It’s a common spiritual belief that we need more compassion as we progress on the path, but what does compassion even mean? Is it just feeling like we wish other people weren’t hurting? The dictionary definition of compassion is “the quality of understanding the suffering of others and wanting to do something about it.” But in nonduality there are no others. And wanting to do something about it but not doing anything sounds pretty lame. Is it enough to just have a thought in your head that’s compassionate? Let’s tackle those questions and more.
First, here’s the claim I’ll be making about compassion. It’s basically the TL;DR
The only people who need to cultivate compassion are those who have negative, judgmental or hateful thoughts in their mind about others and they want to replace those thoughts with some that are more enjoyable and skillful. Literally NO ONE ELSE needs to cultivate compassion in order to progress spiritually.
Compassion is generally seen as a good quality. It is commonly believed that people who have it are good people and those who don’t are bad people. But what is normally called compassion – caring about the welfare of others and taking action to help them – is actually an aspect of the structure of reality. From a nondual view, there are no separate people. There is only one being, one seamless whole in the universe. [This, by the way, is not a dogma or a belief that anyone should adopt, but a view that each practitioner is encouraged to question and investigate for themselves. If you experience it to be true then it is knowledge, not belief. Until you experience it to be true, it is only a hypothesis.]
Because there is only one being, when you care about or help another person it’s just like when you get a cut on your foot and you clean the wound and put a bandage on it. It’s not some special kind of virtue like love or compassion that makes you do this. You’re just doing what needs to be done. This realization of non-separation, of the singularity of being, is required before true “compassion” – that which is effective and truly helpful for another – can shine through..
To “cultivate” compassion before this realization occurs is just overlaying our ideas of what compassionate action or regard might look like on top of our other ideas of what the world is about. Mostly we are interacting with our ideas of the world, not the world as it is. Spiritual practice and nondual awakening are about removing and seeing through our mental concepts about the world — seeing that our mental concepts are not reality. Our ideas about compassion are not compassion.
How do we even determine what will be helpful for someone? We don’t know what anyone’s inner experience is. And we know that even when people are specifically asking for a certain kind of help, giving them what they want can actually be enabling them to remain in a state of relative suffering. The type of actions that make us feel good about helping someone may not be the ones that help them the most. For instance I heard of a neighbor bringing a homeless man a hot coffee and a pastry. That felt really good for him to do. He found those things hours later untouched where the man had been sleeping.
If we practice cultivating compassion, what we are generally doing is reprogramming our mental concepts to be ones that match our other mental concepts about what we think compassion is. Because true compassion, those actions that actually facilitate reduced suffering for someone, often do not fit our preexisting ideas about compassion, we can wind up being less helpful and even hurting others only so we can feel better about being “compassionate beings” and have a more spiritual self image of ourselves.
We cannot know the the long term effects of our actions towards another person, and frequently we can’t even know the short term effects. The world is so multifaceted and complex, helping someone out of a fix today could plant them firmly in an even bigger mire tomorrow, just through “coincidental” occurrences. We cannot know the ultimate effects of our actions, so it doesn’t make sense to take actions based on what we believe will come of them. We can only take actions based on what our heart’s deepest longing tells us to do, and what we know we would regret not doing.
It takes a lot of spiritual practice to be able to hear our heart’s deepest longing without the selfishness of the mind getting in the way, selfishness that can even manifest as being unable to tolerate viewing a situation that seems hopeless, such as a homeless man sleeping out in the cold. In most cases what we can’t stand are the feelings that arise inside us when we see someone else suffering, not the actual suffering of the other person.
This happens most often when I see someone else “comforting” someone else who is crying, telling them not to cry, that it’s okay. This is purely that person feeling uncomfortable with another person crying in their presence. How often have you been on the receiving end of this kind of “comfort” that just felt awkward or even prompted you to try to push the tears down, to reduce that person’s discomfort? Repressing tears is never the best course of action and only causes more suffering down the line, for yourself and the people around you as you act out repressed emotions unconsciously.
Do not “practice” compassion. Compassion arises only when our ideas about the world drop away. (Unless, as previously stated, you are replacing hateful thoughts with more positive ones, which is an important step when you are at that phase.) Instead, practice seeing through your beliefs about reality — all beliefs. When you stop believing your own thoughts and your beliefs begin to drop away, only reality remains. You don’t need to posture about being a good person, even to yourself. You are a good person even if you never have a supposedly compassionate impulse again.
“Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.…There is no spoon.” – The Matrix
When your beliefs drop away and your passing thoughts no longer dictate your actions but your actions are driven by a deeper impulse that is guided by your insight and realization into non-separation, you can trust that these impulses will likely be helpful or at the very least neutral. The same way your hand naturally presses down on a wound to stop the bleeding from the cut on your foot. The deeper and clearer your realization is, the more naturally helpful your actions will be, without needing to cultivate some extra mode of thinking called compassion.
The more your actions are coming from a place that is trying to bolster your own self-image, however inadvertently you may be doing this, the more likely you are to bring harm to those around you. This is one reason why the best way we can help the world is to work on ourselves. Because when we are no longer trying at every turn to keep our self-image intact, our actions become effortlessly selfless and compassionate towards all others.
Eventually the starkness of reality reveals itself and we see that “compassion is actually [built into] the fabric of reality itself.” [Shambhavi Saraswati, The Reality Sutras]. It is not something we need to generate more of, or add to reality. Compassion is preexisting and is revealed naturally through a spiritual practice that dismantles and removes everything that is not true.
If your argument against this is that you don’t feel much compassion, so it can’t be true that it’s already there, then one of two things are the case: 1 – You have not spent enough time seriously contemplating and questioning the nature of reality and your thoughts to facilitate a falling away of belief in your thoughts OR 2 – Your idea of what compassion should look or feel like has confused you.
In my experience it doesn’t feel like mushy gushy love, or bliss, or a shining heart. True compassion feels very matter of fact; parents are very familiar with this phenomenon. Compassion is changing a crying baby’s diaper, and feeding them healthy food when they don’t want to eat, and applying discipline when they want to stay up all night and eat candy. Those actions don’t feel warm and fuzzy, and you may even feel like a jerk when doing them, but they are the kindest, most helpful things you can do. I think most compassionate acts are actually like this. Things that look stereotypically compassionate from the outside are mostly for outer show and inner self-image creation.
As a supposedly virtuous and spiritual quality, compassion has become glamorized. I believe almost all our ideas about it keep us from actually benefiting others and instead serve to bolster our self images and allow us to feel as if we are compassionate.Compassion is the natural flowing of beneficial action that is free of self-interest and occurs when non-separation is experienced directly.
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Shivā