Compassion as a Consequence of Understanding
La compasión como consecuencia de la comprensión
A question about whether practices of loving-kindness and compassion can inadvertently reinforce a sense of self and other, and whether there is a more direct approach.
Compassion as a Consequence of Understanding
A question about whether practices of loving-kindness and compassion can inadvertently reinforce a sense of self and other, and whether there is a more direct approach.
The more that falls away here, the more compassion there is anyway. But sometimes I've done practices of metta and such, and they feel helpful, like they open the heart. At the same time, they seem to support a sense of self and other. So I wonder if there is any nondual approach to compassion practice.
I don't have a lot of thoughts about the practice of compassion, because I don't think of them and don't have a particular relationship with them.
If I think about it now, to me compassion is something that is a natural consequence of understanding. It is not something you can practice. You can only imagine and fabricate false ideas about what compassion is. It is the same when I hear the expression "unconditional love." Practice unconditional love. I think that is insane.
Looking at conditioning, not imitating goodness
What you can do is look at your conditioning, your conditions. As you see that and see through it, then something can happen. But you don't practice it. Practicing being good will only make you emulate ideas of what it means to be good. Instead, look at how you are not being good. Look at how your behaviors are coming from reactivity, fear, and pain, which move you into behaviors that are mean and hurtful. If you move through that and clear it, the consequence will be loving.
So sure, if a practice of compassion actually means "look at all of your illusions" and that is all you are doing, then as you see through them, you won't have to do the compassion. It will truly emerge. It will naturally be what happens. Because as you understand your own madness, you will understand madness appearing in others. That understanding is compassion. But you don't start by understanding the madness in others. You don't focus on the madness in others. All you do is focus on the illusion and the madness in yourself. As that is seen through, everything else will be obvious. Otherwise, you are going to be imagining and projecting from the ideas you have of yourself and of what love and compassion are.
Yes, that is the growing sense here. The more that is undone, the more there is just a natural sense of compassion anyway, a natural emergence. So maybe there is just an old attachment to the idea of speeding things up by taking on some practice.
The illusion of time
Any sense of speeding up is buying into the illusion of time. So the fastest way is to look at the illusion of time. As you look at it and see through it, you go into the root. By "the illusion of time," I mean you understand its essence. The essence of time is an interpretation of experience, which can be useful, but it is not fundamentally real at the level of experience itself. There have been studies where you could shut down a part of the brain and the person stops experiencing time, yet they are still experiencing reality; they are still conscious. Then that part activates again and time begins again. So is time fundamental to reality, or is it a mental overlay? It is a mental overlay.
The more you see that, the clearer it becomes: if you are trying to accelerate, trying to rush, you are going to be operating at the level where time is real. The whole point of what this is moving toward is deeper than that.
Falling through the mind
The most direct way, if you want to call it the fastest, is to see through illusion, to see through the constant buying into the mind's maps. When it is fully seen as mind, mind, mind, nothing but more mind, you fall through. You can no longer identify with something that is just seen as forms moving, appearances of thought. You simply pop out, and there is sensation, perception, thoughts, and the vastness of not being identified, not buying in.
That is something that calls for a very gentle, constant looking. "Oh, there I go. That is more thought I was buying into. It seems to be more than thought. It starts to become important as not just a thought but as an actual, fundamental aspect of reality." And it assumes an "I" as something known, something limited and knowable. That assumption is always at the root of buying into thought.