What Is Compassion? Compassion Is The Manifestation Of The "Original Mind": God

Kate asks:

Hi Dan,
Can you explain what compassion is? Is it empathy?
Great blog!
Kate
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Thank you, Kate. Great question. I am going to go somewhere else after this dictionary stuff. My Webster's New World College Dictionary (Fourth Edition) defines compassion as sympathy <to feel pity <to suffer <sorrow for the sufferings or trouble of another or others, accompanied by an urge to help; deep sympathy; pity (emphasis mine).

'Com' in Latin means with. 'Passion' means to suffer. So together they mean "to suffer together." As in Jesus on the cross; his being there being OUR being there--one died for ALL.

Compassion is a lot like empathy, but compassion has feet, and for that matter, hands. Compassion would be empathy and/or sympathy if it didn't incorporate action to alleviate the suffering. There is the biting of the bullet and the entering of the pain (as intense pain causes gnashing of the teeth, people would bite on the soft lead of a bullet to keep from breaking their teeth). Jesus bit it, as it were, to become the Messiah, which was a post-mortem(!) status. Here are a few of the 227,000,000 results of a web search on "What is compassion?":

Greater Good Magazine's What is Compassion?
Audiopedia's What does COMPASSION mean?
Mind Valley's What is Compassion? Looking Beyond Yourself For A Better World
Compassion International's Who is Compassion International?

End of dictionary stuff.

In the Bible, as I see it, there is no "other." The Bible is the description of a single Being: the Ineffable Most High (..?). We have absolutely no idea what this entity is, but we are facets of the whole enchilada It is. It is the ex-nihilo everything is made out--for there was not, is not, and never will be anything else. It alone is perfect and worthy. We just happen to be It. "Of" It, but It nevertheless. It loves being perfect. Loves everything about It (there is nothing else to love, anyway). And we, unfortunately, are ignorant parts of It which It is in the process of perfecting. Hence we are here undergoing this cleansing, purging, generating, overcoming of ignorance unto our perfection.

God is Compassion, and we are It here. That is why I said, "the world is learning compassion." Learning to God, which I understand as a verb. The action of God (i.e., that is God) is imagination (the Ineffable has nothing else to move!), and that imagination is compassion.

I like very much the ancient Chinese take on this. Mencius used the illustration of a person seeing a child about to fall into a well. Absolutely anyone would have the same immediate, automatic reaction: to spring to their feet and dash to grab the child, or do whatever they could to save it. This, he said, was indication of Original Mind. The Original Mind is God, and It is compassionate. Compassion is the Manifestation of the Ineffable.

The question now is: when we see the child, do we spring? Do we pray/celebrate believing they have received? Have we sold everything that we might gain Christ as Neville describes in "The Pearl of Great Price"? Compassion is investment.