Marinating in these two passages from Ken McLeod and James Low. I want to really take them in.
Compassion is the difference between a faith that opens you to what life brings and beliefs that force you to close down to protect what you cannot or will not question. Compassion enables you to accept and appreciate the experience of those with whom you have differences. In difficult situations, it leads you to find a way that meets the vital interests of all concerned when possible and to minimize the pain when that is not possible. Compassion puts you directly in touch with the human condition. It cuts through beliefs. It goes straight to the heart.From Compassion, Culture, and Belief, by Ken McLeod.
James is teaching from the dzogchen text Uncovering the Mother of All Buddhas, by Gonpo Wangyal. The passage below starts 33:22 minutes into the audio.
James Low: When we see, ‘My thoughts are the radiance of emptiness.’ They have this formation, but it doesn't establish anything. But when you decide someone is an enemy of the people, the conclusion becomes radical and enacted.
So when we look at texts like this, it doesn't say much about compassion, it doesn't say much about helping other people, it doesn't say much about ethics, because that is inherent in non-duality. If you stay with the co-emergence, if you start with the openness, the welcome, the reception, and you respond into that, you're responding to the vitality of a living presence of somebody who is alive with you.
In ordinary language you might call that intersubjectivity, but it's not really subject, but it gives a sense of it, a pulsation between us. And because I feel you as alive and changing and moving, I can't catch you. I can't catch you. And if I can't catch you, that is the basis of ethics, because I'm not defining you. I have to be with you, because I don't know how you're going to be, so I have to be with you in a receptive way, so that my sense of you is being altered as you reveal more and more of yourself. Now that brings us into quite an ethical proximity, I would suggest.
And then compassion is, fundamentally, not to freeze the other, not to define the other, not to make the other equal what I say the other is, that I've caught you inside my concept. So when we shake loose of that, I don't know who you are, but I'm happy to try to relate to you, to stay with you as you reveal more of yourself. So we're in a process of mutual unfolding, mutual revelation. So that would be compassion from this point of view. It's not addressed very much. It's not like thinking, may all beings be happy, which is a lovely thought, but there's no methodology in it.