Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

You may call God love you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion.

Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth goodness beauty love and compassion and also intuition creativity insight and focused attention.

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

In Scotland over many years we have cultivated through our justice system what I hope can be described as a 'culture of compassion.' On the other hand there still exists in many parts of the U.S. if not nationally an attitude towards the concept of justice which can only be described as a 'culture of vengeance.'

We assume that we've come so far as compassionate citizens of the world if we do choose to read the news yet the attitude towards life can be one where we put blinders on and forget that there are civil wars going on. It's easy to forget that there are so many people starving to death every single day.

For me music is a vehicle to bring our pain to the surface getting it back to that humble and tender spot where with luck it can lose its anger and become compassion again.

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.