You had such a great feeling that day that it lingers. Now you’re inspired
and open-minded, and you find that you truly love your mother-in-law. As
you couple your new, internal feeling of goodwill and love with this person
in your external reality, you connect compassion with your mother-in-law.
You form an associative memory.
Once you began to feel the emotion of compassion, in a sense you
(chemically) instructed your body what your mind (philosophically) knew,
and that activated and modified some of your genes. Now you’ve gone from
thinking to doing: your behaviors match your conscious intentions; your
actions are equal to your thought; mind and body are aligned and working
together. You did exactly what those people did in those books. So by
intellectually learning compassion with your brain and mind, then
demonstrating this ideal in your environment through experience, you
embodied this elevated feeling. You just conditioned your body to a new
mind of compassion. Your mind and body were working together. You
embodied compassion. In a sense, the word has become flesh.
Two Brains Have Taken You from Thinking to Doing,
but Can You Create a State of Being?
From your efforts to embody compassion, you now have your neocortex
and limbic brain working together. You’re out of the box of the familiar,
habitual memorized self, which operates within a set of automatic
programs, and you’re in a new thinking and feeling cycle. You have
experienced how compassion feels; and you like it better than covert
hostility, rejection, and suppressed anger.
Hold on, though, you are not yet ready for sainthood! It’s not enough to
have mind and body working together one time. That got you from thinking
to doing, but can you reproduce that feeling of compassion at will? Can you
repeatedly embody compassion independent of conditions in your
environment, so that no person or situation could ever create that old state
of being in you again?
If not, you haven’t yet mastered compassion. My definition of mastery is
that our internal chemical state is greater than anything in our external
world. You are a master when you’ve conditioned yourself with chosen