Compassion through social strife

[Asolsutsesvyl]

Likewise thanks for clarifying, to everyone.

I'm not interested in debating which definitions are generally best, but clarification about what's actually meant when words are used can be useful. (In a discussion like this, otherwise more and less subtle disagreements could go on without people knowing what they are about.)

For me, compassion is [...] when I am connected with someone who experiences intense emotions and my heart is open, I literally feel what he/she feels.

This is what compassion means to me, its a bit like understanding but on a more holistic level that includes emotions and the whole energy someone is in.

This does not seem limiting. I was reminded of the ideas I posted about when I read your earlier post, where you described compassion as not always the appropriate response, it somehow being in the way and happening instead of practical action which can help. That's a description of compassion as somehow limiting.

If compassion simply is consciousness expanding in the direction of the other, then how would that be in the way of helping the other, practically? Seems like it would help, instead, because it would make clearer what's appropriate action and what isn't.

Bein caught in an abstraction cuts one off from the actual experience and makes for a action or reaction that is rather based on "should" as opposed to a true reaction that emerges from ones depth.

I can understand that through a personal "before" and "after". Until my spirituality changed over the last 5 years, it was connected to deeply rooted hopes and fears, with the old personal discipline I had built up connected to a range of sophisticated concepts.

Then, as described in another discussion, all of that gradually broke down. I experienced too much, inwardly, for the hopes, fears, and belief connected to the old discipline. So it all began to dissolve, replaced by ambiguity and later, faith in the midst of it.

But I still have a large inner world where big areas are more rooted in the old than the new. It will take a lot of time to more completely re-explore and re-establish understanding on the new foundation gradually forming, especially because I crammed as much learning into the earlier years as I could.