Fr. Seán ÓLaoire

They want to dribble the ball from one post to post.

They won't share with anybody, even though they're surrounded.

They won't call a timeout.

They want to try and break through.

And so they're benched.

They're taken offensively.

They're replaced in some way.

So for me, then, compassion had these four facets.

And we must be able to kind of activate all four, depending on the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

So it's a compassionate thing to do to confront evil, you know, but to do it with a loving heart and the recognition that the other person is divine as well.

So I would say there are the four levels.

And then there's kind of five facets of compassion.

The first one is literally neurological.

that we're born with mirror neurons.

And the little baby actually develops this by watching the faces of mother and father.

They're developing these mirror neurons and they're learning how to behave and emotionally interact with the environment.

But there literally are mirror neurons.

And there's some really, I think, horrendous kind of research on this where they take two monkeys and they put electroencephalograms in both of them and they torture one monkey while the other guy is watching.

And they're looking what area of the brain of the person being tortured is being activated by the torture, and what area of the brain of the observer monkey, and it's the same area of the brain.

So that's how they discovered mirror neurons, that literally there's a neuronal circuit in my brain that's activated by watching somebody else suffer.