While I wrote the above, my whole being and becoming self realized something about compassion that now seems obvious but had escaped me before. Compassion comes from our sense of being and becoming. It cannot come fully from our identity or our ego out of their having meaning perspective. The having identity seeks to assert itself and make itself visible and tangible to itself and the world. It bases its attitudes and actions on differences and feels uncomfortable with real connections with others aside from the illusory connections to those who conform to the same dominator societal model. It speaks the I-am-not-you because it would fear a dissolution of the constructed identity itself. The having meaning perspective informs our identity in that expression of the materially constructed existence. The more our identity possesses of the world and its material goods and powers, the more our identity feels its own reality. As I discovered with the people whom I served that long, hot, and poverty stricken summer, the reality of this form of identity remains insubstantial and transitory because it finds its basis and strength in the material and the responses of the world, both very transitory forms of existence. To paraphrase Charles Baudelaire, whether on the stairs of a palace or on the green side of ditch, the material desire to have, to possess, to own ends always in what Fromm calls "necrophily:" the love of the dead as opposed to "biophily," the love of the living. Fromm describes this operation of our identity in The Heart of Man: "The necrophilous person can relate to an object --a flower or a person --only if he possesses it; hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself, if he loses possession he loses contact with the world."
Compassion cannot involve possession. Compassion actually feels the limitations of another being's condition and seeks the liberation of that being from whatever holds that being in its influence. Liberation can come in many external forms, but it will ultimately come from the being and becoming part of our living. The core condition that limits and impoverishes us comes in the denial of unconditional positive regard. Our identity does not offer such regard because it primarily and essentially seeks regard for itself, for its own existence. Identity cannot offer regard to others except in an exchange of regard, where one identity feeds another because the other reciprocates. Certainly, this exchange doesn't come as unconditional in any sense, but it satisfies temporarily if insecurely.
This temporary satisfaction between identities works in a very similar way to the exchanges made by those who find themselves dependant of some substance or action or another. A semblance of the feeling of regard and a semblance of a sense of recognition and thus satisfaction comes with the immediate gratification of the use of the substance or engagement in the action. As with the business model exchange of regard, it is not only conditional but illusory. It feels temporarily as if it exists, but it never really does. As we have discussed, compassion comes into being as one element of a full relationship or engagement with another being, the I/Thou. When we enter fully into a being way of perceiving and conceiving the world and ourselves, we encounter our natural feelings of unconditional positive regard, and compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance. Out of its need to possess, the having identity cannot offer such generosity of mind, heart, and spirit.[104]
Our ego as a defensive agent of protection also cannot offer such generosity. It may accept exchanges of regard, but it cannot act out of altruism, another element of the compassionate feeling and action. Our ego may also perceive compassionate acts as threatening because it might be rejected or ignored, or even simply not noticed in some material way. Whenever we fully encounter another being in the I/Thou fashion, we can risk rejection, a very long way from any form of regard, conditional or unconditional. Our ego can speak before any compassionate act can occur and make it clear that compassion does not fit in the healthy life-style of our identity.
When we consciously form a being based philosophic perspective about life, it acts transformatively in terms of our self, our becoming self as we find it in the working definition we delineated and used in this writing. The nature of the transformative opens us and our becoming self to a true sense and experience of compassion in thought and action. We feel no loss of self in any act of altruism. Although the best of altruism does not act for any exchange, "if I do this, I will gain that," the becoming self continues in its becoming with each of the acts. Expressing the best of this becoming self involves no direct gain, for the generosity for the being based becoming self simply thrives on its place in the rightness of things. When that becoming self contributes to that rightness, everything increases not simply the becoming self as in some form of limited and having based exchange.[105]