The Power of Compassion

I’ve been around the block a couple of times and I’ve heard all the talk about empathy and compassion. The Buddhists preach about how great it is to have compassion. Priests in Yoruba talk about sensitivity, and Christians talk about forgiveness. What does all this mean? It means absolutely nothing.

Warning, the rest of this article contains explicit tell it like it is language about compassion, empathy, and forgiveness. So if you are the kind of person who places flowers in the barrel of guns, I suggest you read something else. If you choose to continue, you will continue at your own risk.

The truth of the matter is that many of us cannot be compassionate, empathetic, or sensitive because we are limited by our own beliefs and perceptions. Many of us are nearsighted, we see the world from one single perspective, our own. We sometimes have occasional moments of being farsighted, but this only happens when we “try” to see the world from different perspectives.

Many of us live in a bubble. We are nearsighted and tend to only care about issues that strike close to home. We care about the things that affect us directly. We are empathetic, compassionate, and sensitive when we feel and understand our own pain or the pain of our loved ones. Then, there are times when we are farsighted. This is when we can only “imagine” the pain that other people are going through. We watch television and see famines, Jihads, and refugees fleeing war-torn countries, and we have just a flicker of empathy, a fleeting moment of compassion. Then, we turn the channel to see what else is on.

Now, it would be a different story if our wives, husbands, or daughters were trapped in one of these countries. It would be different if we ourselves had to flee from an army of angry child soldiers. It would be different if we had to brave the jungles and risk getting eaten by hungry lions. It would be different if we had watched our loved ones die from the blade of a rusty machete.

That is my very point! It is always different, when it is somebody else. People talk about compassion, forgiveness, and sensitivity. But these things mean nothing to nearsighted people. It is not that they don’t care about other people. It is just that they don’t have the capacity to understand. Our ancestors operated from a different paradigm. They didn’t have a “me” generation mentality. They believed in the concept of “we” because they realized that everything and everyone was interconnected. If one person had a problem, then everyone had a problem.

There is a better way that I can explain this concept. Everyone is pretty much familiar with the binary code. It is a language that is used to program computers using the numbers one and zero. A computer can only generate results through a process of elimination, and it can only perform one function at a time. Today, there is something called quantum mechanics, where a computer can perform millions if not billions of functions at one time. This allows us to solve problems at a much faster rate. Furthermore, this allows us to solve issues and do calculations that are virtually impossible for the human mind.

Just think about it! The physical world mirrors the spiritual world. Many of us are going through life using the binary code. We are solving our problems the only one way we know how. However, it is when we become enlightened that we are able to leap into the sphere of quantum mechanics. This is when we are able to view the world from many different perspectives. And we are able to not only solve our own problems, but virtually all the problems that plague our world. That’s deep! And that is the real meaning of compassion, forgiveness and sensitivity.