 Karen Armstrong, it really is a great privilege and honor to be able to talk with you about this. Let's begin with the with the big idea. Compassion, the Charter of Compassion. Could you describe that? Yes. In 2008 I won the Ted Prize and they give you a wish for a better world, which they will try and make happen. And for years I've been writing about religion and and in whatever tradition I'm writing and whatever subject I'm taking up I kept being brought back to compassion and then I wrote my book The Great Transformation about the genesis of many of what we call the world religions and every single one of them had at its core what's often called the golden rule, never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself. But it seemed to me frustrating that our main goal, one of the main tasks of our generation is to build a global community where people of all persuasions can live together in harmony and respect and the religions with this ethic should be making a major contribution and yet they're often seen as part of the problem. So I asked Ted to help me to create craft, propagate and launch a Charter for Compassion to recall religion away from all the doctrines and the peripheral things back to this so that we could address these severe problems in our time and I've been astonished. We launched it and we really thought that was going to be the end of it. We've made a sort of stand or a demonstration. It had been written by leading activists in six major world faiths and we launched it in 2009 and then people started to take it up and it will be of interest to you all here that the people who've come forward to help me most have been businessmen. Now that is something that I could never have foreseen. I mean I have the business head of a chicken and there's no way I thought this could have imagined this but it's wonderful for me because I'm an ideas person but businessmen know how to plan and strategically implement and create realistic things. So businessmen in the Middle East, in Pakistan, which has become virtually the leader of the Charter, which has been an amazing thing right from the front line of our polarized world. There are many things in which you've said that I think raise interesting questions. I know that you are very, very serious about this. So undoubtedly there are going to be people who are saying and thinking, this is all really wonderful. Of course we should believe in the golden rule and of course everybody should come together and love each other and so on. But it means more than that to you. So how can you convey this sense that this is very serious and it has to be integrated into the lives of people, not just something that we all ascribe to but then go about our daily lives? Yes. I mean people often say to me when you're just preaching to the converted or as the Americans say you're preaching to the choir. You're just talking to people who are stuck in church anyway. And I say I'm perfectly happy to preach to the choir because the choir isn't singing. If all the people who believe in the golden rule and who tell me that of course we all agree with compassion actually got active we could turn around all this discourse of hate and religious discourse of hate. We could change the conversation but we've got to get active and practical because I think part of the trouble is the word compassion which has got so feebled that it's dropped out of our lexicon and people think it means pity. When I was giving a speech in Holland I specifically said the compassion does not mean feeling sorry for people and yet every time I mentioned compassion in the Dutch translation of my text in the newspaper they translated it pity. It's ingrained. Compassion is it means different things in the Buddhist tradition. It means to take responsibility for the pain that you see in the world. We all see pain all around us. We're subjected to images of pain as perhaps no previous generation with our modern media. One of the things that's striking about what you write is this several centuries period the axial age in which people became so fed up with violence but they were also able to develop lives in which they could reflect on what is a good life, what is a meaningful life. And one of the things we see today is hundreds of millions of people coming into that state who were not in that state before. So I guess the question I want you to sort of speak to is do you sense this yearning? Where is it coming from? How does it relate to what's happening in today's world? I think people look around and see the violence. They see the hatred that people know that something isn't working. It is simply not sustainable. The sages of the so-called axial age, that's Confucius, the Buddhist Socrates, the Greek Tragedians, they were all living in times like our own which were full of violence where violence had somehow reached a crescendo. And it was that that made them implement the Golden Rule. They said, as one of the Chinese sages said, if we go on like this we will destroy one another. That is even more so today with our weaponry. Would you also add in to this the existence of incredible new interconnectedness in media so that we're able to see pain and suffering in ways that we had not been able to see before? Because you're very, very astutely interested in the observation of pain and what that opens up and suffering, what that opens up in human beings. Pain is something we all have and pain is therefore something that can bring us all together. We so often shut ourselves off in our pain and we've got to look tough and we've got this wretched thing in the West about being positive, you know, sort of always looking on the bright side of life. And God forbid you should say you're feeling miserable, but let people in. Do people like you at parties? I see. They're just about to come up with some really juicy bit of gossip and they catch sight of me and their faces full. Feel a bit like a party pooper. But nevertheless, the pain is there. And if sometimes we say, oh, this is nothing to do with us, but if we deny our own pain and say everything is fine, and it's very easy to dismiss the pain of other people. And so we've got to find out more about one another too. We're talking about dialogue so often, as though if the whole world started engaging in dialogue, peace would break out. But there's very little Socratic dialogue going on. It's often dialogue means simply bludgeoning the other side to accept our opinion. So how do you think we should, as cultures, as societies, as universities, as institutions, try to overcome that? Well, media, I think plays a big role. Somehow, I think the media has a job to go a little more deeply into these, instead of the sound bite to help us penetrate these areas. Educators have that responsibility to parents, teachers, because we can't understand one another unless we know that person's story. There are two ways in which people, I think, can respond in sort of diametrically opposed ways. One is, we all know what you're already saying. We all believe in the golden rule. We just have to do it more. Thank you very much for pointing that out. But the other side is, you're asking a lot of us. Human nature just can't go that far. You're asking us to love our enemy, to forgive people who have done things. These are serious things that people have done. What do you say to that side? First of all, look into your own heart and discover the wickedness in there. I've had such a privileged life that goodness knows what I would have been like. If I'd been born two or three hundred years ago and hadn't had an education, I'd been one of those angry witches, I think. So think of that. Think of what you could be doing, that that is a part of it. Love. I'm wary of using the word love in this context here, because I think in English, we've debased the word so much. It's a principal determination to look into your own heart, discover what gives you pain, and then refuse to inflict that pain on anyone else. If we want a peaceful world, we have to be more compassionate. And is it also right to say that these are very, very difficult things to achieve? It is hard. That's why I call my book 12 Steps to a Compassionate Life based on the Alcoholics Anonymous program, because we are addicted to our pet hates. We often don't know what we do without them. They're essential to our sense of self, both on a national level, a cultural level, as well as an individual level. So we need to be weaned away from them step by step, little by little, to train ourselves. We can train our minds. But if we can at the end of our lives, perhaps say, as we die, well, perhaps the world is just a little bit better because I've lived in it, then in that case, our lives will have been worthwhile. And it is liberating. It is liberating to let go of this sense of righteousness and privilege, and to say that only I suffer to let other people's pain come in. So it is a fulfilling, it's a growing thing. You begin to discover new capacities within yourself, even quite early in the process. Shifting just a bit. I think it's natural to wonder whether a free market life, a consumer, producer, or capitalistic life is consistent with what you advocate, whether it can be integrated into it in a material culture that people think about. Well, as you say, I'm the wrong person to ask about this because of my utter inability to understand things economic. But, and I'm not proud of that, I'm not saying that in the way people say when they're really delighted that they can't hunt. I feel really stupid on these occasions. But these people who've come forward to help me, one of their main objectives is to make compassion effective in business. And business could be, I mean, such a powerful tool. It is very powerful. For bringing light and help into the world, bringing help, not just hogging wealth for ourselves, but taking it sometimes from our great abundance to where it may be needed. Let's close on the fundamental point that you have made now for many years, which is the commonness of the religious groups within the world and deep philosophical traditions. Could you just say something about that, the commonality that's so important? Well, the world religions are not all the same. They have significant and wonderful differences. And because the religions are talking about transcendence, that is inevitable because none of us has the last word. The search to find not definitive answers, that's a modern heresy, I would say. But to find, to attempt to find ways of living with problems for which there are no easy solutions, like pain and cruelty and injustice and death and suffering. And to help us live with those realities, kindly, creatively and peacefully, and at peace with our fellow human beings and with all creatures on our planet. Do you think, yes or no, do you think it's possible we are in a new axial age? We certainly are living in an axial, but our sages have not been Buddha, they've been Einstein, Bill Gates, it's been a technological axial period. But this axial ages don't just come about, they come about because people work for it. We can make an axial age if we work at it. Karen Armstrong, thank you very much.