What surprise will the next minute bring us?
If God were that ineffable divinity that the church paints us, with white beards and an eye that sees everything, he would be dead laughing watching us from his throne alien to the earthly.
Because, we really are a crazy show, a kind of macabre tragicomedy in which there is not, even remotely, an iota of what paradoxically differentiates us from the rest of living beings: the ability to discern.
So we go through these worlds, like headless ducks, trying to find out everything, except what we really are and we hit each other, we get into each eggplant that if this were a circus show, it would not be so much alike.
We are going to exemplify and to do so, I can think of nothing better than to take my own experience, which is obviously the one I know the most:
I do it out of compassion and there are people who think of it as synonymous with pity, that feeling it is triggering a feeling, period: in front of a beggar, a seriously ill person, another who suffers, someone who something is wrong, without realizing that it is something deeper, much more:
To feel sorry for someone is to make aware that the vast majority of people live in latent suffering, subtly camouflaged with the trifles of everyday life. The one who smiles and makes a joke, who lives comfortably in relation to his assets and money, the one who works or has a business, an ordinary family, where apparently his life passes normally, that one, who can be any of us, it also suffers, and discovering that torment is not difficult for the detached observer.
I was born in Cuba, eight years before the triumph of the revolution that became socialism, therefore I had a totally secular education and customs that did not include any approach to spirituality. In other words, pure and simple materialism, and I have to admit that I always had a suspicion, an imperceptible feeling that my life was not a mechanism with all the visible parts, that there was something hidden, mysterious and magical in what was happening and in myself..
Sometimes, before some important decision, he invoked God, other times he called it luck or the Universe. Always more afraid than anything else: of getting sick, of having serious problems at work, and when I was the father of a girl, I asked for things for her more often.
I do not have an instrument that compares the degree of happiness and joy or worry and sadness, but I observed in my loved ones, those closest to me, my friends and the rest of the world, that I was not one of the most desperate, I was never one of the most sad and much less pessimistic. My life was not a constant party, but neither was it a disgrace compared to that of others I observed, but, oh, disappointment, it got worse over the years.
One fateful day, I made a momentous decision and put a triple-digit number of miles between where I was born and my new life. I did it when I was more than five decades old and I ended up in Spain.
And not for a moment did it cross my mind that those experiences would be, that I judged as "terrible and harsh" the most fruitful plot of my entire existence.
Human suffering comes from not remembering who we are in essence, from the inability to stop identifying with our mind. A high percentage of Human Beings live asleep believing that they are birds of passage, that they were born one day and everything will end up in a funeral home or something similar.
Feeling compassion is giving in some way, to those who suffer, the opportunity to look in the mirror of your soul. Someone desperate for a fight, for a problem that cannot be solved, for a disaster, for something he does not like, a concern. Feeling compassion is making a space of silence in the din of the living dead, it is lending your eyes to him so that he looks into them, it is listening to him as if he were saying his farewell to duels, it is Being You a space for the love of God to be manifest. Feeling compassion is sweeping your brother's house rather than going to judge him, it is thanking him in a silent message for helping you cultivate kindness. Compassion comes from the depth of our essence, from knowing with wisdom that there are no other people's sufferings, that separation is an aberration because in divinity, WE ARE ONE!
