Saturday, August 11, 2012

August - Compassion becomes freedom

July 21 to August 21



Such purified selflessness is true compassion.

True compassion undergoes all suffering as its own, without the loss of independence in its well-considered judgment. Indeed, independence can only have its source in compassion. For compassion is spiritual union. Everything remaining external to us, however, exerts influence or imposes coercion on us. In the mind of another human being that is not linked with ours by the compassion weaving between us, we do not live as free individualities. For such a person avoids us or seeks (albeit in a manner of which he himself is perhaps not aware) to make us dependent on him. Similarly, we can only turn away from a person, whom we approach without compassion, or attempt in some form or other to dominate him. On someone whom we confront with a coercive attitude, however, we are no less dependent than on someone we avoid. Naturally, this is not a matter of outer behavior but of a mental attitude. Once we have reached a spiritual union, however, we can neither be the object of an exertion of power nor do we exert power.  It is not possible, because our own being and the one united with us cannot be the object of our power. Knowledge therefore excludes power, and compassion is a form of knowledge. Even in the compassionate union with someone deserving revulsion (which is of course wholly inward), we do not demean ourselves. On the contrary, through it we liberate that higher element which is hidden in him as it is in everything of a lower nature of which it has only not become conscious. True compassion therefore does not only make ourselves free, but also liberates those it embraces.

Thus it becomes freedom.

A meditation on such compassion is: Compassion is the sheath in which the free heart beats.

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