Compassion Does Not Come From A Book

True compassion comes from genuine understanding.

True compassion has nothing to do with chanting mantras on a cushion, or spinning prayer wheels, or throwing rice into the air, or learning Sanskrit or Tibetan or Pali.

If we merely give lip service to compassion, it is doing harm. Lip service is support for something that is not shown in that person’s actions; in other words, it’s hypocrisy. Sounds come out of our mouths without sincerity.

Compassion comes from personal realisation of our true reality of pure awareness, and genuine concern for others who do not know this. People can know about compassion from reading a book, but this is not practising compassion – they’re merely repeating hearsay. Compassion can be uncomfortable and challenging, because we have to actually listen to others’ concerns and put our self to one side.

Genuine compassion is extremely rare. 

Yes, yes, people give time and money to great projects, and lose themselves in the Guru’s or Lama’s activities that need time and money. People are just people; they follow one another and get involved. I did all that, and it was completely unsatisfying. My resources were being harvested due to my gullibility, my desperation to know, my being too trusting and ready to believe.

So I dropped everything and did exactly what the Buddha advised – look at experience, and see its causes and effects. 

We merely have to live out our time, reducing our karmic load in our specific life, by training our mind’s behaviour, avoiding doing harm, and doing whatever we feel is right. We start with compassion for our feeling of self-importance, realising that everyone else feels the same way. That self is merely a set of ideas that we’ve adopted.

I write a blog (in it’s twelfth year now) explaining all my experiences. It may not everyone’s cup of tea, but it does prove that our reality isn’t complicated by elaborations – and isn’t expensive. 

Compassion is having empathy for silliness.
Our reality is free and totally happy.