Compassion consists of the desire to alleviate the suffering of another. Initiation into the energy of Compassion given by the Beings of Light of Vega in the Ascension Healing Course facilitates the unfolding of this quality as one realizes one’s spiritual progress.
The Beings of Light of Vega teach us that there are 3 fears that get in the way of the free expression of compassion:
- Fear of emotional pain (the person thinks that if they feel compassion for the other person, they will feel their suffering equally)
- Fear of feeling diminished (the person thinks that he/she will have to give up something of him/herself since Compassion is a quality that creates connection with the other person and in that way the ego of that person fears losing its individuality. In fact, one can maintain one’s individuality without giving in to individualism).
- fear of being distracted from their path (the person thinks that by paying attention to the suffering of others, they risk losing their own path)
Interestingly, Compassion leads to feeling exactly the opposite of what these fears try to convince us of. In feeling compassion, the desire to alleviate another’s suffering overrides the fear of becoming stagnant in emotional empathy without, however, taking any action to help the other person. Pity or pity, on the other hand, leaves one stagnant since pity or pity is a feeling that emerges from an awareness of duality and separation. In a duality consciousness, one feels that the other is separate from oneself. In this awareness, the person merely laments another’s negative situation while maintaining the fear that something similar might one day happen to him or her.
The fear of emotional pain is also associated with the fear of the person attracting the same suffering to themselves if they focus on the suffering of others. Deep down, the person refuses to have compassion because they are afraid to identify with the other. There is sometimes a hidden desire to feel superior, to feel better than the other person, while watching them suffer. The ego feels that assuming compassion for the other would somehow pinch its superiority, its status quo. So what you do is feel sorry to maintain separation consciousness in relation to what you suffer while, to feel better about yourself, you issue some apparent opinion that you care about the other. An identical scenario can be found in everyday life when we come across someone commenting on some negative news, on television or in the newspaper, that affects a certain portion of the population in a country.
Compassion is an active quality, so it implies action beyond a feeling. Compassion naturally emerges from a state of Unity consciousness where one feels that by alleviating another’s suffering, one is actually alleviating one’s own. So, paradoxically, although fear tries to convince one not to feel compassion so as not to suffer for the other, the truth is that if one feels Compassion, one suffers less because one begins to alleviate the suffering of one’s fellow man. Being in a duality consciousness is already a suffering in itself. Compassion is a divine quality that leads a person to an awareness of unity. When, in the face of someone’s suffering, we choose to feel pity instead of compassion, we find that we will do nothing to extinguish that suffering of another. Thus, we will continue to suffer when we don’t want to get involved in solving someone else’s problem because we feel the sting of guilt from ignoring someone else’s suffering whipping at our conscience.
Helping others gives us joy and allows us to feel more at One. That’s compassion. Each and every act of compassion inevitably leads us to a greater awareness of Oneness with the Whole.