by Peter Latona

Created on: April 18, 2009

Compassion

If you are careful to catch your initial response to the word compassion, you most likely will think of a scenario like a photo of a starving child or families picking up the pieces after being hit by a tornado; and you will feel great sorrow for these people. You will want to do something to help them and this you think, it a show of compassion. Thus, so many of us confuse sympathy with compassion.

Compassion is a word readily bandied about, yet we do not understand the concept or the dynamics of its actual practice. Compassion has nothing to do with feeling sorry for someone. Compassion is taking oneself out of your body and inhabiting the body of another, so that you are feeling what they are feeling. Not imagining what it must feel like. Not feeling sorry for their plight. You are experiencing for yourself the exact same feeling they are experiencing. Easily said, but difficult to do. Our ego gets in the way. Our ego does not want to disappear long enough for us to experience what another is feeling. Our ego is selfish by nature.

Confucius stated a golden rule of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." We have all heard this and agree with it in theory, but few have dug into the depths of what Confucius was requiring us to implement. The golden rule was not something to keep in our back pocket, so we can pull it out when we want to be good. It was a way of life! It was a rule to be followed each and every minute of everyday. In every interaction with another person you must diligently make sure you do not do anything to them, that you would not want them to do to you. If you think this sounds easy, then try it for a day and see how often you cross the line.

A Rabbi in the 2nd century AD, was asked to explain the entire Torah while standing on one leg (explain it as simply as possible). He replied, "Do not do unto others that which you would hate them to do unto you". "All the rest is just commentary." "Go study." In other words, although there are volumes of words in the written Torah, all these volumes are just commentary on the simple golden rule of do not do unto others what you would hate them to do unto you. Does this sound a little bit like Confucius?

I bring up this discussion on compassion because it is a solution to all of our global crises. If we were constantly diligent in not doing something to another person that we would not like; if a business would not do something to another business that they would not like; if a nation

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