>So what IS compassion? Our capacity to hold (within our awareness, which is
>aprtly mental) the experience of others as they experience it, together
>with our experience of their experience, without rejecting, denying,
>distorting or in any way invalidating their experience, or our experience
>of their experience, in the service of the truth of the situation being
>revealed. Sounds wordy but is actually more simple to experience.
>Compassion, beyond the concept is therefore an ontological capacity that
>can be developed. Question: if this is not "modeled" for us by others will
>we exercise it?
It seems to me that compassion is not mental or reducable to
epistemological terms -- it is a physical, emotional response, often
triggered by our personal relationship to the event. When we hear of
children, for example, without parents or home, we experience a sensation
of compassion connected to our own sense of "what that must be like,"
perhaps based on experience, but more probably based on our "internal
experience" of being in that situation. What would life have been like,
what of personal value would we have missed, were we to experience such a
situation at that age, etc. None of this is mental: it goes straight
through to the gut.
BTW, it is completely possible to distort the experience, based upon our
own view. For example, it could well be that the individual is not so
badly off as we may imagine them to be, given our own response to their
situation. The child without a parent might actually be better off in a
foster home and not being in an abusive situation... but that is another
cause for compassion, no?
gerry starnes
austin, texas