VBT – Meditation 97.1
Simply Feel Compassion
It will be good if you move alone somewhere and do this, practise this. Alone this technique will be helpful, but remember to start with something that you can feel. I have seen people doing techniques which they cannot feel. If you cannot feel, if you don’t have any experience, even a glimpse, then the whole thing becomes false. A man came to Osho and he said, “I am practising that God is everywhere.” So Osho asked him, “How can you practise? What do you imagine? Have you any taste, any feeling of God? Only then will it be easy to imagine. Otherwise, you will be simply thinking that you are imagining and nothing will happen.”
Remember this for any technique you do – at the start you must do something you are acquainted with; you may not be totally acquainted with it, but a little glimpse will be necessary. Only then can you progress, step by step. But don’t jump into something which is absolutely unknown to you because then you cannot feel it and you cannot imagine it. Because of this, many masters, particularly Buddha, completely dropped the word ‘God’. Buddha said, “You cannot work with it. It is the very end, and you cannot bring the end into the beginning. So begin from the very beginning.”
He said, “Forget the end, the end will follow automatically.” And he said to his disciples, “Don’t think of God. Think of compassion. Think of love.” So he doesn’t say that one should feel that God is everywhere, one should simply feel compassion for everyone who is there – for the tree, for human beings, for animals. Simply feel compassion. Feel sympathetic, create a love… because love you know, howsoever little. There has been something like love in everybody’s life. You may not have loved, but someone may have loved you, your mother at least. You must have looked into her eyes: she loved you.
“Just be motherly to existence,” Buddha says, “and feel deep compassion. Feel that the whole world is filled with your compassion. Then everything else will follow.”
Remember this as a basic law: always start with something you can feel because only then can the unknown enter through it.
Compassion is the ultimate flowering of consciousness. It is passion released of all darkness, it is passion freed from all bondage, it is passion purified of all poison. Passion becomes compassion.
Passion is the seed; compassion is the flowering of it.
But compassion is not kindness, kindness is not compassion. Kindness is an ego-attitude, it strengthens your ego. When you are kind to somebody, you feel the upper hand. When you are kind to somebody there is a deep insult – you are humiliating the other, you are feeling happy in his humiliation. That’s why kindness can never be forgiven. Whomsoever you have been kind to will remain somehow, somewhere angry with you, and is bound to take revenge. Because kindness is only on the surface as compassion, but deep in the depth it has nothing to do with compassion. It has other ulterior motives.
Compassion is unmotivated, it has no motive at all. It is simply because you have, you give – not that the other needs. The other is not a consideration at all in compassion. Because you have, you go on overflowing. Compassion is very spontaneous, natural, like breathing. Kindness is a cultivated attitude. Kindness is a kind of cunningness; it is calculation, it is arithmetic.
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