compassion

The enlightened consciousness is one in which the sense of self has disappeared. With this disappearance, a vast amount of mental energy is liberated, is freed up for other purposes. For that sense of self, the ego, consumes a huge energy, day in, day out, to sustain itself. The dissolution, the dissolving of the ego, is a relief from all that effort and from that focus on the self. Consciously or unconsciously, that energy of the ego is keeping our awareness on ourself, or our sense of self, and reducing the awareness we have for other things. Once this sense of a self is out of the picture, we have energy and awareness to spare.

From this space, seeing another human being, or another being, not necessarily human, we can put our full awareness on the other and see him or her in a way that is unfiltered by our own desires; that is uncorrupted by our expectations, our memories, our hopes. So we see things as they are and we see people as they are. We also see people’s suffering; the suffering of the other. And as the urge to be better than someone else has disappeared with the ego, there is no longer that strange, ugly feeling of relative happiness, which ordinarily we feel, perhaps just as a momentary thing, when we see someone else suffering. That has disappeared when the ego has gone. In its place there is genuine compassion. Seeing the suffering of another, one feels it, for that sense of separation is no longer there. This is compassion, to feel the suffering of another and to care. But this genuine compassion can only come when our sense of self has evaporated and our sense of separation is no longer there. Then only can compassion come into one’s being.