This is us living the busy and unexamined life, acting from that
complex of motives that take us through the day. But when we don’t pay
full attention to our inner dialogue, to our feelings and thoughts, and
we don’t answer the call of the heart, we feel alienated from ourselves
and from life around us, however subtly, and we don’t experience the
moment as fully as we might. As we pass by the homeless woman, life
passes us by.
Compassionate action gives us an opportunity to wake up to some of our
motives and to act with more freedom. It gives us the chance to put
ourselves out on the edge, and if we are willing to take a clean look at
what we see there, we can come to know ourselves better. We can’t, of
course, change what is arising in us at any moment, because we can’t
change our pasts and our childhoods. But when we listen to our own minds
and stop being strangers to ourselves, we increase the number of ways
we can respond to what arises.
Then we know when we are resisting contact with a poor person because of
something that happened in childhood, and we know that now we have
nothing to fear either from the homeless person or from the examination
of our place in the economic structure. We are here right now, and we
are free. We can either walk past the person, talk to her, give her some
money, and go on, maybe reflecting on the causes of homelessness and
its relation to our hot tub, or we can cross the street because we are
still carrying around fear and protection from childhood and don’t want
to deal with it today on the way to a meeting.
Whichever we do, with increasing awareness comes an appreciation of our
actions as they are, and then they begin to change. Even if we haven’t
acted compassionately toward the woman, we haven’t repressed the fact
that she exists, and we aren’t judging ourselves; as awareness and
acceptance increase, not blocked by our fears, we tend to act more
humanely. It happens naturally.
- Ram Dass
Excerpt from Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service
