Another post to the “Psychopaths Brains Different” thread on SOTT

(orig. published) December 5th, 2006

http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=28524#p28524

Bholanath wrote: (quoting) I’m tending to agree with the above. While I hear from many quarters all day long about the necessity for “compassion”, “unconditional love”, etc., I’ve been shown the down side of “idiot compassion” and the really complex reality of in-the-moment nature of levels of compassion. We all have. “Ruthless”- or “Fierce”-compassion is what some call this other path. (And I’m so sick of new-age teachers/disinfo-agents constantly “mixing up the levels”.)

Another thing is the axiom of non-dualists that “knowledge-transmission must only be given when specifically requested”. This leads to serious self-inquiry regarding attachment to a “goal” of, say, “creating a critical mass” of awareness around the planet. Maybe its like what one Tibetan lama said (a book called “Carefree Dignity”): [to paraphrase] the self-motivation to become aware is like a cold…if you’re around someone who has it, you will just “catch it”.(end quote)

I think that true compassion is “Fierce” compassion. Pema Chodron tells the story of a Buddhist monk on a sea voyage who decides he will slay the captain of a pirate ship attacking them to save the pirate from creating further karmic debt for himself. Tolle speaks in a couple of places in A New Earth about sometimes having to defend yourself or others from the actions of deeply unconscious people, but that it can be done without “making them into enemies.” And it’s not compassionate to let a system that feeds on ignorance and suffering grind on in its brutal course out of some kind of sentimental sympathy with the tragedies of the lives of the perpetrator class.

Level confusion is a malady that anyone in the process of unfolding awareness is going to have to meet head-on and chronically. Learning to use your mind efficiently to think critically about things probably requires understanding the nature of mind itself, and what its innate limitations are. Its necessary to look at any idea skeptically, regardless of its source. It’s likely that anyone tends to move between states of greater of lesser clarity on a (daily? momentary?) basis, and someone momentarily in a state of greater ignorance may then be/seem an agent of disinfo inadvertantly at that time.

As to the arising of a “critical mass” of people who are “catching it” (ironically, catching that which buddhas seem to suggest is seen on awakening as having always been there behind the veil of ego) that would seem to depend on whether such a gestalt “wants” to happen. Certainly, no one can force or manipulate anyone else into waking up. I think that may be part of what Gurdjieff was talking about when he stated that the forces of inverted intelligence have access to tools and strategies that the forces of evolution don’t. Still, I think we perhaps need to hope that such a thing can occur, as if “we” have the fight the PTB in conventional terms, the probability of the significant survivability of living systems on this planet doesn’t seem high. Also, should “we” be able to prevail in such a war, whoever came out “on top” could well be a “Galadriel” that all would worship and despair. Several teachers have spoken of being around someone who’s awake being like a log coming into contact with one that’s already ablaze – you can begin to “ignite.” But then you have to tend the flame when away from the awakened one, no one else can do this for you. Particularly as one begins to grow in awareness, though, falling back into states of ignorance starts to become more and more intolerable. Then, as Adyashanti says, you can put a fork in yourself, ’cause you’re done. He calls that “great good luck.”

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