A lot of my best intentions as an ego to relieve the suffering of others has ended up increasing the sum-total of suffering in the world.
As you see the web of interconnected information and consciousness, you see that, as each individual in the system changes, the whole system changes.
I realized that, if it were going to be the end—that means I was going to die along with everything else—how would I like to prepare for death? The way I’d like to prepare for death is: stay in the present moment as fully as I could for when the moment comes when I meet the mystery of the unknown. Basically, I say death is a mystery. How would I like to meet a mystery?
I look and I see you are me. And then I see that any suffering you have is like a splinter in one hand. And I pull it out with the other finger, and this hand doesn’t say to this hand, “Thank you.” It could, but it doesn’t usually. Because they both recognize they are part of one thing. That’s compassion. See, compassion comes when it’s your suffering. It’s not their suffering. Kindness comes with their suffering—and righteousness, and guilt, and pity, and all the rest of it. But the compassion where you go from “I do a compassionate thing” to “I’m a compassionate person” to—and this is where the emptiness comes in, where that going from soul into awareness comes that ultimate dying—then, at that point, compassion is. Suffering is and compassion is, and there’s nothing personal about it.
You are walking through a web of projections of other people’s minds as to who you are and who they are, and they are trying to get you to reassure them that their costume is on straight. So you see me as who I think I am, and I’ll try to see you as who you think you are, and we’ll make believe this is real so we won’t frighten ourselves.
When you wake up into soul awareness, you look and you see people coming along deeply mired in their identity with who they think they are—with their role, with their personality, with their needs, fears, hopes, joys, da, da, da, da. And you play with them in the world they live in, but you’re also available if they’d like to say, “Ha, ha, ha! Doin’ well, aren’t I?” See? It’s interesting whether your consciousness allows other human beings to come out and play. You can go into a city and say, “Oh, there’s nobody here that’s spiritual.” All you’re doing is mirroring your own consciousness. When you’re spiritual, it’s all spiritual. When you’re resting in soul, what you see is souls in drag. And you enjoy it. You enjoy the dance. You appreciate the beauty of the manifestation.
You become that being that can bear the unbearable—not through denial, not through coldness, not through anything else, but through being with what is. Because you can’t live in the moment if you’re busy making believe a lot of stuff doesn’t exist. This society is making believe that the underclass does not exist. We are living as if it doesn’t exist, and we’re hiding it under ethnic stuff and all kinds of stuff. But basically there is an extremely unfair and unjust system we are part of. And when you are more conscious, you see that the game begins with you, and how you live your life, and how you live with each person around you, and you begin to feel the webs that work to change the whole game.
Once you can look at the suffering and be with it as it is, and realize it’s not their suffering in Bosnia, it’s the suffering; it’s not their suffering in Africa, it’s not their suffering in Israel, it’s our suffering. It’s not their suffering in the inner city, it’s our suffering. It’s not their suffering with AIDS, it’s our suffering. And then, when you open to that immensity of the suffering, what arises in absolute equal measure out of you is this quality of compassion, of hearing what part you play in the balance of it. And it doesn’t matter which part you play. You play whichever part is appropriate for you to play in view of your skills, opportunities, situation in life, et cetera. And you realize you are just part of a process of transformation.
What you have to do is throw off membership and things. So there has been breakdown in the extended family. There has been breakdown in a lot of the membership in social structures that gave your ego life meaning. Now, we got so far over, and what do I want? What do I need? You go into another culture—like, I go to India all the time where, in the villages of India, they live with role identity, not personality identity. They fulfill their roles. I’m not arguing from it as whether it’s bad or good. That isn’t the issue. The issue is: these people are identified with role, not personality. They don’t ask: “What do I want?” “What do I need?” They ask: “What’s my part to play?” “What’s my dharma?” What’s my dharma? And then you come back to our culture, and it looks like the back ward of a mental hospital. I mean, everybody is: “I’m not getting enough. I want more.” “I need.” “I had a terrible childhood, you don’t understand. I deserve.” I mean, it’s so painful, it’s so thick! And everybody walks down the street telling you this is who they are. And everybody—I mean, it’s like a victimized society. It’s a bizarre thing.
I was so caught in individualism that I was losing my sense of community.
The soul is the ocean that thinks it’s a soul. The thought that it is a soul is what reincarnates. Okay. I mean, it’s still a drop in the ocean, so it’s still whatever it is. It just isn’t—you don’t stand inside of it any longer. You’re the whole ocean.
The root of fear is ignorance. The ignorance is that you are a separate entity. As long as you identify with your separateness, there will be fear. As long as you extricate yourself from that identification, you will enter a part of your being which has nothing to be afraid of. The separate entity has a lot to be afraid of, because it’s going to cease to exist in practically no time. And it’s also going to go through all its stuff. So there is fear in separateness. And as you awaken from that and balance it—that you are separate and you are not separate—that part of you that is not separate is not in fear. And that is the part that balances and makes you able to be with the fear without making believe it doesn’t exist, or without being taken over by it. So that you can be—it doesn’t mean fear goes away. You may still feel the fear, but the other part of your consciousness will be able to say, “Ah, fear.”