Transcript

Building Compassion - How Do We Get More Compassion in the World? Christopher Kukk at TEDxHayward

all right I'm here today so I'm going to talk about building compassion and the question the more general question I want to get to you is how do we get more compassion in the world and from here it's a simple question that comes from our leaders obviously the Daly Lama I had the Good Fortune to um meet him back in October and that have breakfast with him and it's like in another world and he obviously makes that question how do we get more compassion in the world but also I would argue when the tragedies that have just occurred around our country and around the world for example West Texas with the explosion of w West Texas President Obama has put courage and compassion together in the Forefront of his comments if you go and Google his comments you'll see that those two words courage and compassion of the residents of West Texas and other communities are the things that he brings to the Forefront but no one's talking about how do we get more of it right they talk about when it happens so it's a question from our leaders it's a question that comes from our non-governmental organizations from our organizations we call Civil Society our Civic organizations like the charter for Compassion or the compassion Action Network their job is to spread the word of compassion and actually have action to it on the grammar school level the university level in cities and towns and they're trying to make universities become universities of compassion and Western Connecticut State University just became the second University in the country to become a university of compassion through the charter uh for compassion it's also a simple question that comes from our past from Einstein and what's amazing is that Einstein has this question but he does it as he always does or I always did in a cool way right he says we have this sense of Independence this sense of separateness that he calls an optical delusion of our Consciousness and he says that keeps us separate but that Consciousness that optical delusion needs to go away it needs to evaporate it needs to disappear because it creates a prison for us and he says how do we get Beyond this optical delusion he argues that we need to widen our circle of compassion so he talks about widening the circle of compassion but he doesn't say how so it's still left as Einstein always did as a question for us to pursue so it comes from our leaders our non-governmental organizations comes from our past but it also comes from our future those are my three little boys uh walking away and for me it really rang home hard from them for the fact that we live just a few miles away from Sandy Hook New Town where that tragedy occurred on 1214 and on the East Coast we also had hurricane Sandy that had massive D destruction but also the a Boston Marathon and so my three boys were asking me why is there so much evil in the world dad why why do we have to be worried why do we have to have these lockdown drills at school and they know about Sandy Hook because we live right there they know about the Boston Marathon we live there for a few years up in Boston as well so it's a question that comes from our future comes from our kids as well so how do we do it how do we build it I argue we weave it uh one of my close friends uh who's a successful businessman he knows I do a lot of different things at the same time and he goes how do I prioritize and I told him I don't prioritize I said it's the wrong thing to do I weave so when I have a bunch of projects coming up I try to tie them together so if they're tied together if one gets a little weak the others if I tie them correctly will keep that other one going and keep it strong and move it along so I always talk about weaving and we weave quite a lot if you think about it we weave to catch our dreams in the dream Weavers we weave to innovate that picture was taken while I was in the GOI desert in China I was there to help the Chinese uh overcome some of their water problems that they have both in terms of desert vacation as well as flooding and I took that picture because I saw hundreds of people in the GOI desert at the edge putting these 1 meter by 1 meter hay squares woven hay squares together down on the desert and I was what what's this this is to stop desertification and by the way it's working in the GOI desert so what happens is that the little rain that happens gets caught like a sponge with the hay squares and as the winds blow the seeds of plants they get caught in the hay squares the water's there and guess what grows back right they're stopping desertification with a simple weaving tool to innovate so we weave to catch our dreams we weave to innovate and we weave for strength this is the sagata familia in Barcelona Spain it's a bunch of pillars inside a church and they what they did is they wo the pillers together to give it such great strength beautiful too we weave if you think about it we weave our clothes chairs buildings we weave it for strength now how do we build more compassion how do we weave it I would argue we weave Institutions and people who care to together and if you're like my boys when you think about weaving people together in institutions you of course I know you do Dan think of zombies right you all think of zombies well I asked my my my Center dude uh I don't have a middle child I have a center dude I asked him what why did he think of zombies and he he drew me a picture of a zombie hug and I said where did you get this from He says Dad we play this game called plant versus zombies and I said we do do we and so I asked them to explain it to me and to show me and what was really interesting I know a lot of the college students play it that's what I found found out you have to cultivate plants sunflowers tomato plants whatever it is to stop the zombies from coming into your house so you have to grow things and I thought that is brilliant that's what we're trying to do we're trying to cultivate compassion to stop the zombies of antipathy hate and IGN ignorance from eating our society away and unfortunately as a former Counter Intelligence agent I've seen what the lack of compassion can do and how it can make zombies out of people and how it can eat away at Society so for me this Plants versus Zombies is an okay game play it has a good lesson uh to be had in here so how do we do that at Western Connecticut State University I'm I wanted to say five ways that we're weaving people and institutions together to build compassion to get more compassion in the world and the first thing we did was become a university of compassion and here I'll just highlight three things one we have courses where compassion is woven into the fabric of those courses and in honors 100 for example it's called the nature of inquiry and I use his Holiness his book The Universe in a single atom to weave in science and compassion into societal concerns it's a great book it's an easy way to do that students really grab on onto the notion anybody can do this it is not hard what we also did is we started a student club called the compassion and creativity club and those students have done amazing work it just happened in October by the way and what they have done is they've kind of taken care of the two sandies we call them around us Sandy Hook and and S Hurricane Sandy they have volunteered for various organizations around Sandy Hook they have uh gone to New Jersey a number of times to help people who had Hurricane Sandy and have been hit really hard by Hurricane Sandy so that creativity and compassion club not only does stuff on campus it go out into the communities another thing that has occurred is that students have taken this on their own this idea of compassion and creativity and woven it together in ways I couldn't even imagine for example one student Alexis Cucos she decided to go to the danur Fair Mall the largest mall in our area and have a fashion show called compassion through fashion and she convinced all the stores including Macy's JC Penney The Works to donate Goods all for the purpose of raising money for Habitat for Humanity it's just snowballing on and it doesn't take much takes a little bit of push and then students you get out of their way and they do some magical things the next thing we've done is that's a picture aerial view of our city that Western Connecticut state universities in Danbury and we've introduced the concept of Danbury becoming the 13th city of compassion in the United States they're already 12 and so what we're doing is we're meeting with the city council again this month to go over 36 different ways of how they can have projects become a city of compassion and why we came up with 36 I asked the students to go to those 12 cities that are already in existence come up with three projects from each of those 12 cities that you think would meet danbury's needs and then the city council can choose from there about how they move on so a simple way of getting it out outside the university and into the community the next thing I'm doing I'm working with one of the mothers of Sandy Hook uh her name is Scarlet Lewis and what we're trying to do through the Jesse Lewis Foundation uh her son was Jesse Lewis is to weave compassion into the common core curiculum and I'm going to steal a little bit of Oliver wend Holmes here he said some people know facts others more wise learn how facts live and through this kind of adaptation to the Common Core we want to promote that idea of not just having students learn the facts but learn make them learn how they live in the real world and how are we doing that I came up with uh a system called the five C's basically real quick it's conceptual learning compassion creativity courage and constraint and what we've done is created already a k through second curriculum and it's on space so we want them to learn this concepts of space but and also some values of compassion and as an example let me just give you one quick one we are introduced dark matter and dark energy to K through second braiders in a fun way right because if you think about it dark matter makes up about approximately 27% of the universe Dark Energy 68% for those of you who are mathematicians that's 95% of the universe and by the way 95% of the universe is invisible we can only see 5% of the matter so they learn about invisibility but then this is the key about values and compassion 27% dark matter is the glue that keeps us all together in the univ 68% dark energy is trying to rip us apart so what they're learning is not only basic pie charts in math but they're also learning the idea that the good in this world the good in the universe is at least as twice as strong as the bad the good that keeps us together is at least as twice as strong as those that try to tear us apart so through their curriculum they're not only getting the Common Core the concepts but also also the values that we hope that every person uh can get and so for me the way I see the Common Core it should be a launching pad for our students not a landing Zone and unfortunately it has become a landing zone so we're trying to increase the common core standards and increase these ideas of exposure to Value such as compassion we also started having uh conferences in the community we just had uh it last month compa and creativity in the community conference where we had five different communities come together who are usually separate from each other for example we had the business Community Health Community spiritual Community government and education national state and local leaders come together to talk about the role of compassion whether there is compassion in their businesses or government level and how they can get it going if there isn't so it was a dialogue to open up a cross-disciplinary dialogue to open up a discussion about it but then lead to action and we had a list of non-governmental organizations that people from the community could then go to to actually do something about when they when they learn uh about the different topics in in the uh conference we've also been very fortunate to get some seed money from his Holiness to DAL Lama to create a new center for compassion creativity and Innovation and that Center that by the way that a picture of the woods on the West Side Nature Preserve on my campus it's a great place to to go and just to get get away from everything and think and that Center is acting as a resource hub for our local communities of getting them together to actually do something in their communities from immigrate immigration communities to uh Women's Health Center to veterinary clinics and we're combining them linking them together so that we can solve the problems in our local community right then and there but then the center also we've also started helping other universities and cities and towns outside of Connecticut Oxford University we're helping the College of New Jersey University of Harford so that we can take the value of compassion to their neck of the woods as well so it's not just centered right around Fairfield County area we're looking to Branch out to help other other centers through the generosity of his Holiness to Daly Lama now from the woods to the concrete and Virtual Worlds and why would I put that up well scientists have just come up with self-healing concrete right so when concrete by the way that's a picture of my walkway in my front front yard uh so it's cracking I don't have self-healing concrete that idea sparked for me that what compassion is when a com when a community has compassion woven through it it's a self-healing property for that Community we should be looking at Compassion in that way now why do I have Minecraft up there for those of you have played it you know you can build your own worlds you can build them in the sky on clouds you can build them underwater I sound like Dr Seuss right now you can build them anywhere you want and my oldest boy Cade he loves this and he shows me his worlds all the time and I ask him why likes it so much he says Dad I can build any world I want anywhere I want and I love living in it I love surviving in it and all I could think of is wow why aren't we doing that in our world why are our kids building these worlds these Virtual Worlds they're so proud of that shouldn't we be building our real world that we're proud to give our kids a world that they more than want to survive in that they want to live in we can do that if we build a concrete world of compassion for them and I've given you the five ways that we've done it when we're a small Public University if we can do it anybody can do it anywhere and on a closing note all I can think of is when I talk about compassion some people see it see compassion as a weakness but when compassion is woven through a community it's its source of strength thank [Applause] you