Natural Compassion

I have written in this blog that compassion is not an emotion. This may be a confusing misuse of words on my part. Compassion is not an emotion, but it requires us to be able to feel emotion. You could say that compassion is the ability to listen to our emotions, but it is not in itself an emotion.

To have true compassion it is necessary to be able to let our emotions guide our behavior and thoughts without interference from our ego. When the ego gets in the way we end up letting our thoughts rule our emotions instead of the other way around. This always results in suffering of one form or another, either pain or pleasure. Regardless of the result, our egos can never be compassionate, though it frequently tries to convince us we are being compassionate when we have thoughts that invoke feelings of sympathy for another person. By raising your consciousness you become aware of these thoughts and begin to be able to distinguish between the false emotions they generate (false compassion) and the genuine emotions that come directly and unhindered (innocently) from your heart (“heart” is just a convenient term for the complex inner-workings of your unconscious mind). Only by learning to listen to these emotions do you begin to naturally have compassion.