“When you take a life, you take your own.” ~Dune

I wonder if compassion is something born out of suffering.  To be present to those who are here now is maybe something we learn only because we have suffered through loss. To understand the suffering of another being is to understand your own.  Through the loss of life of an entity, we see what we will soon meet ourselves.  Does this not lead into the great road that interconnects us all, that yearning to understand each other through compassion?

Compassion.  With passion. Passion from the flames of endearment and intense enthusiasm we call desire.  Only with desire do you reach “enlightenment”.   Buddha acknowledged that we are all already enlightened, you need only to open your eyes to what has always been there before you were conscious of your own existence. 

Desire.  Suffering. Compassion.  It’s all relative.

The Buddha did not escape suffering. As a human, he smiled through it.  Isn’t that what we are all doing every time we grieve? Sometimes when you lose one you feel like you have lost it all until you realize that it had been lost already long before anything has even started. In the same respect, we have gained everything we have ever gained, and in that sense, we never really lose anything, do we?  It has always been there, suspended in this great Continuum of time.

We are a speck already set in the eye,  a fly already caught in the web, the space between a glass seen as half empty and half full.  What is NOW if not everything?  If you can take yourself outside of time you can see the book has already been written.  Yet, we are flying through the pages of the book. Every word is NOW and every NOW is fleeting.

Most of our lives, we live in Samsara, caught like a hamster walking the wheel, only ours is a wheel fueled by our desires.  What is the point of our own existence?  Most days we are the center of our universe, refusing to look outside ourselves.  Only by looking outside ourselves can we get off that wheel.  To understand someone else’s center is to understand our own humanity.  To understand someone else’s suffering is to come to terms with our own.  

Loss gains suffering.  Through loss, we suffer.  How?  Loss of life?  Loss of money?  Loss of rights? Loss of dignity?  Loss of health?  Loss of beauty? Loss of love?

For many years Buddha lived shielded from going past his comfort zone by a father who wanted him to conquer the world and reign as Supreme King, until one day the Prince stepped  beyond his most comfortable palace leading him on a path to face three fates who will meet us all: Sickness, Decay, and Death.   

Buddha’s first experience with suffering was not a choice.  It was not within his control when his mother died while he was an infant, too young to understand or remember his own suffering, the greatest suffering of humankind cutting him off, the root of his own existence and energy.  Suffering without consciousness of that suffering.  How deep is that?

Later, Buddha’s experiences with suffering were all choices he made.  He chose to abandon his beloved wife and child. He chose to abandon his people, leaving them without a king, later to be killed by invaders.  His suffering was not just his own. In his search to find an end to suffering, he only found more of it.

In his end, Buddha chose to eat food he knew was spoiled, leading to his death. He did not want to hurt the feelings of the one who fed him.  His last choice was one of compassion over his own suffering.  Compassion is not just the deep sympathy or concern for others. It is a knowledge that we are not alone in our suffering.  It is a path that leads us all to each other.