TRS Foundation

Compassion can be cultivated by ways of formal meditation, attention and insight.

We need to acknowledge for ourselves our blind and habitual rejection of fear, because it’s fear we’re really afraid of, not the pain of the world. We already know that pain is part of life. What we’re actually afraid of, and what we’re turning away from, is our sense of a lack of capacity to receive it, to bear with pain in a sane way. Pain, JUST IS, and pleasure, JUST IS. not right or wrong. While we don’t usually have a problem with pleasure, except that sometimes we forget ourselves with it, we do have a big problem with pain. It motivates us to do all sorts of things that become additions or other avoidance strategies, which are very wasteful of energy, both inwardly and outwardly.

Compassion can be cultivated. It isn’t helpful to approach compassion or any of these heart matters with the idea of having or not-having it; compassion is a potential in all of us. But it needs to be cultivated. One of the best encouragements for cultivating compassion is to intentionally witness compassionate beings.

Our generation has arrived at the threshold of a new era in human history. Communications, trade + International relations as well as the security and environmental dilemmas we all face make us increasingly interdependent. No one can live in isolation. Thus whether we like it or not, our vast and diverse human family must finally learn to live together. Individually and collectively we must assume a greater sense of universal responsibility.

We confidently use terms like “facts’, “truth” and “reality”; yet in the end these are mere words, and our experience of any given subject is conditioned by our personal make-up. Nowhere is more evident than in the telling of history. Life is so rich, detailed and multifaceted that we can’t describe the things that occur in just one day of an ordinary individual’s life. Words are simply inadequate. Yet we attempt to speak of thousands of years of human experience as though it were a flat object held in the palm of the hand.