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Re: Introducing Compassion and Kindness

Keith said Aug 6, 2007, 8:14 PM:

Yes, and I appreciate Pastor Mike relating that if the United States had compassion, our troops would be in Darfur instead of Iraq. This is what we should be doing with our resources.

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Re: Introducing Compassion and Kindness

Enlightened.thinker said Aug 6, 2007, 8:24 PM:

Bravo!

thanks to all here who are working on a new model.

Back to chysalis for a minute…

so then are you saying in effect, irregardless of parentage etc…we ARE all connected and need to work from that fame of reference?

If so, I heartily agree and aim to do that in my own life…

Re: Introducing Compassion and Kindness

Chrysalis [no longer around] said Aug 6, 2007, 11:44 PM:

Aley, my next post below might answer your question, but yes. This is what I think. Do I have reason to judge in pride because I was accidentally born in a rich country, in a nice environment, with access to self help books and spirituality, enough food and sweet friends, maybe a reasonably beautiful body even? Of course not.

We have talked about this before, but I think it's a good moment to let each other see how far compassion can go. Imagine yourself being Saddam Hussein, having grown up learning to believe in something so much, you would kill and die for it. You have brothers, sisters, a mother, a lot of money and power. You know nothing else. But then something goes terribly wrong and your belief system breaks apart. You have to take the blame for everything. You take the blame for your army following your orders. You take the blame for your army having all those guns and tanks. Guns and tanks that you bought from France maybe or the USA, 20 years ago. They supported you back then because they wanted your oil and your agreement on whatever matter. Today you are alone and you take the blame. You even die for it. Do you deserve that anyone feels sorry for you because you haven't accidentally been born in a rich western country with a college education in sight?

Best wishes

Re: Introducing Compassion and Kindness

cosmicbdog [no longer around] said Aug 10, 2007, 3:39 AM:

Brilliant thoughts Chrysalis.

Can compassion extend even out to somebody like Saddam Hussein? It seems hard to do… he seems quite different to us. Right?

Ahh… the grand illusion…. well!!! I have come to the grand conclusion that we are all having exactly the same experience more or less in varying degrees of intensity and specificities… but that aside! we are the same.

Without compassion, we can't begin. For Saddam, in a world not overpowered with compassion, his sentence was innevitably death. But in a world empowered by compassion? Well, many world leaders would have been able to at least communicate with the guy. And if the world leaders that did try and communicate with the guy and failed felt they lived in a world in compassion, maybe they would have shared their failure with us, so we could be in the loop… but instead… the compassionless world keeps all the veils up. How do you peer inside the veils? Easy… peer inside. Begin within. What you see out there, use as a way to reconfigure whats going on in here. I can't believe nobody could do that… but thats the paradigm we are in. I mean… thats the paradigm I'm in…. the paradigm we're in. Instead of Compassion being primordial, instead of it being the base plate from which we begin, we are caught in a monotonous lonely and deluded self defeating battle against ourselves, convinced the world is distant and distinctly different and detached.

Who doesn't kill a gazillion ants everyday they walk around while taking care of their loved ones? I'm sure to the Ants, we're all like Saddam Hussein dropping these monstrous machines… and thats just ants… But Saddam's different to us… yeah… and George Bush is different to us… yeah… and yet their not different to us at all. In my opinion they are just like us but projected onto a larger scale.

So in walks the freedom fighter into George Bush's office who is righteous and believes he is different. He's there to convince George of how he's different and how to change the way he goes about things. Is that compassion? Not in my view. Will George listen? Doubt it. Not without compassion.

Who listens to anybody who's not on their level? Is it even possible for communication to exist without compassion being the supportive fabric that carries the message? Without it, are we just throwing stones at a wall?

Re: Introducing Compassion and Kindness

katrinamae said Aug 10, 2007, 10:58 AM:

Great post, Cosmicbdog. If we could observe in ourselves why we feel anger, frustration, or sadness at how someone else is, or how someone else acts or talks, I think we'd then be able to use that negative emotion as a positive tool to seeing the flaws within our own philosophies, thoughts, and actions. There's a new Nine Inch Nails song out, and in one part of it, trent Reznor says, in different words, that he's tired of people not seeing themselves in George Bush, and not seeing how they were just as responsible for “manifesting” him into office as the people who physically voted for him…It's a very profound point that I just happened to catch, listening to it one day. it made me think:

“It's so easy for me to see how my mom's “conservative view” against everything draws more of what she's uncomfortable with into her life. Like, since she sends passionate e-mails around opposing illegal immigrants, she's perpetuating exactly what she doesn't want. But, I had never looked at how me or supposedly “conscious” others like me were doing the same thing with people like her!”

These thoughts happened not long ago, maybe a few weeks, and they are the reason I posted about “what you resist, persists,” because I do have a new, more clear, picture of what that means. Erean said it perfect when he said that if we push too hard, we could be creating the resistance that keeps us from achieving the desired affect. In one other posting, I remember reading that if you resist the “tails” side of a coin, you have no coin! You can't only have the “heads” side of a coin, it takes both for it to be a coin.

These are very inspiring posts, and it's really giving me a chance to construct myself as one who accepts my own darkness, which allows me to better use my light.

Re: Introducing Compassion and Kindness

cosmicbdog [no longer around] said Aug 10, 2007, 5:19 PM:

Totally! Its so weird to think how we can be doing all these things, projecting all these solutions to fix a problem, when the people who are judging the situation are as much a part of creating it.

Sometimes I have found that problems persist because people are more attached to fixing the problem then even the problem has energy to sustain itself. In cases of addictions where you often have a saviour trying to help the victim you have both people equally attached. It seems sometimes the healer is out there looking for problems and actually can't handle things when everything is at peace.

Perhaps while somebody tries to fix something out there, they neglect something close to home? Problem perpetuated… why? Problematic mindset. Naturally a problematic mindset births thanks to a disconnected view of the world. You are you and I am I and we are living different worlds… ah huh. NOT…. well.. YES… but only half truth.. essentially, underneath the veil it seems we're all going through the same stuff. You tell me one thing that makes us different and I'll tell you a thousand things that makes us similar.

Whether one is spiritual or not, believing there is an all connected energy between us all, or whether one just plain and simple understands we live on a ball of gravity where if you throw up its going to effect the guy next to you, compassion and kindness is inescapable. How can we be so sure? Well, the world is growing… power is shifting… who's hands is it going into? Those who are closing down or opening up?

If the zeitgeist of today is fusing our differences, dualities and oppositions, then wouldn't it be pretty safe to say the power is shifting into the hands of those who have this greater view of Compassion and Kindness deeply etched into their being?

So with a world that is growing, power is going to those who are expanding their capacity to feel and love the whole situation. We can trust then those of us who are living in this will be living an example and continue to exude an unmatched energy within crisis of any degree. Bringing peaceful resolutions and greater understanding to illusory conflicts. Through an awareness of our unity, whatever level of unity we subscribe to, by communicating our differences in a palatable way, that makes unity and therefor a truly beneficial interaction possible.

Something that just popped into my mind… could true global compassion be possible unless the world grew to such an overgrown and unhealthy state that our survival forced us all, no matter what belief system, to find the true unifying concept that stretches across all cultures, so that we could finally begin as a unity of one whole planet?

Re: Introducing Compassion and Kindness

Meenakshi said Aug 10, 2007, 7:10 PM:

Cosmicdog, very interesting point about compassion and communication. You're right…if we talk down or up at someone; we may as well be talking through and around for all the good it does us.

All the unspoken thoughts get communicated louder than words.

Re: Introducing Compassion and Kindness

Jodell said Sep 24, 2007, 9:05 PM:

More than the Same we One but Not the Same. LOL

From my own experience, I have experienced being other people both dead and alive. I have experienced being persons who are preparing for dying. I have had recall back to the caveman days and countless death memories. I gave up on reincarnation over a decade ago in order to explain my experience of reality.

On that note, one I would like to add to your argument, in my mid-twenties, during college, I had many memories of being male. In many of those memories I had raped and killed men, women and children. They were different eras and different races. I felt a lot of guilt and shame after rising out of the encapsulated experiences of being in their mind's eyes. As I began working on compassion for myself to alleviate the intense emotional impressions, I began to have compassion for rapists and murders. I began to see from their mind's eyes. That is not to say that I was not given the balance to those lessons later when I was too compassionate to blame anyone. I was later shown the responsibility that we all carry for our work here. Yet, at least the first recognition of self in other is half the solution to any problem.