love, all-forgiveness, and compassion. what do these concepts mean? is there any sense in them

Love, all-forgiveness, and compassion. What do these concepts mean? Is there any sense in them?

Let's start with love, let's examine it in terms of potential and kinetic energy. That way, it'll probably be clearer.

The basis for love, its foundation — is what can be expressed as a feeling of gratitude, heartfelt openness, a sense of belonging to everything around, a readiness to be together with the rest of the world. This is its potential energy, on which the entire house of love is built.

As for its kinetic energy, I would define it primarily as active care. Love is active care, if we're talking about its concrete manifestation. How exactly it might be expressed — those are particular cases.

So, love seems to be sorted out. As of now, this is my version, not a statement (the version might change tomorrow, that's what makes it a version).

Now, all-forgiveness. This is simpler — if there's no one to blame, then there's no one to forgive. All-forgiveness is the other extreme of the same coin paired with all-blame, devoid, as you can see, of any meaning. This is already a statement that will hardly ever change.

What about compassion? The etymology of this word? For several years now I've been paying attention to how this word is used and by whom. Buddhists talk about it, New Age followers, and many others. But if you look closely at this word, it looks like "со-страдание" — co-suffering. According to some Buddhists (maybe even the majority), compassion is one of the manifestations of love. I understand what certain people feel and why this word affects their inner state the way it does — for many it evokes elevated feelings of reverence, spiritualization, being filled with something positive, awe. Partly, it must be noted, this is the influence of the Christian tradition (God will forgive... the all-forgiving father... well, you remember). But as people who speak Russian, we can very easily see that there's an obvious substitution of concepts here and the construction of this word does not correspond to the meaning many try to dress it in.

In my view, the most accurate way we can express this is as "со-переживание" (co-experiencing), or even more precisely — "со-проживание" (co-living) — I'm not sure such a word exists in Russian — together with another person the feelings they are living through. Or what the rest of the world feels when you, for example, meditate. Co-suffering places emphasis on suffering, but people experience different things and it's not at all necessary for us practitioners to engage more deeply with suffering when it comes to meditation on love, or to make that the main emphasis — the spectrum of human feelings is much wider, and co-suffering is merely one particle of co-experiencing or co-living.

Love, on the other hand, implies openness to the rest of the world — you cannot feel love if you are closed off, it's physically impossible, and therefore, to feel it fully, you must open your heart and merge with everything else, thereby embodying the attitude "I am the world, and the world is me" and thus removing the boundaries you've built between yourself and Being. Whatever it may be and whatever feelings it may evoke in you in the process.

I have nothing against co-suffering, since even recapitulation (one of the most important practices of the direct path) is partly connected to the theme of suffering. To truly release the strap and let go of a particular feeling you're stuck in, you need to return "there," roll back and recreate everything in detail. And if you suffered then, you need to return to that same feeling again, but consciously — this is not-doing, when you play your role naturally, and your suffering at that moment can truly be called real (in fact, you're not even playing at all, but actually are that way if you practice not-doing). But you as the "player" (the active character of your game) are not asleep — you are a practitioner and your free, undivided, and imperturbable attention in its deep core remains virginal, untouched, innocent. It is precisely in this way that the liberation of attention from the captivity of emotional fixation occurs.

And first and foremost — it is still living-through, because you can live through any feelings and recapitulate them too. In a sense, recapitulation is something like a sensory re-living. And when it comes to the rest of the world, in that case we are dealing with co-living.

This is exactly what Buddhists mean when they talk about co-suffering. None of them actually intend to become absorbed in suffering together with their fellow brother under the same sky — on the contrary, their intention is directed toward liberation from such a burden. So why not define this doing in a more precise way? Especially since the Russian language quite allows us to do so.

Incidentally, in the same English language, for example, the word "co-suffering" doesn't exist at all — instead, their language has the word "compassion," where "com" means "co" and "passion" means passion. So it's "co-passion." Although Google Translate thinks otherwise and translates this word from English precisely as "compassion" (in Russian: сострадание). Even in their language, compiled, assembled from pieces of various other languages quite deliberately, and which is an order of magnitude poorer than ours, this is expressed, in my opinion, more accurately — but even they didn't hit the bullseye. But I suppose they didn't have that goal — English was never intended to be a deep language; its intention is international communication, philosophy and depth are far from its priority.

And it's no surprise that they tipped the scales toward passion, while we, native Russian speakers, couldn't come up with anything better than to call it "сострадание" (co-suffering), and didn't even try to express it more positively, for example, "сострастие" (co-passion). This is the difference in cultures. If you enter a Catholic church, you'll see a completely different mood there than in our Orthodox church (those who've been to both will surely understand what I'm talking about).

But despite this, neither word accurately expresses the meaning of this phenomenon. Again, can the world's religions or such popular movements as Buddhism be fundamentally mistaken? The mistake here lies precisely in the substitution of concepts — that is, purely linguistic.

Why are you so nitpicky about words, O'Harra? The reader might think. I am convinced that words have power. Any word is built from bricks of symbols, and each symbol — like a rune — has a figurative meaning and sacred significance. Incorrectly constructed words, containing a considerable charge of energy, are especially harmful to us. They need to be watched in a special way — sometimes we don't even suspect what influence they have on us subconsciously. Besides, being literate and able to think is useful and generally helps a lot in life.

And how would you express the meaning of the word "compassion"? And if you know any other languages, how is it expressed in those languages? I'm especially interested in rare languages. Write in the comments.

With love,
Arthur O'Harra.

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