Compassion
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion”
– The Dalai Lama
But compassion goes far beyond that, it is not really a skill, but a way of being and relating to other beings in the process.
What we see in the world right now is a tremendous lack of compassion. Humans at this moment, simply cannot relate to other beings and see them as someone that also seeks happiness and wants to avoid suffering. As a result of that we are creating a world full of anger and fear.
The first that is needed is compassion for ourselves. What this means is that we need to become aware of our suffering, the repressed hurtful emotions and tendencies that are outside of our current field of awareness, (because we have blocked them and thus narrowed our field of consciousness) usually buried in our subconscious or just on the edge of our conscious perception.
Since most people are not even aware they are suffering, they can hardly understand that others are suffering, or empathize with them.
Most people are simply in a state of blankness or resistance. They feel nothing, or at least very little – thus they cannot feel either happiness or suffering since they have desensitized themselves to both.
By becoming conscious of them and embracing them we can dissolve them and with that gain a deeper understanding of our own experience and the experience of all beings.
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