Compassion and Fearlessness
Where the mind is without fear, let me awake in that world...
On our post-dinner walks I helped a lady restart her bike.
While my motive was not to get any credit, my mind kept going back to this incident.
I think there was a feeling of having done something good, but there was also some pride and egoic satisfaction. It was like ‘how good I was!’. Why did I feel this way?
I think I still am egoic, and since this was a different thing than usual, my ego was trying to observe its occurrence. It was trying to do what it always does, focusing on the doer, the I, the self. It was responsible for this self-aggrandizement. ‘Ain’t a great human being?’
It deepens the identity. The solidity of the self. Even selfless deeds thus become a source of suffering. This pride, this quiet smugness, is nothing but falsehood. It blurs reality. A hindrance to clearly seeing the cause of the event. An obstacle in being in the world. A delusion, an unreal hallucination.
The reality is that compassion is a natural response to awareness. It doesn’t make anyone great. There is no lesser or greater human being. Everyone has their own chains to break. In the path to awareness, everybody is a failure first. Our conditioning defines how we exist, and how we die. To see clearly is to negotiate this substance through our will.
To live is to be willing to die each moment. Fearlessness comes naturally to the compassionate. It is no coincidence that Jesus was the most compassionate at the same time he was the most fearless.
To live is to detach from these identities, this conditioned construct called ‘I’. When we understand how we became what we are, we realise we are all alike. That is why helping others is to shed the resistence by this ego, this self, to merge into the flow of this impermanent world. To move on with the universe. To exist.