The Science of Compassion

Highlights from Gregg Braden's book Walking Between the Worlds, one of my most life-altering reads.  I first read it about 15 years ago and it really resonated with me at the time.  Here are the key parts of this book that I want to remember and share.  

• This book focuses on scientific research as well as ancient texts such as the the dead sea scrolls.  
• You are and have always been, intimately connected to all that you see and experience. Researchers have now digitally measured this relationship. Each cell of your body specifically, and all matter in general, attempts to tune to the reference vibrations of Earth.  Through your circuit you touch all of creation and it touches you, as the gentle undulations of pulsed resonance. 
• The laws of creation assure us that to the degree change is judged and discouraged, to that degree is change experienced in life as a challenge.  You experience that which you have a charge on.  Life's events are catalysts for moving us to new experiences of ourselves.
• You must know your extremes to find your balance.  You are not your success or failures, joy or pain.  These are elements of your experiences that allow you the opportunity to know yourself in all ways, so that those ways may be mastered.  You are in this world and not of this world.  
• The way that you respond to key events, relationships, jobs, etc. - your choice of feeling and action - is a demonstration of your personal mastery.   

The Definition of Compassion *One of the biggest keys to understand*

• The modern definition of compassion is often associated with pity...  
• Ancient texts say that compassion is "the ability to witness an event in the absence of judgment" and offer insights into a perspective where the outcome of an event is less significant than what one becomes through the experience.  
• Specific qualities of thought, emotion, and feeling that demonstrate compassion:
• Thought - without attachment to the outcome of the event (trust in the process of life itself)
• Emotion - without charge of polarity (the ability to refrain from judgment and bias) 
• Feeling - without distortion of bias and conditioning
• What you think and how you emote determine, for you only, the way that you feel.
• Emotion is the switch that triggers specific DNA codes within your body.  These are the same codes that allow you to live without illness, disease, and deterioration.
• If you are often or easily hurt, look to your thoughts about life, and your emotions of life, to recover the joy of life.  

The Science of Compassion

• Compassion is beyond simply feeling, it is the merging of feeling with emotion and directed thought made manifest in your body.  It's a state of being, feeling, thought, and emotion within you allowing the 1.17 volt liquid crystal circuitry of each cell to align with the seven layered liquid crystal oscillator within your chest (aka "heart").
• If you allow life to show you yourself in new ways so that you may know yourself in those ways, and you reconcile within yourself that which life has shown you, then you become compassion.  It is within the very reconciliation, the coming to terms with whatever you have invited as life, that you become compassion.  
• There can be no battle without judgment.  It is the assignment of good, bad, light, and dark as judgment that implodes unity into polarity.  Darkness is a powerful catalyst in our lives, often catapulting us into growth.  It is a portion of the whole, a part of the source of all that is, rather than a fundamental force to contend with.  
• Compassion heals our sense of separation.  
• As we seek to recover lost fragments of ourselves, we seek wholeness often times through these reflections of ourselves through relationships.  When you notice yourself attracted to someone, they represent a part of yourself that you aren't connected with, that you value highly.  When you notice yourself "put off" by someone, they represent a part of yourself that you judge.
• We have the opportunity to transcend hate, becoming something greater in the completion than we are in the polarity of the experience.  
• We are holographic in nature.  We are cells of a body that encompass a whole.  Our lives mirror patterns of experience embedded within patterns of experience.  Each pattern provides a vital key to the much larger whole.  [Hermetic Science]  Our holographic model is a single pattern repeating over and over as varying magnitudes of expression from micro to macro.  Each cell functions within its own space while, knowingly or not, is in service to the entire body.  It doesn't take many individuals to anchor a new seed of thinking, feeling, or emotion and introduce change regardless of how long old patterns have existed.  
• By their nature, life-discouraging patterns collapse upon themselves, consuming themselves in their completion.  Life-giving patterns perpetuate themselves, spawning new life in their expression.  
• When someone chooses to respond to a situation without judgment, they allow for a new possibility and become a living bridge for every other person to choose the same path.  
• Your expression of life as anything less than your truest nature of compassion, is you expressing a fraction of your possibility.  As compassion, your body is tuned beyond the range of physical parameters that discourage your fullest potential such as illness and aging.  Research demonstrates the direct benefits of compassion upon physical health such as cardiovascular, respiratory, immune, and reproductive systems.  You become genetically biased toward immunity as your DNA responds to compassion.  Your state of emotion actually determines your state of physical being!
• Mental logic must be tempered with the wisdom of the heart.  Viewed as the conscious program of life, thought becomes the navigator of emotional energy originating from within the body.  Thought directs the power of emotion.  The quality of that energy is determined by the nature of the emotion. 

Example:  Compassion is often visible as the ability to view the events of life directly to form a new perspective.  If you look at the tragedy of Rwanda in 1994, you could respond in different ways:

• Denial - Many people feel nothing as they see images of the tragedy.  This blocking of feelings is a defense mechanism to avoid the pain.  
• Polarity - If you feel anger, outrage, retaliation, or have thoughts of revenge, you are living in the polarity of un-tempered logic.  Expressed as thoughts of right, wrong, good, bad, light, and dark, polarity assures you remain in separation.  Does your anger serve you in that moment?  
• Compassion - If you feel for the people that have had the experience and their survivors, without anger or the need to get even, you have made the choice to feel compassion.  Grieving for suffering and pain and acknowledging the uniqueness they brought, while not judging the situation, are feelings that transcend polarity.

The Path of Compassion

1. Pick the lens you filter life through:
1. numbness or denial expressed as rationalization and logic
2. polarity expressed as anger, rage, or the desire to get even
3. compassion expressed as sadness and grieving without judgment of "wrongness" or "rightness" of the experience
2. Through the use of your left and right brain, logic and emotion, build new patterns of feeling.