Responding to the Suffering of Others

My question arose out of, partly from the meditations that we were doing yesterday when we're kind of conjuring up the emotions that we've put away for a while, but then also from your talks about the mind, and I love your analogy of how the mind is like something that doesn't necessarily have a concrete outline, but it's porous, and it kind of gives a little bit of validity to some of the experiences I have with other people in terms of feeling the emotions that somebody else is feeling. The question I have is, it's about somebody that is close to me, like a family member, I think it's hard for me to differentiate whether or not I'm experiencing an emotion that is something that I've been putting away for a while because of guilt, or I'm not quite sure, or if it's just something from the porous mind that I'm feeling this person's suffering. And it's hard for me to differentiate, am I feeling this person's suffering, or am I feeling this emotion because I feel like I can't help this person? It doesn't matter which it is. You process the experience in the same way in both cases, whether the emotion you're feeling originates in another mind, and through empathy and sensitivity you are feeling that person's emotion as your own, that's what the word compassion means, compatio, to feel together with, so you are feeling the other person's emotion as your own, or whether the emotion is in fact generated within you for whatever reason, it doesn't matter. The experience, whatever its origin, is taking place inside you. So whatever its origin, and remember the origin is never personal, ultimately there is no person, no separate self, that is the cause of the emotion. So it doesn't really matter what its cause is. In this approach, we don't really look for the causes of our feelings in our external world, we just take the raw feeling itself, it may be generated inside you, you may have felt this other person's pain as your own, or you may have inherited it from your family, from your culture, it doesn't matter, it is your experience. Forget the commentary, the subtitles, the interpretations, just take the raw experience itself and treat it in the way we've been treating these last couple of days. If you treat the experience in this way and the experience rises up the well and is dissolved in the space of awareness, then not only does your own suffering dissolve, but to the extent that the suffering belonged to someone else or to another group of people, you are also purifying their suffering. I've come along a similar line from that, I was thinking about what you were saying in terms of the gentleman about mindfulness and being able to tailor your response to somebody based on what you feel is a comfortable level of their understanding or what might be appropriate to tell that person. I have a hard time finding the balance of having that more of a, not stern, I forget the word you use, but that type of compassion that doesn't collude with the separate self and yet feeling that, God, I want to do something for them and sometime that internal struggle that's… Yes, you just have to trust your intuition and if your intuition is coming from love, which it obviously is in this case, then just trust that whatever your intuition in relation to this person is, is the correct thing to do. In one case it may be to put your arms around the person and say, I totally understand, totally understand. In another case you may take what would appear to be a tougher approach and say, well, okay, that's your story about the situation, but have a look, is it really true? Investigate the place in yourself from which your reactivity is coming. In other words, you won't collude with them. Your response will be equally loving, but you can't manufacture it. It will be one thing with one person, two minutes later it might be the opposite with somebody else and it's just intuition. Trust your intuition. And even if it turns out in time that you look back on the situation and you realize, oh, I didn't handle that well, I was too tough with them or I was too soft with them, I wish I had done it differently, even then the sincerity of your intention will keep you safe. There's no blame. You may notice, it's one thing to notice, I would do it differently next time. That's a very different thing from feeling guilty. You just notice it and move on. You are not personally responsible for the apparent mistake you made. Thank you.