James Wood on compassion:
“How long do I practice before I wake up? It’s like digging to China. How do you know when you get to China? You see daylight, stick your head out, and there are Chinese people around.
Or like a big stack of dishes. If you’ve ever been to a cafeteria, they have a cart that has a cylinder full of plates that is spring-loaded from the bottom. When you take the top plate off, the next one rises to the surface. How do you know when you’ve taken the last plate?
It’s a good question, and the best advice I could give is that the fastest way through the stack is to focus on the one you’re doing now. As soon as you stop to say, “Gee, I wonder how big the stack is?”, you’re not doing it, and it’s just sitting there.
I think that’s part of why compassion is so powerful. Like, how many doors would you break through to get to your child who is trapped in a burning building?
Or even better: How many doors would you break through to get out of the burning building so that you could then see where your child is and go and rescue your child? That’s a good one. Then it’s not just for you, and yet it is for you. Can you feel into how much power it might give you?
Imagine this long hallway of doors. You know the building is burning down and you want to get out. But if you knew somehow that you had to get out so that you could then survey the building to find out where your child was to rescue him — to me it feels like it turbo-charges the whole thing.
Like I have to do it, and I have to do it for myself, but I’m doing it so I can do it for someone else. That’s what I’m talking about.”
– James Wood, Importance of Body
Svaha 