Situational Compassion P.2

What is that feeling?

Where in the body do you feel compassion?

If so, can you generate that body sensation all the time even when there is no observable reason to feel compassionate? Does compassion rise before thinking you “should” be compassionate?

Is compassion a label that only rises when you think of the need to be compassionate or a sudden insight that you should be compassionate?

Is being more compassionate than I am by contemplating compassion actually initiating a change in consistent behavior?

Being compassionate implies behavior. How do you show “Compassion?” My personal interpretation of Zen and Tao indicate that compassion, whatever that is, can only be generated specifically to the event that is unfolding in the here and now. There is no way to “store, increase, design, manipulate, conclude, or predetermine what a compassionate act may be until we are in the specific situation that calls for a compassionate response. At best I do have the potential to act compassionately.

To be “compassionate” implies that the word compassion, as an extraction, must mean something. What does the word compassion mean?  How would you define it as a reference frame that lends itself to action? What position and definition would you apply?

In looking at this word compassion and how we interpret the word, we begin to see that the word is also abstracted from various acts of compassion and somehow folded into the concept of being compassionate. And yet we cannot “be compassionate” we can only, minute by minute, depending on the experience, take the opportunity to act compassionately. The process of being compassionate has a lot of different content and responses, it’s transient like everything in this part of the universe.

I love the concept of compassion because, in some ways, it’s the continuous action of seeing where we may apply kindness.

And to me there is nothing greater than being kind.

Take care of you,

Bryan