Sadhguru was joined in conversation by Dr. James Doty, a Clinical Professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, a part of the Stanford Institute of Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences. In the following excerpt, Sadhguru discusses the meaning of compassion – an all-inclusive passion:
“Generally compassion is described as kindness. Kindness is relevant only when a person is in some kind of helpless state. Most human beings, when they are standing on their feet, wouldn’t want kindness. They want acceptance, they want respect, they don’t want kindness. Compassion is an all-encompassing passion. When I say all-encompassing, passion is essentially an exclusive process. When two people are passionate, the world disappears, that is the beauty of passion, it is exclusive, and the world evaporates in your passion.
Compassion is an all-encompassing passion —that is, it has become an all-inclusive passion, many many fold more than passion. Compassion is not a dry state of kindness, that you are standing above everybody and being kind to everyone, this is not it. This is an active engagement, it is passion. Whatever you set your eyes upon, you are passionate with that right now: the air that you breathe, the earth that you walk upon, the food that you eat, and the people that you see and don’t see. Whatever you are conscious of, you are absolutely passionate with that. That’s compassion, it includes everything in its passion.
So compassion is not that which is bereft of passion, it’s a larger dimension of passion.
It is definitely not an incremental increase of passion. (Laughs). It is not like today you are passionate with one person, tomorrow with two, day after tomorrow with ten to twenty-five. It is just that when you are confined by the limitations of your psychological space where your thoughts and emotions are more important than your existential experience you will know only passion at the most. Most people unfortunately do not know passion in its entirety.
Passion is a wonderful state. If your realization transcends your psychological space and your life becomes very existential, you clearly understand in your experience —not an intellectual understanding, experientially you know— that what is here is just one mass of life and you are just one small pop-up. You are thinking that you are an individual bubble. If that individuality dissolves in your experience, in your understanding and in your knowing, then compassion is a natural way to be, there is no other way to be, because in some way you are experiencing everything as myself. It is not a value or an ethic that you develop. Compassion is an all-encompassing passion, a natural outcome of an experience beyond one’s physical form of absolute inclusiveness.
As we breathe, what we exhale the trees are inhaling, what they exhale we are inhaling. Or in other words, one part of your breathing equipment is hanging out there on the trees. If this becomes an experiential process for you, now I don’t have to tell you, as you are walking, don’t pluck this leaf , you would never do that, it is like somebody plucking your hair . It is not even a thought, it is not an intention, it is not an ethic, ‘I will not pluck leaves’, ‘Thou shall not pluck leaves’, there is no such thing. It is just that, this is the way you will be, how else to be?
Compassion not as an ethic but as a consequence of borderless consciousness can change the dynamics of how we exist.”
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