Seeing Through the Self
What you defend may be the root of your suffering.
Awareness is about using the happenings in this world as a mirror to understand our own predispositions.
Let’s say I come to know that someone hates me. There are generally three reactions to this situation.
I start to hate them back as a tit-for-tat.
I stay indifferent.
I turn compassionate to their suffering.
The first case is a great opportunity to understand my own affliction triggers. Why did I feel aversion? What was I defending? Was it my identity which felt wounded? What was the fixation which caused this?
The second case is an opportunity to analyse indifference itself.
Is this genuine equanimity, or have I withdrawn from engagement?
Am I at peace—or simply avoiding discomfort? Why did I close myself off to this world? Did I consider myself as superior? Did I consider myself as special? What is the root cause behind this isolation?
The third case connects us back to this world. We understand that person’s issues. This person suffers in their hate. What caused this hate? How can I help them overcome this hate? Is there something that I can improve in myself? I am just another human like them. In this case, my love for existence would not let me deny their suffering.
If I take the third route, then a question arises about its execution. Compassion is difficult not because it is rare, but because it demands clarity at multiple levels.
The Tough Road to Compassion
Practicing compassion is hard.
There are four major obstacles to compassion in my experience:
The person we are trying to help refuses their suffering.
The solid self creates defensive shells around it as an excuse to survive. Identities’d have formed around this self. People who suffer afflictions like anger, envy, hate, greed, fear do not even realize that they are suffering. They even use these emotions to perpetuate their delusions.
So, when you attempt to help them see this, they become defensive. Their ego ‘does not’ need help. They actively refuse.
Sometimes they’d have fallen into the trap of apathy. They would not react to your endeavour at all.Helping with a self-serving motive.
Helping others is rewarding when it is without the involvement of our ‘self-interest’. If we help someone with the motivation to take credit, or some reward in some other form, we are really helping them for our own sake. We are actually helping ourselves.
This becomes an obstacle, because the mind is unable to let go of its greed. Much of our suffering seems to arise from self-centered attachment.Compassion requires understanding the other person’s issues deeply.
True compassion is selfless. Empathy enables us to look from their perspective, without the need to defend a solid self. This may sometimes require placing another’s needs above our own—but not blindly abandoning wisdom or balance.
A surface level reading of a person’s problem would often lead to incorrect decisions. It needs time and effort to truly investigate the root cause of a problem, and helping them with a solution.
Helping others requires prediction of future states using one’s intellect and knowledge.
Helping others needs knowledge and resources. One cannot help others if one is severely constrained. Sometimes, even if you act with the best of intentions, helping only makes things worse.
Awareness begins as observation—but it matures into action.
In that response lies the choice: to reinforce suffering, to ignore it, or to understand and solve it.