WITH JANAKA
7/04
"The role of compassion"
A.In the American Dictionary, compassion is defined as sorrow for the sufferings or trouble of another or others, accompanied by the urge to help; deep sympathy; pity.
In Advaita Vedanta, there is no other, no second, so who is there to feel sorry for another? And so if one is intellectually convinced of this notion then when one’s friend comes up and says that he is dying of cancer, one can remain naturally silent, because how can one be coming to another if there is not two, let alone talking about dying when nothing is even born?
When I first became a practitioner of Non duality, which admits of no other, I understood this with the logic of my mind. So when I saw people who were obviously in pain, whether physically or emotionally, I would stand there, and with eyes unblinking, I would tell myself that all this was illusion, and go on my merry way. I watched myself go through several relationships in this way as each partner would go through the throes of emotional pain, while I retreated into the security of my head and its mental dispassionate safety net.
It was not until I began teaching small children that I began to learn from them, who can be wailing in exquisite pain one moment and the next skip off in joy, forgetting completely the pain that they were in. My heart started to open and I slowly descended back into the sticky realm of light and shadow.
“Know there is one, but act as though there is two,” so said Ramana. This is what Hanuman, who is considered to be an incarnation of Shiva, did when he served Rama. He knew the Unity of the One but played the part of devotee, as did Rama play the part of a weeping husband bent on freeing his wife. They knew the Truth but played their roles. When I allow the feelings to come forth, I am no more my feelings than I am my thoughts, yet they are part of that humanness that manifests through this unique _expression called Janaka.
The word sympathy comes from the word pathos. The Greeks recognized the divinity of pathos, the suffering that humans go through. If I go to my heart and out of my head, when I see a child crying because they miss their mother I then won’t say, “Why are you crying? Who cries for whom?” I will instead say, “You want your mother right now and you miss her. You are sad because she is not here with you.” I can be where the person is without trying to fix anything. When there is pain, there is pain; when there is joy, there is joy.
Next to the word compassion is the word compass, and the compass encircles. The tendency of a philosophical path is to be very straight forward, very masculine. To encircle is the way of the mother who holds the laughing or crying child.
However, just as the straight forward way can be dangerous by locking us up into a cold cell of a false enlightenment, so too does the compass way have its pitfalls. While non-dualism can get caught up with antipathy, pushing the world away, compassion can become waterlogged with sympathy and may sink into the suffering of the world, where it is hard not to succumb to the notion that the one Self is actually in pain. Then pity comes forward and the world becomes a pitiful place.
Ramana talked about the importance of helping others, not for their sake, because they are the Infinite Self which needs no help, but for our own. When one extends oneself one gets out of the little me and finds that by helping others we help ourselves. The trick is, however, to give up the notion that ‘I am helping,’ which only feeds the ego. There is simply helping. Another danger is falling into sympathy of the sufferer and siding with their notions that they are a victim and that somebody or something has caused them to be so. This only feeds the illusion of ‘Yes, you are a pitiful body.’ If one can simply acknowledge that the person is suffering and witness what they believe is actually happening, without agreeing or disagreeing, then one is being present in this amazing play called Life, that the One Consciousness is expressing through the myriad forms on this planet.
What a Mystery! May everyone have the good fortune to play with little children. But, hey, who plays with whom?
2004 Janaka Stagnaro
www.janakastagnaro.com