holy truth within a practical, evidence‑based framework. We need a new "religion" — in the old sense of shared rituals and experiences that make sense of the world — to help humans rejoin the wider community of life.

> "A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness."[^136]
> (Salman Rushdie)

### Hollowed to be hallowed

Sacrifice can also be a hollowing‑out to become hallowed.[^137] Many great artists and holy people reach the same conclusion: to swim in the sea of humanity and be a fisher of souls requires self‑effacement — a reduction of the insistent *I* in exchange for a deeper reach into the collective unconscious, and a return with a precious haul.

> "The subliminal self is in no way inferior to the conscious self; it is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; it has tact, delicacy; it knows how to choose, to divine. What do I say? It knows better how to divine than the conscious self, since it succeeds where that has failed."[^138]
> (Henri Poincaré)

What is found when the chattering, acquisitive monkey mind is set aside is a process of discovery common to artists, scientists and holy people. It requires mastery of a technology, humility, and a willingness to let a deeper part of oneself work. It is an acceptance of the limits, or absence, of "free will". And what is found is not owned or even really created by the discoverer; the Greeks knew this, and thought of philosophers as receivers of ideas. Wisdom is a technology of the mind — communal property, if one must insist "on so much of yours and mine".[^139]

> "In the course of centuries the naïve self‑love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe … the second blow fell when biological research destroyed man's supposedly privileged place in creation … But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house."[^140]
> (Sigmund Freud)

## Into the Inferno We Fell

There are so many other great sacrifices of human life — the Gulag, slavery, the destruction of the American Indian civilisations, the plight of the Australian aborigines, the rape and pillage of nearly every people at some point in empire‑building. Better writers have given them the treatment they deserve. Here I consider only the two world wars, and only to make the wider point about how wrong we can be, and remain, in what we value and what we ignore.

Lest we think sacrifice belongs to other places and "less civilised" times: warfare demands the greatest sacrifice and can arrive at any time. It has been imposed on most peoples in the last few centuries, less so on the West since the invention of atomic weapons. The cost of the Second World War is mostly seen as unavoidable given the eugenic evil of Nazism; it is hard to say that of almost any other war of recent centuries.[^141] The Second might even have been avoidable but for the conditioning brutality of the First and the excessive reparations imposed by the victors — though by then, one suspects, the gathering forces of xenophobia, mass communication and industrialised slaughter were unstoppable. I have written elsewhere about [why removing one man from history would not have removed those forces](https://compossible.blog/2024/04/09/freewill-or-freedom-part-2/).

Into the Inferno we fell…

![Gustave Doré, "Lucifer Cast Out of Heaven", 1866](dore.webp "Gustave Doré, \"Lucifer Cast Out of Heaven\", 1866")

> "Long is the way
> And hard, that out of
> Hell leads up to Light."[^142]
> (John Milton)

![Pablo Picasso, "Guernica", 1937](guernica.webp "Pablo Picasso, \"Guernica\", 1937")

> "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
> \[All hope abandon, ye who enter here]."[^143](Dante)

How do we enter Hell on Earth and speak of it adequately? The world wars; the mechanisation, administration and industrialisation of suffering and murder in Germany and Russia; the firebombs and the atomic bombs; the tens of millions killed; the hundreds of millions injured in body, sex and mind. All of it is beyond language and almost beyond contemplation.

> "In all men's hearts it is.
> Some spirit old
> Hath turned with malign kiss
> Our lives to mould.
> Red fangs have torn His face.
> God's blood is shed.
> He mourns from His lone place
> His children dead.
> O! ancient crimson curse!
> Corrode, consume.
> Give back this universe
> Its pristine bloom."[^144]
> (Isaac Rosenberg, "On Receiving News of the War")

Yet we must consider the inferno, because more than any other period it brings the central questions into focus. *How can we be so wrong about what is right? How can we inflict so much suffering in pursuit of what we believe to be right? How did we decide that the suffering of millions of life‑forms is not a thing to care about while we go about our daily lives?*

> "It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame … that the just man experiences at another man's crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence."[^145]
> (Primo Levi)

No sane person wishes to revisit this. The first half of the twentieth century was a charnel‑house.[^146] But the desire for wisdom requires us to grasp the banality beneath the horror — the ease with which wrong thinking and wrong action can be carried out by any of us.

Mostly I remember with sorrow those who suffered and with gratitude those who found a way to save lives. The troubling days are those when what frightens me is that I have no idea how I would have behaved — victim, perpetrator or silent witness. None of us can be sure. So we must look to how we treat the suffering of people and life‑forms today, where we live.

We "see through a glass darkly", and the glass is a mirror. Each of us carries the potential for good and bad, and luck often decides which seed is watered. What should concern us most is that millions of ordinary people took part in these events — not scheming megalomaniacs — and were complicit, or looked away. That is what Hannah Arendt and the other witnesses tell us.

> "They … the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non‑men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer … if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen."[^147]
> (Primo Levi)

Levi brings a scientist's eye to the systematic destruction of moral status in both victim and perpetrator. His book is an astonishing testament and an act of great ethical courage: he brought back knowledge and wisdom from hell.

Nazi Germany reduced many of its people to thoughtless inattention to basic ethical principle. We find it hard to believe because we do not want to. The child in us wants a world of black and white, good and evil; the harder truth is that each and its opposite are in every one of us, and how we act can make this journey hell for others — through basic thoughtlessness and hidden industrial process rather than any evil intent.

> "Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil."[^148]
> (Hannah Arendt)

![SS auxiliaries at the Solahütte resort near Auschwitz, 1944](ssaux.webp "SS auxiliaries at the Solahütte resort near Auschwitz, 1944")

[^149]

I have used no photographs of Holocaust victims here, out of respect for the dead and their families, and because even the most horrifying image is insufficient. But this photograph — SS auxiliaries having fun at a resort near Auschwitz — shows better than a thousand words the truth of Arendt's insight. Given the wrong conditions, human beings can do almost anything and convince themselves of its rightness, or, more troubling still, of the absence of any moral question at all.[^150]

Why dwell on suffering and sacrifice at such length? To re‑sensitise the mind to the commonality of pain, and to remind us how wrong we can be about which life‑forms deserve freedom of action and protection from unnecessary suffering. The maximum diversity of compatible life‑forms, species, cultures and beliefs is essential to the success of life, and therefore to any universal ethics.

### Owen

I close the section on sacrifice with one of the finest English poets, whose life was cut off in its prime like so many young men's. Wilfred Owen fought in a war he did not believe in, and — "the pity of war, the pity war distilled"[^151] — died a week before the Armistice. He chose to return to the trenches to continue the effort, with Sassoon and others, to tell people at home what hell on Earth was really like. He redeemed his suffering and transformed his death in a senseless slaughterhouse; he was an alchemist of suffering. The glory of war was "the old lie"[^152] told by old men to a generation of young ones.

"To Eros", written before the war, is ostensibly about erotic love. Its blood‑and‑ash imagery and abandonment of Christianity read as a presentiment[^153] of the war that would kill some 15–20 million soldiers and civilians, and even of the descent that was to follow.

> "In that I loved you, Love, I worshipped you;
> In that I worshipped well, I sacrificed.
> All of most worth I bound and burnt and slew:
> The innocent small things, fair friends and Christ.
>
> I slew all falser loves, I slew all true,
> For truth is the prime lie men tell a boy.
> Glory I cast away, as bridegrooms do
> Their splendid garments in their haste of joy.
>
> But when I fell and held your sandalled feet,
> You laughed; you loosed away my lips; you rose.
> I heard the singing of your wings' retreat;
> And watched you, far‑flown, flush the Olympian snows,
> Beyond my hoping. Starkly I returned
> To stare upon the ash of all I burned."[^154]
> (Wilfred Owen, "To Eros")

Perhaps it also points to the future awaiting us if we go on degrading the biosphere and sacrificing other life‑forms to our demand for ever more living matter: a grey world covered in the ash of burnt offerings to our egos and thoughtless passions. Another holocaust.

## Compassion

> "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your friends, hate your enemies.' But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in heaven. For he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil."[^187]
> (Jesus of Nazareth)

Compassion is the bridge between logic and love. It can arise subconsciously and is often a manifestation of wisdom following suffering. It is a special kind of wealth: it accumulates and compounds with use, as we open the doors to the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life. Every step toward the suffering and needs of other life‑forms increases our feeling for one another. The root of the word is *com* (with) and *pati* (suffer) — a courageous connection with other life‑forms through imagination and empathy.[^188]

![Aimé Morot, "The Good Samaritan", 1880](samaritan.webp "Aimé Morot, \"The Good Samaritan\", 1880")

[^190]

In the parable of the Good Samaritan,[^189] a priest and a Levite cross the road and walk on; the Samaritan — of a people hated by the Jews — binds the man's wounds, carries him to an inn and pays for his care. Jesus's commandment is to go and do likewise.

It is understandable that self‑protecting beings feel overwhelmed by the scale of suffering. It is comforting to blame others for their misfortune, to make sense of it in a way that spares us from understanding and kindness and lets us avoid seeing that person as one of *us*. It absolves us of guilt and of any obligation to share. It lets us shut the door against the fear that it might happen to us. It is the opposite of "there but for the grace of God go I"[^191] — grace here meaning the impersonal turning of the wheel of fortune, "chance's strange arithmetic".

In recent years some governments have moved away from the Good Samaritan altogether, shutting the door on people fleeing persecution, war and death — brave, entrepreneurial souls risking everything, even their children's lives, for a better life. Some have said that rescuing them, even rescuing children from drowning, only encourages more to come, and so they should not be helped when they are in the sea.[^192]

What an extraordinary inversion of the parable.[^193] We are moving thousands of years backwards in ethical wisdom, in this modern language of dis‑compassion.[^194] Under the political "realist" approach the Samaritan becomes an interfering do‑gooder who only makes things worse.[^195] This is what happens when money and power become the gods to whom politicians and privately owned news oligopolies pay homage. We are told to tone down our compassion, to sacrifice the victims and the innocent so that no bad person might ever benefit from our humanity — wilfully ignoring the degradation of that humanity with every step.[^196] Yet there is always room for compassionate freedom of action.[^197] Wisdom can never be spent.

### Cool compassion

Although the road to compassion may begin with feeling, compassion is not a surfeit of feeling that could be exhausted. In its purest form it is abstract, almost impersonal: a state of mind that takes work to maintain, looking beyond the surface of relative form to the deeper nature of impermanence and the commonality of life.

> "\[Einstein's] heart never bleeds, and he moves through life with mild enjoyment and emotional indifference. His extreme kindness and decency are thoroughly impersonal and seem to come from another planet."[^198]
> (Leopold Infeld)

Leonard Cohen on his Zen teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi:

> "He became someone who \[either] really cared about – or deeply didn't care about – who I was. Therefore, who I was began to wither. And the less I was of who I was, the better I felt."[^199]

We see this serene, universal compassion most clearly in the figure of the Buddha and in Buddhism.[^200] It contains a reduction of the pain of aloneness, a diminution of the false sense of an important, separate self. It connects us with the Earth, its life‑forms and the flow of the energy of life. It roots us like a tree and lets us weather storms.

> "No man is an island,
> Entire of itself.
> Each is a piece of the continent,
> A part of the main.
> … Each man's death diminishes me,
> For I am involved in mankind.
> Therefore, send not to know
> For whom the bell tolls,
> It tolls for thee."[^201]
> (John Donne)

![Hokusai, "The Great Wave off Kanagawa"](hokusai.webp)

[^202]

### Song for Derek

When I began writing this, I had no intention of offering anything personal. That intention did not survive.

When he was a young man my younger brother Derek went missing after a party. I wrote him a letter, to be read when he came home, that I hoped would comfort him in what I knew was a very hard time.[^203] While writing, it became clear that I could not get close enough, in prose, to what I wanted to say about suffering and relief from suffering. A poem popped out almost whole, from what felt like the top of my head. It said what I wanted to say to him, from my own experience. I share it here as my communion with all suffering life‑forms, and to remember the countless life‑forms that have left these shores in pain — "the eternal reciprocity of tears".[^204]

> I told my sad story to the wind and,
> brutal wind,
> It would not listen to a single word.
>
> So I sung to the cold cruel sea,
> But it shrugged off my song
> in the toss of a wave,
> Even the dolphins refused to hear me.
>
> Then I gave in and no longer cared,
> And I tried hard to sit still.
> Slowly, with great effort,
> I learned to sit still.
>
> And I learnt that my insignificant song
> was part of a greater chorus:
>
> Many creatures have reason to feel sad
> And who can claim to be lonelier than the sea?
> Even the sun destroys itself
> to give life.
>
> The beauty that exists in yellow leaves,
> that glint in the sun
> as they are torn from the trees,
> is all the more touching because of this.
>
> We should spend our lives:
> Listening for our echoes
> in the silence between birdsong,
> Looking for our image
> in the spaces between stars.
>
> Life without suffering, toil or sorrow
> does not exist here,
> neither shall we.
>
> There are other songs that we must try to hear,
> Perhaps we will then be free.[^205]

Derek never came home.[^206]

![AI generated woodcut of a dolphin](dolphin.webp "AI generated woodcut of a dolphin")

We are all temporary residents on Earth and in this universe. We carry the fire of life, and at times it burns us. We owe it to ourselves and to every life‑form that can feel pain to ease the journey — to hold on to, and value, what must be carried forward for life's improbable possibility to stay alive. Knowledge and suffering can bring wisdom if we reflect on how our experiences bind us together, and that insight can reduce suffering, ours and others'.

Whenever the world feels too full of sorrow, it is because we feel separate and alone. We need to come back to the forgiving stars, the cleansing seas and the broad‑shouldered Earth. They need us to join the greater cycle — so full of strange forms and flows, patterns seen only much later, if at all. We must weep together, laugh, sing and dance. We must give thanks.

> "I cannot grow;
> I have no shadow
> To run away from,
> I only play.
> I cannot err;
> There is no creature
> Whom I belong to,
> Whom I could wrong.
> I am defeat
> When it knows it
> Can now do nothing
> By suffering.
> All you lived through,
> Dancing because you
> No longer need it
> For any deed.
> I shall never be
> Different. Love me."[^207]
> (W. H. Auden, "Anthem for St Cecilia's Day")

If we let go of the fear of death and loss, and of the belief that we are unique in our feelings or pain, we soon see that death and loss are not insufferable. Suffering is a shared inheritance. We are never alone. We are all one body of life.

![AI generated image of a dead soldier surrounded by poppies](poppy.webp "AI generated image of a dead soldier surrounded by poppies")

> "But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,
> That they should be as stones.
> Wretched are they, and mean
> With paucity that never was simplicity.
> By choice they made themselves immune
> To pity and whatever moans in man
> Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
> Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
> Whatever shares
> The eternal reciprocity of tears."[^208]
> (Wilfred Owen, "Insensibility")

## Healing

> "Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un‑uprooted small corner of evil."[^210]
> (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

To lack tolerance and acceptance of the good and the bad is to be unhealthy in oneself. Unholy. The first act of compassion is to accept the dark spaces within — to forgive light and dark their exploration of their degrees of freedom. In a sense all must be forgiven for each of us to be forgiven. Forgiveness here has a special meaning: an acceptance of the limits of freedom and free will, a compassionate understanding of how energies move through histories and people.

> "The birds they sang
> At the break of day
> Start again
> I heard them say
> Don't dwell on what
> Has passed away
> Or what is yet to be…
> Ring the bells that still can ring
> Forget your perfect offering
> There is a crack, a crack in everything
> That's how the light gets in."[^209]
> (Leonard Cohen, "Anthem")

This forgiveness is neither naive nor dangerously innocent.[^211] It does not absolve anyone of the need to make choices and pay the price of poor ones. It asks us to adapt our mental infrastructure and our cultural technology, and to help each other do so. It asks us to look at the whole system — the wave or the river, not just the molecule — as we do in science, and must in the science of compassion.

> "Light is the left hand of darkness
> and darkness the right hand of light.
> Two are one, life and death, lying
> together like lovers in kemmer,
> like hands joined together,
> like the end and the way."[^212]
> (Ursula K. Le Guin)

So we must each forgive the bad done to us or through us, and exchange the self‑centred *I* for a deeper identification with every living manifestation of universal energy. To be unable to look at the causes of unskilful behaviour is to be unwholesome: to damn oneself as bad while claiming good and bad do not exist in *I*, because the mirror is too painful to look into.

The continuation and chance of life, with all its light and dark, is the only good in itself — including its freedom to contain pain and suffering. Time is compassionate: it allows love, and some freedom to be different, again and again. Each act of forgiveness is the ultimate expression of faith in good and in time's redemptive nature. Forgiveness and acceptance are as cool and clear as morning dew on mountain flowers. They do not reject, explain or justify anything. They just are. To forgive is to allow that greater forces move through this world and deflect us all into one another; it does not justify poor practice, it accepts that our actions are also effects of previous actions and potential causes of further suffering. "And so it goes."[^213]

> "Therefore freedom comes not through hatred and denial, but through love and affirmation … To love both the root and the flower, earth and heaven, slime and air, death and life is not merely to like decay because it makes possible growth; it is to bring the two together into an inseparable unity and to become one with it by a complete acceptance; until, beholding it, man can make to himself that tremendous affirmation: Tat tvam asi – That art thou!"[^214]
> (Alan Watts)

None of us holds a monopoly on hurt, and the test of wisdom is not how much we have suffered. It is how much hurt we can let go of, so as not to perpetuate waves of anger and pain for others, and how much wisdom we can bring to the causes of suffering for the benefit of all. That is why the Buddha's teaching is as relevant today as ever.

> "Though the world keeps changing its form
> as fast as a cloud, still
> what is accomplished falls home
> to the Primeval.
>
> Over the change and the passing,
> larger and freer,
> soars your eternal song,
> God with the lyre.
>
> Never has grief been possessed,
> never has love been learned,
> and what removes us in death
> is not revealed.
>
> Only the song through the land
> hallows and heals."[^215]
> (Rainer Maria Rilke, *Sonnets to Orpheus* I.19)

Compassion starts with ourselves — our capacity to forgive ourselves — which lets us step outside ourselves for a moment and really see the wider world of which we are a small part. We must help each other through the anger that follows suffering, and then let it go, to see the wood for the trees.

It is inconceivable that any sapient being should care for a philosophy, economics, religion or politics not rooted, like a tree, in compassion. In a universe with the potential for almost infinite suffering, if we are not compassionate to ourselves and others we may be intelligent, but we cannot be called wise.

> "This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."[^216]
> (Dalai Lama XIV)

![plasm flow - AI generated](water.webp "plasm flow - AI generated")

> "Join water, wade in underbeing
> Let brain mist into moist earth
> Ghost loosen away downstream
> Gulp river and gravity
> Lose words
> Cease
> … As if creation were a wound
> As if this flow were all plasm healing
> … Try to speak and nearly succeed
> Heal into time and other people."[^217]
> (Ted Hughes, "Go Fishing")

- - -

## Footnotes (Part 3)

[^103]: *Bhagavad Gita* 9:16.
[^104]: Wiktionary, "god" — from a root meaning "that which is invoked" or "that to which libation is poured".
[^105]: Beth Lord, *Spinoza's Ethics* (2010), glossing the Appendix to Part I: humans, "ignorant of the true causes of things but conscious of being driven by their desire to seek their own advantage", assumed a ruler of Nature who had made things for them.
[^106]: Gustav Klimt, "The Kiss" (1907–08), public domain.
[^107]: It also gave rise to practices such as *sati*, in which a widow burned on her husband's pyre.
[^108]: Gustav Klimt, "Death and Life" (1915), public domain.
[^109]: Seamus Heaney, "Punishment", *North* (1975). Image: Tollund Man, CC BY‑SA 4.0; Robert Clark's bog‑body photographs for *National Geographic* (2014) are the most beautiful I know.
[^110]: Ashoka, Rock Edict I, Shahbazgarhi; see Livius.org. The edicts are the earliest surviving writing in South Asia (c. 272–231 BCE).
[^111]: Each year Athens sent seven boys and seven girls to be fed to the Minotaur.
[^112]: “The priest quickly sliced into the captive’s torso and removed his still-beating heart. That sacrifice, one among thousands performed in the sacred city of Tenochtitlan, would feed the Gods and ensure the continued existence of the world. Death, however, was just the start of the victim’s role in the sacrificial ritual, key to the spiritual world of the Mexica people in the 14th to the 16th centuries” (Lizzie Wade, “Feeding the Gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital”, Science, 21 June 2018). Image: from Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de Tierra Firme, vol. 1 (‘The Gods’), Plate 7. 
[^113]: *Ibid.* 
[^114]: *Ibid.*
[^115]: Wikipedia, "Retainer sacrifice".
[^116]: Heather Whipps, "Early Europeans Practiced Human Sacrifice", *Live Science*, 11 June 2007. We also have abundant evidence that prehistoric peoples cared for their infirm and disabled: Laura Geggel, "This Ancient Society Buried Disabled Children Like Kings", *Live Science*, 13 February 2018.
[^117]: AntWiki, *Colobopsis explodens*: minor workers of these "exploding ants" rupture their own bodies to smear toxins on attackers.
[^118]: "What beings are conscious?", Animal Ethics.
[^119]: The highest ethical form of a utility‑optimal calculation.
[^120]: Scott Atran, in John Brockman (ed.), *This Explains Everything* (2013).
[^121]: Karen Armstrong, *The Case for God* (2009).
[^122]: Philip Larkin, "Love Again" (1979).
[^123]: C Messier, Sagrada Família, CC BY‑SA 4.0.
[^124]: As my history teacher Mr Ashworth put it, borrowing Andrew Lang: rulers use philosophies as drunks use lampposts — for support rather than illumination.
[^125]: William Blake, "A Little Boy Lost", *Songs of Experience* (1794).
[^126]: Jesus uses the grain of wheat to illustrate the ego‑death required to enter the Kingdom (Wikipedia, "The Grain of Wheat").
[^127]: Caravaggio, "Sacrifice of Isaac" (c. 1603), public domain.
[^128]: Perhaps there is something in this dark, rich soil that gives rise, lily‑like, to so many extraordinary minds from the Jewish community — Cohen, Einstein, Kafka, Mahler, Spinoza, Spielberg. A questioning culture, and the hardships of exile and the destruction of the temples, would make one question a great deal, not least the strange manifestation of "chosenness".
[^129]: Wikipedia, "Cain and Abel".
[^130]: Léon Bonnat, "Job" (1880), public domain.
[^131]: Karen Armstrong, *The Great Transformation* (2005); see also Joan Acocella, "Misery", *The New Yorker*, 16 December 2013.
[^132]: Penelope Minney, "Job's Gethsemane: William Blake and the Problem of Suffering", thehumandivine.org, 3 November 2019.
[^133]: William Blake, "Job's Evil Dreams" (1805), public domain.
[^134]: Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was tortured and burned at the stake by the Church for heresy; his death profoundly influenced free thinkers including Spinoza.
[^135]: Wikipedia, "The Satanic Verses controversy"; Pew Research Center, "Which countries still outlaw apostasy and blasphemy?" (2016); Kate Hodal, *The Guardian*, 8 August 2019.
[^136]: Salman Rushdie, *The Satanic Verses* (1988).
[^137]: T. S. Eliot: "the progress of an artist is a continual self‑sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." See Ben Brice, *Green Altars* (2020).
[^138]: Henri Poincaré, *The Foundations of Science* (1904).
[^139]: Pablo Neruda, "Too Many Names", *Estravagario*: "let us not fill our mouths with so many faltering names … with so much of yours and mine".
[^140]: Sigmund Freud, *Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis* (1916).
[^141]: More men died in the four years of WWI than in all wars between European powers in the preceding century.
[^142]: John Milton, *Paradise Lost* (1667). Image: Gustave Doré, "Lucifer Cast Out of Heaven" (1866), public domain.
[^143]: Dante, *Inferno*, III. Image: Picasso, "Guernica" (1937).
[^144]: Isaac Rosenberg, "On Receiving News of the War" (1914). It is notable that poetry no longer seemed adequate to what followed; the great war poets all wrote during the First.
[^145]: Primo Levi, *If This Is a Man*, trans. Stuart Woolf (1947).
[^146]: Harriet Sherwood, "'The horrors I saw still wake me at night': the liberation of Belsen, 75 years on", *The Guardian*, 12 April 2020.
[^147]: Levi, *If This Is a Man*.
[^148]: Hannah Arendt, *Eichmann in Jerusalem* (1963).
[^149]: "Laughing at Auschwitz", Rare Historical Photos; the Höcker album photographs were taken at the Solahütte resort between May and December 1944. See William Ryan, *The Guardian*, 22 November 2016.
[^150]: *Schindler's List*, dir. Steven Spielberg (1993), fair use.
[^151]: Wilfred Owen, "Strange Meeting" (1919). 
[^152]: Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est" (1920).
[^153]: Carl Jung recorded visions in 1913 of "the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands" (*Memories, Dreams, Reflections*).
[^154]: Wilfred Owen, "To Eros" (written c. 1914–15; published 1983).
[^187]: Matthew 5:43–45.
[^188]: Merriam‑Webster, "What's the difference between sympathy and empathy?"
[^189]: BBC Bitesize, "The Parable of the Good Samaritan". 
[^190]: Aimé Morot, "The Good Samaritan" (1880), public domain.
[^191]: Attributed to John Bradford, mid‑sixteenth century.
[^192]: Alan Travis, "UK axes support for Mediterranean migrant rescue operation", *The Guardian*, 27 October 2014.
[^193]: Daniel Trilling, "How rescuing drowning migrants became a crime", *The Guardian*, 22 September 2020.
[^194]: Al Jazeera, "Children among 45 dead in 2020's worst Mediterranean boat tragedy", 19 August 2020. Image: Banksy, "Migrant Child" (2019), fair use.
[^195]: Tristan Kirk, *Evening Standard*, 6 October 2020.
[^196]: Alan Kurdi, aged three, drowned on 2 September 2015 with his mother and brother. I know no more effective image of how the lack of compassion leads to suffering today.
[^197]: Lorenzo Tondo and Maurice Stierl, "Banksy funds refugee rescue boat", *The Guardian*, 27 August 2020.
[^198]: Leopold Infeld, *Bulletin of the World Federation of Scientific Workers*, July 1954.
[^199]: Sean Murphy, "Being True Love", *Tricycle*, Fall 2007.
[^200]: Buddhist compassion "is not particular, warm, or even a feeling … it is the result of knowing one is part of a greater whole … objective, cold, constant and universal" (Jennifer Goetz, *Greater Good*, 1 June 2004).
[^201]: John Donne, "No Man Is an Island" (1624). 
[^202]: Hokusai, "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" (1830–32), public domain.
[^203]: I knew he was very unhappy and had always struggled with the death of our mother, Mary, when he was a little boy.
[^204]: Wilfred Owen, "Insensibility" (1918).
[^205]: Peter Pink‑Howitt, "Song for Derek" (2004). I was strongly influenced by Eliot, and the poem is in some ways a counterpoint to the terrible, and in this case painfully prophetic, last eight lines of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".
[^206]: It is still striking to me that the sea figures so strongly in this poem and its inspirations, given that Derek had already died in the sea. His death, and the manner of it, were unknown to me when I wrote the letter and the poem.
[^207]: W. H. Auden, "Anthem for St Cecilia's Day" (1942). Music, for Auden, does not heal the pain of living in a fallen world; it offers a way of coming to terms with it.
[^208]: Wilfred Owen, "Insensibility" (1918).
[^209]: Leonard Cohen, "Anthem", *The Future* (1992). The last couplet is possibly adapted from Rumi: "the wound is the place where the light enters you".
[^210]: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, *The Gulag Archipelago* (1973).
[^211]: It is the compassion shown by many who suffered in different ways from the atomic bombings.
[^212]: Ursula K. Le Guin, *The Left Hand of Darkness* (1969); *kemmer* is the time of being in heat.
[^213]: Kurt Vonnegut, *Slaughterhouse‑Five* (1969); also "I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all" (*The Sirens of Titan*, 1959).
[^214]: Alan Watts, *Seven Symbols of Life* (1937). *Tat tvam asi*: "that art thou" — you are the universe and not separate from it. Watts also wrote that the lotus welcomes "darkness and slime as the petals welcome light and air".
[^215]: Rilke, *Sonnets to Orpheus* I.19, trans. Stephen Mitchell (2009).
[^216]: *The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness*, ed. Sidney Piburn (1990).
[^217]: Ted Hughes, "Go Fishing", *River* (1983). Hughes was no stranger to suffering; see Koren and Negev, "Written out of history", *The Guardian*, 19 October 2006.