01-25-2015, 12:00 AM
" Warriors are incapable of feeling compassion because they no longer feel sorry for themselves. Without the driving force of self-pity, compassion is meaningless. For a warrior everything begins and ends with himself. However, his contact with the abstract causes him to overcome his feeling of self-importance. Then the self becomes abstract and impersonal. ''
From the Power of silence
A friend of mine a while ago was hit rather hard by the death of his mother and the circumstances which followed but for some reason I did not really register and at the time that this was an issue I did not take his feelings in to account at all! I was meditating one evening when my friend came to mind as did the events that had passed and I realised then what he must have been going through at the time, I then wished that I had been a better friend and more awake.
When I try to study these events now I wonder where compassion fits in? It is clear that something prevented me from seeing what my friend was going through, you could call this a lack of compassion although this does not seem accurate to me. If compassion is what I felt further down the line when I recapitulated on my friend then compassion or a lack of compassion is like a symptom of being blind or ignorant or self centred or just not caring.
From the Power of silence
A friend of mine a while ago was hit rather hard by the death of his mother and the circumstances which followed but for some reason I did not really register and at the time that this was an issue I did not take his feelings in to account at all! I was meditating one evening when my friend came to mind as did the events that had passed and I realised then what he must have been going through at the time, I then wished that I had been a better friend and more awake.
When I try to study these events now I wonder where compassion fits in? It is clear that something prevented me from seeing what my friend was going through, you could call this a lack of compassion although this does not seem accurate to me. If compassion is what I felt further down the line when I recapitulated on my friend then compassion or a lack of compassion is like a symptom of being blind or ignorant or self centred or just not caring.