The Nature of Compassion ~by Eckhart Tolle

Having gone beyond the mind-made opposites, you become like a deep lake. The outer situation of your life and whatever happens there is the surface of the lake. Sometimes calm, sometimes windy and rough, according to the cycles and seasons. Deep down, however, the lake is always undisturbed. You are the whole lake, not just the surface, and you are in touch with your own depth, which remains absolutely still. You don’t resist change by mentally clinging to any situation. Your inner peace does not depend on it. You abide in Being – Unchanging, timeless, deathless – and you are no longer dependent for fulfillment or happiness on the outer world of constantly fluctuating forms. You can enjoy them, play with them, create new forms, appreciate the beauty of it all. But there will be no need to attach yourself to any of it.

Question: When you become this detached, does it not mean that you also become remote from other human beings?

On the contrary. As long as you are unaware of Being, the reality of other humans will elude you, because you have not found your own. Your mind will like or dislike their form, which is not just their body but includes their mind as well. True relationship becomes possible only when there is an awareness of Being. Coming from Being, you will perceive another person’s body and mind as just a screen, as it were, behind which you can feel their true reality, as you feel yours. So, when confronted with someone else’s suffering or unconscious behavior, you stay present and in touch with Being and are thus able to look beyond the form and feel the other person’s radiant and pure Being through your own. At the level of Being, all suffering is recognized as an illusion. Suffering is due to identification with form. Miracles of healing sometimes occur through this realization, by awakening Being consciousness in others – if they are ready.

Question: Is that what compassion is?

Yes. Compassion is the awareness of a deep bond between yourself and all other creatures. But there are two sides to compassion, two sides to this bond. On the one hand, since you are still here as a physical body, you share the vulnerability and mortality of your physical form with every other human and with every living being. Next time you say, “I have nothing in common with this person”, remember that you have a great deal in common: A few years from now – two years or seventy years, it doesn’t make much difference – both of you will have become rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all. This is a sobering and humbling realization that leaves little room for pride. Is this a negative thought? No, it is a fact. Why close your eyes to it? In that sense, there is total equality between you and every other creature.

One of the most powerful spiritual practices is to meditate deeply on the mortality of physical forms, including your own. This is called: Die before you die. Go into it deeply. Your physical form is dissolving, is no more. Then a moment comes when all mind-forms or thoughts also die. Yet you are still there – the divine presence that you are. Radiant, fully awake. Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms, and illusions.   

~Written by Eckhart Tolle (Excerpt from his book The Power of Now)

Once The Ego Is Dropped That Is When You Experience True Peace

By Pamela J. Wells

Not caring what other people think is when you experience true peace in your life. And the only way to not care what other people think is to lose your ego. The same concept as “Die while you are alive.” You will continue to suffer and be miserable if you get upset every time someone attacks you verbally, attacks your ego, because your ego gets offended and becomes defensive. You cannot change what others do or say.


It is not about them, nor is it about you. Without the ego it does not matter what they say, because you (your ego) is not important anymore. People who attack others verbally are coming from a place of ego (body-mind), the egoic state of consciousness. Like Adyashanti says, “Be a nobody.” If you are a nobody who is there to defend? Who is there to stand up for? Nobody! This is hard to swallow at first, the idea of being a nobody, because society, especially in the west, strives for recognition, accomplishment, a good reputation, pleasing others, increasing material wealth, and comparison of what one has (material objects) with what another has. So, you have a choice, continue to suffer or be a nobody. 

The Shift Away From Ego To A Life of Meaning - Wayne Dyer Interview

The morning of our lives, the early part of our lives we are almost conditioned to believe that who we are is what we are able to collect, and what we do, and what other people think of us, and to evaluate our essence and who we are as human beings on the basis of how well we are received by others, how much we accumulate, how far ahead we get and so on, but there is something that is very missing in that and that is what we call meaning. The great hunger. The real great hunger that tribesmen said is the hunger for meaning, to know that your life is on purpose.

And if your life is all about what you accumulate and how much you win and what other people think of you, you get a great reputation. The problem with that is that if you are what you do then when you don’t you aren’t and when you are what you have when it disappears your essence as a human being disappears as well. The Shift is really an attempt to teach people what Carl Jung called, “What happens to you when you move into the afternoon of your life.” Which is you begin to focus, not so much on what the ego says, which is what’s in it for me and how much can I get and how far ahead am I than everybody else versus the mantra of the higher self, the spiritual self, is how may I serve, you know god realization, thinking like god thinks.

Interviewer: This all sounds great. I’m sure that everybody around me, for example, would love for me to have a smaller ego, but how do you do it practically?

Dyer: You know, the Dalai Lama once said that if we could take every child on this planet and teach them to meditate on compassion for one hour a week, just one hour a week, in one generation we could eliminate all violence on the planet. Just teaching people to put their focus on reaching out and having compassion for others. And that’s really what happens as you begin to leave the ego behind.

Interviewer: I have and a lot of people who are watching this have very competitive jobs. Are you advising that we should quit our jobs? Or, how do we make this shift that you are talking about and stay in the lives that we have thus far?

Dyer: I would advise anyone to quit a job that doesn’t give them fulfillment and doesn’t make them feel like they are living their life on purpose. I think that if you don’t quit it, it will quit you. It will take you down.
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About THE SHIFT (Book)

The Shift illustrates how and why to make the move From Ambition To Meaning. Such a shift eliminates our feelings of separateness, illuminates our spiritual connectedness, and involves moving from the ego-directed morning into the afternoon of life where everything is primarily influenced by purpose. The Shift doesn’t mean that we lose our drive and Ambition; it signifies that we become ambitious about something new. We make a commitment to living a life based on experiencing Meaning and feeling purposeful, rather than never-ending demands and false promises that are the trademark of the ego’s agenda. As Wayne so eloquently reveals in these pages, we all have the choice to shift our lives From Ambition To Meaning . . . and thereby complete our return to the Source that created us.