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Kinfonet Discussion
102

For being compassionate, first, a person should notice the state of mind in the opposite person. After that, he has to display some sensible action for alleviating the person of interest. I do not think that most people know this social activity but it is an important aspect in one’s social life in present society.

For noticing the opposite person’s state of mind, one should have the ability to read the person’s thought process. I think this requires a silent mind for the person who wants to perceive the suffering person’s state of mind. This is the one, most of us are lacking in most situations.

I observed that kind of situation most of the time, as you said. I think for practicing compassion one should have a dettached mind set.

If you are not convinced with my assertion, we can reason it out to until we get appropriate understanding. :slightly_smiling_face:

103

One either is compassionate or one is not. There is no advice or guideline for “being compassionate”. Compassion acts. It is not a strategy or a quality to be cultivated.

104

sivaram,

I have observed that you go quietly about in various topics appearing to fulfil what you said, to the effect of being here: to understand how the mind works.

Added: From your latest post below, I have understood that all you are doing on this site is asking questions to confirm/compare your own personal knowledge with what you think is the personal knowledge and experience of others - all of which is meaningless. I would add that your constant repetition (what you have called below re-iteration) is something you have done before. In that sense, I doubt highly that you have learned anything at all in any of your exchanges with anyone on this site. None of which has anything to do with what K talked about. So, I have to conclude that you haven’t really read K, and are not serious. I must say you do a really good job of pretending to understand.

Firstly, one cannot practice compassion. For that matter, one cannot practice kindness, empathy, love.

I recently saw a TV interview by a journalist of an Afghani woman stranded outside of Afghanistan in another country due to the onset of Covid. Since then, well, we are all quite aware of the Taliban taking control of the country. While working in Afghanistan, if I recall correctly I hope, she supported and helped (physical help - not psychological help, understand?) Afghani women there with education and such. She broke down in the interview and began to cry, all the while speaking so passionately, with all of herself - because of recent developments and her constant online contact with many women she knew there who were absolutely terrified as to what life lay in store for them. As she spoke, one saw the genuine sorrow in her face - she was weeping but it wasn’t self-pity or pity for others; one heard the sorrow in her voice, and tears came to one’s eyes, to match her sorrow. That is compassion, her compassion for her sisters who were left behind, and my compassion for her and all the women she spoke of. The one and the same compassion.

Not everyone is in touch with their sorrow. Some people are in touch only rarely and in certain circumstances, right?

Several years ago, during a Christmas supper with an acquaintance, we were joined by two others, neither of whom did we know. One person began speaking and speaking directly to my acquaintance and began a long and intense verbal self-expression of the horrors that she had lived through and that she was still reeling from. Never in my life had I seen such a wanton display of a human being wallowing in self-pity. Not a tear dropped from her eye while she was verbalizing all the details of her horrid experience. No, she was speaking completely out of touch with her sorrow - detached from any sorrow, so to speak; and, she was speaking from the memory of her experience, in other words from her knowledge of what she had experienced. My acquaintance was entirely incapable of discerning that it was self-pity and only listened intently, which only added fuel and energy to the continued airing of this bully’s dirty laundry in public. (K would see such airing of dirty laundry in public as he referred to it as “abomination”.) It was an absolute horror for me to witness. I fell into an absolute silence and ate my meal quietly. I felt nothing for this bully, nothing at all. Eventually, she and her friend got up and left, her with a self-satisfied smile on her face and her accomplishment of self-expression.

So, you can see that compassion is no way that of a detached mind, as you put it.

105

No, Sir, I am not either giving advice or explaining compassion as a strategy. My point was for valuing another person’s emotion, first his/ her state of mind must be noticed. Otherwise, it is impossible to value the pain he/she is going through.

Sometimes, it requires intuition to understand what a person is going through. I observed this quality in very few people of my life.

106

I agree that compassion is not a practice. Actually I wanted to say that, if the opposite person is unloving or having views which differ from our view, valuing such a person to some extent for the sake of stability in the mood, requires some sort of detachment.

By observing the sorrow in situations, some people will just shed tears, some people will go wild and destroy items around (For example in the film hunger games, in a scene the lead actress will grieve for the fellow competitors death. By watching that people start breaking the items related to government. (empathy turned into violence)), some people will just think of the possible solution to make the person come out of the situation or just leave. I all the above cases the person will react according to his/her conditioning. In all three cases, there is empathy towards the sorrow but the outcome is different.

I feel that a detached mind will react according to the situation, without any kind of bias.

Maybe I am wrong, I do not know. :slightly_smiling_face:

107

I think I resonated with your explanation. Sometimes reacting in such situations will increase the intensity of distress.

108

hi sivaram,

You have mentioned the phrase, “detached mind”, twice! Here, we see the idea of duality in full mode of operation, right? So, do you realize, that there are many ideas that exist in our society that perpetuate the idea of duality, ideas such as attachment/detachment, and violence/non-violence? There are others, but I think just mentioning these two will be sufficient for the purposes of this discussion. And, please note that here, one is putting into bold the phrase “idea of duality”. I am doing this to stress duality as a psychological idea, instead of certain physical facts, such as short/tall, young/old, male/female, etc., etc., etc.

But, is non-violence a reality in itself? Is it a fact? People practise non-violence these days. Ghandi like Martin Luther King were well-known proponents of non-violence. The problem is that violence is a fact, while non-violence is only an idea, which many people try and practise, thus avoiding and escaping looking at themselves, at their violence. In general, most people will not ask themselves whether or not there really is a duality such as violence and non-violence. The fact is that there is only “what is”, right? And, because they don’t question themselves, violence continues; and as we can see in the world around us… seems to be getting worse. Here, I am not going to go into all the aspects of violence in this topic (as it is not really in line with the present topic of relationship), okay?

So, in analogy, people also have a tendency to see attachment/detachment as a duality as well, right? So, I am saying here that attachment is a fact, one which everyone indulges in, right? That is “what is”. People are attached to family, wife/husband/partner, friends, children, objects, things they own, their beliefs, their opinions, their way of living, this forum, verbal exchanges with each other (laughs here!), one’s computer !! (You have no idea how I laughed at myself quite some years ago, when the hard drive on my computer died, and went to the store and pitiably whined to the salesman about that, then suddenly realized how attached I was to the darn thing!) Funny, eh?

Many years ago, I was quite struck by the following excerpt, where K said:

“He is caught in Aristotle. Aristotle apparently, according to him, has said, “Opposite must exist; otherwise ‘what is’ is non-existent”. Listen to it carefully, please. The opposite must exist otherwise ‘what is’ is non-existent. I am attached, and the opposite is detachment, and if there is no opposite there is no attachment. I am afraid even Aristotle can be mistaken!”
K: Saanen, 2nd Public Dialogue, 1st Aug. 1974

So, I trust you can see that detachment, as in a “detached mind”, is not a reality, and not the opposite of attachment. Personally, I think that having a detached mind is an aberration of what it means to be a human being, a horror. Under such a detached mind, all kinds of horrors are committed on this planet. Such a detached mind is only someone who has separated themselves from “what is”. So, I ask you, would you rather have a doctor with a “detached mind”, rather than a compassionate doctor…?

109

Okay, if there is duality I have to pay some attention and ask you some doubts.

I will reply to you after sometime. :slightly_smiling_face:

110

Compassion is not about noticing or evaluating. It has nothing to do with the intellect, thought. It comes with the awakening of intelligence. Prior to that, it’s just a word, a concept, like “love”… food for thought, but incomprehensible to the conditioned mind.

111

Thought is nothing but the reflection of self in which there is attachment. If the mind is evaluating the validity of such a thought, then we can say that detachment took place inside (This is not natural thing of course).

Psychologists say that compassion is a process happens between two people and there are three things are involved in it, which are noticing, feeling and acting accordingly. An empathic response towards the sufferer may lead to two types of response, which is personal distress and concern.

Hey, there is a lot of other things involved in the above paragraph. I think I do not know the role of detachment then. :slightly_smiling_face:

Again I have to re-iterate myself.

112

Jiddu talked about awakening of intelligence, are you referring to that?

113

Yes. I’m referring to that

114

Sivaram,

What psychologists have said (as you mention in the above paragraph) is completely false. You see, one can practise detachment, because it is an idea. One can contort, twist and play with all sorts of ideas. Trump used to keep a copy of Mein Kampf on his bed stand and read it at night and practised giving speeches according to Hitler’s way so as to learn how to manipulate others. That is a perfect example of a “detached mind.” All that people like Trump and psychologists do is all based on thought.

From what I understand, psychologists don’t believe in goodness. In general, they refer to it as altruism, and believe it is a function of the “self”. I see goodness as something existing outside the self. You understand, eh? And worse, the entire field of psychology is based on the idea that it is impossible to end the “I”, the “me”, the “self”, whatever word one chooses to call it.- all of these words meaning the same thing. They are actually trained to accept this idea that it is impossible to end the “I”, and it is this belief that underlies their entire approach with their clients. The problem that I have with this approach is that there is not one psychologist who has ever tested whether or not this belief is true or false !! Psychology is consider a “soft science”, not a pure science, because the foundations of it are not based on empirically proven bases.

Their entire approach is geared to improve the quality of life of their client so as to live less neurotically in this neurotic world - in other words to appear to function sanely in an insane world. I can’t think or imagine anything more stupid than that.

And, any work of a psychologist on their client is one of dependence. I say that because the word “client” derives from the PIE (Proto-Indo-European) klient-, a suffixed (active participle) form of root *klei- “to lean” - in other words, it is a relationship of psychological dependence, which even a psychologist will admit is neurotic !!

Moreover, such an exchange cannot dissolve any childhood memory completely. So, I would call such clients their victims. In the best of their efforts, they can peel back some of the memories that their victim may have experienced just like one peels a banana and, unfortunately, leaving the peel attached to the banana (their victim). Afterwards, they would tell their victims that now they have a “choice”, whether to act out the damage or not. They do not believe that the peel can be discarded. So, I am saying, from what I understand, they believe that the peel is permanent.

The psychologist believes that they can help others, psychologically speaking, completely neglecting the fact that the urge to help others psychologically is based on a neurosis, a neurosis which they live their entire lives with. They never question the possibility of freedom from their own personal neuroses.

I have never been therapized, but I have known quite a few who have undergone such work, and I have discussed my pov with some of these “professionals”, as well as informing myself and reading about them.

Everything that any psychologist/therapist does has absolutely nothing to do with what K talked about, what I post in here, and what I understand.

So, I would say that I am not at all interested in talking about what some neurotic psychologist says, or what some of their victims believe. This is a K site. I am not K, one is Charley and “I” have tested so much of what K what and found them to be true.

Personally, I understand that all psychologists are insane, crazy !!

115

I don’t know if compassion comes in with the awakening of intelligence. Compassion is a state of being in relation with a situation wherein one ore more persons are involved. There can follow an action or reaction and that gives proof of your own involvement or not.

116

If it’s present without intelligence, it’s just empathy.

117

Hi charley,

I was travelling and it is the reason for my delay to reply you. From your previous reply, I felt that psychologist creates a kind of dependency in their clients. Therefore, the conflict in the clients mind will become an inevitable pattern.

As @Inquiry, referred me to the video of Jiddu talking about intelligence I understood the content follows,

“If there is no conflict between two people, love between them take place automatically. Where there is love, there is compassion. In love and compassion, there is intelligence, for that one has to be tremendously watchful in the situations.”

From my research on the topic of compassion and having an interaction with you. I got a conclusion that the psychologist point of view compassion is, it is a process which happens between two self-centered minds as a transaction to satisfy the self.

It is very easy to say that, Jiddu’s understanding on love and compassion is at different level. As it talks about the relation between two people for their entire life span which is not the case from definitions of psychologists research.

If you don’t mind give the answer to my following question,

Q. What should I tell to a 10 year old child if he asked about compassion?

118

Tell him to look the word up in the dictionary.

119

sivaram,

Tell him the truth (your truth), that you, sivaram, don’t know what it is… :slightly_smiling_face:

120

It’s okay mam

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121

It’s okay inquiry

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