Saturday, August 1, 2009

In mind 2

Compassion is the bottom line in Buddhist philosophy, and the other bottom line is awareness. Is there no conflict between truth and compassion? The answer is no.
Reality can be described in many ways, and all are good except the bad ones. The good ones are about compassion, which means a general, positive attitude towards others.
Compassion is an unusual attitude, as we see from history. History has been driven by egoism and strange ideas about superiority and the right to hurt and kill others.
In mind we can spontaneously have different ideas and experiences, but compassion is not spontaneous. It is something we have to learn. If we do that, we can see all issues in the light of compassion.
In Buddhist philosophy we find the connection between relative truth and absolute truth. The relative is an expression of the absolute, but not in a random or arbitrary way.
The relative truth can be understood in so many ways on the coarser levels of mind. We are normally deceived.
If we can not reach the deepest levels - which we can not do normally - we have to rely on rules of thumb - and the basic rule of thumb is that compassion is right.

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