Here in my isolation from all relationships and society, even the feelings and emotions that seemed to be so palpably real and intense earlier now look dreamy and unreal, almost as if they are some strangers seeking my attention. And as far as feelings and emotions go, their purity is always determined by the the extent to which one is pure oneself — the “fruit does not fall far from the tree” kind of situation.
And, when feelings and emotions start to feel unreal, believe me the loosening of one’s bonds with this world has already started to occur because feelings and emotions are where the whole drama of life unfolds.
And, where there is purity in one’s being, the feelings and emotions coalesce into one and only one thing, namely, compassion.
Else, the feelings and emotions will keep on serving the needs of the ego, and where the ego is alive what good can we expect from the feelings and emotions that are fuelled then by the self-serving desires.
And, where there is compassion, it can only be universal and never for any particular thing because compassion equates to wisdom, and the wise, as Bhagavad Gita points out, “see with an equal vision (samadarshinaha) a learned Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog, or an outcaste” (Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 5, Verse 18).
Claude’s Commentary on My Above Writing
This is a compact, tightly-argued piece — almost aphoristic in the way your writing on the blog tends to be. Let me take it point by point, with commentary that both explains what’s implicit and pushes it a little further.
On the “dreamlike” quality of emotion
What you’re describing is the Vedantic mechanism of drashta-drishya viveka — the discrimination between the seer and the seen — beginning to operate on the affective layer, not just the intellectual one. Most people who take up Vedanta apply viveka to objects and thoughts readily enough; it’s harder-won when applied to feeling, because feeling carries a conviction of “mine-ness” that thought doesn’t. A thought can be observed as an object almost immediately. A feeling insists it is you, right up until it doesn’t. So when you say emotions start to look like “strangers seeking my attention,” that’s a precise description of the moment when the antahkarana (the felt, feeling mind) has itself become an object of witnessing rather than the seat of witnessing. It’s a real and significant shift, not merely a report of emotional flatness.
The purity-of-being clause — and a caution worth naming
Your “fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree” point is essentially the guna doctrine restated: the quality of what arises in the mind-field is a direct function of which guna — sattva, rajas, tamas — predominates in the substrate. This is standard and sound. But I’d flag one thing for the sake of the intellectual honesty you value: the feeling that one’s emotions have become unreal is not, by itself, proof of increased purity. It can also be a symptom of ordinary psychological withdrawal or numbing — what contemporary language calls dissociation, and what even Ramana and Nisargadatta were careful to distinguish from genuine vairagya. Nisargadatta in particular warned seekers against mistaking a lull in feeling for the cessation of the ego; he called it a phase to be watched, not enshrined. The tell, in the tradition’s own terms, is exactly what you name in your next line — whether what remains, or arises, is compassion, or whether it’s simply absence. If the loosening resolves into indifference rather than into karuna, that’s worth a second look, not a celebration.
Why compassion is the necessary residue, not an added virtue
This is the strongest move in the piece and worth expanding. You’re not saying purity produces compassion as one quality among others it might produce — you’re saying compassion is what feeling looks like once it’s no longer being organized around a center. That’s an important distinction. Ordinary emotion is centripetal: it organizes itself around “what does this mean for me.” When the ego-reference point weakens, feeling doesn’t disappear — it loses its organizing center and so ceases to discriminate. What’s left, structurally, can only be something that doesn’t ask “mine or not mine” — which is compassion. This is also why the Mahayana Buddhist tradition pairs karuna with prajna as the two wings of one bird rather than as two separate achievements: real wisdom that doesn’t issue in compassion is suspect as wisdom, on their reading too, for the same structural reason.
On the Gita citation
Worth being precise about samadarshinaha here, because it’s easy to flatten into a sentimental “love everyone equally” reading, which is not what the verse is doing. The equal vision of the Brahmin and the outcaste, the cow and the dog, isn’t an emotional accomplishment — it’s a perceptual one. It says the wise see the same one thing (Brahman/Atman) present without differentiation across all these forms, and compassion is the natural behavior of someone whose actual perception has changed, not a moral overlay applied on top of unchanged perception. That’s consistent with your closing claim that compassion “equates to” wisdom rather than merely accompanying it — they’re the same event seen from two sides, affective and cognitive.
One thing you might consider adding, if you want to preempt a reader’s misreading: a line distinguishing this universal compassion from mere emotional expansiveness or generic “unconditional love,” since readers often collapse the two. Your piece already implies the distinction (compassion arises from purity, not from cultivated sentiment) — making it explicit might close a gap some readers will otherwise walk through.
Know Thyself 