Everyone’s reality is different, like a finger-print

Painted by one’s lived experience, we look upon the wold from our socioeconomic status, race, religion, culture, cast, era of birth, age, gender and sexuality. Additionally formed by our schooling, peers, co-workers and family, the fabric of experience has formed a unique tapestry of paradigm that we look out onto the world from. This is a fundamental understanding of compassion that is often lost because we automatically map the world into absolutes as a default defense mechanism.

Dualism Machine

To gain advantage, or survive, we need to know how another is going to think and act. We put all people through a dichotomy machine of black and white judgements at a speed that is not seen by the conscious mind. This dualism machine assumes a lot about people and creates unconscious bias. It often has faulty programming that goes unchecked such as expectations on what a person should be at any given stage of their development/life. These large swath categorizations miss the uniqueness of each human’s experience. It leads to a lot of assumption errors and the sacrificing of compassion because it is not conducive to reptilian survival. It is not like the monkey pauses upon being eaten by a tiger to have compassion for his hunger. Regardless, we are not going to throw out our mechanism for survival but how can compassion be woven back in since we are no longer monkeys?

Compassion is lost when we assume to know another’s reality and lived experience. We assume that all of the ingredients to make the best choices are present and it is the fault of the person for their failure. Thus, they do not deserve compassion. These unchecked quick judgements are where I invite pause. To take out your compassion finders to grow this under-developed aspect of yourself. Without it, you might not be far different from an animal.