During a dialogue with the Dalai Lama, UCLA psychiatrist Daniel Siegel said (as recounted in disc one of his The Wise Heart and the Mind series): “When we’re threatened, you accentuate the difference between who is similar to you and who is dissimilar to you. Who’s in the in-group and who’s in the out-group. You take the people in the in-group, and you take better care of them. You take people in the out-group, and you treat them more harshly. That we know from a lot of studies.
“The second studies show that when you are shown pictures of people who are not like you, the circuitry of compassion, empathy, you shut off those circuits. I said to His Holiness, how can we awaken ourselves as a global community during this time of threat, so we can stop shutting off our circuits of compassion and keep them alive?
“He said…you cannot have compassion for your enemy from the biased form of compassion, only from the unbiased kind. He said, I’m a Buddhist, so I know a Buddhist practice [that promotes unlimited compassion]. He said it has got to be a mind training to open up this unlimited compassion… It is up to you scientists to come up with a secular ethic to promote more compassion in the world.”
