Compassion: The purest love

Only compassion is therapeutic — because all that is ill in man is because of lack of love. All that is wrong with man is somewhere associated with love. He has not been able to love, or he has not been able to receive love. He has not been able to share his being. That’s the misery. That creates all sorts of complexes inside.

Emotional wounds become physical illness
Those wounds inside can surface in many ways: they can become physical illness, they can become mental illness — but deep down man suffers from lack of love. Just as food is needed for the body, love is needed for the soul. The body cannot survive without food, and the soul cannot survive without love. In fact, without love the soul is never born — there is no question of its survival.

What is compassion?
Compassion is the purest form of love. Sex is the lowest form of love, compassion the highest form of love. In sex the contact is basically physical; in compassion the contact is basically spiritual. In love, compassion and sex are both mixed, the physical and the spiritual are both mixed. Love is midway between sex and compassion.
You can call compassion prayer. You can call compassion meditation. The word ‘compassion’ is beautiful: half of it is ‘passion’ — somehow passion has become so refined that it has become compassion.

Compassion starts with oneself
You have to understand that to be compassionate one has to have compassion for oneself in the first place. If you don’t love yourself you will never be able to love anybody else. If you are not kind to yourself you cannot be kind to anybody else. Psychologically it is impossible. If you cannot be kind to yourself, how can you be kind to others?
Whatsoever you are with yourself you are with others. Let that be a basic dictum.

You have been taught to hate yourself
If you hate yourself you will hate others — and you have been taught to hate yourself. Nobody has ever said to you, “Love yourself!” This is why every love-affair is on the rocks. Sooner or later, every love-affair becomes poisoned. Because both pretend that they are loving. The father says he loves the child; the child says he loves the father. The mother says she loves her daughter, and the daughter goes on saying the same thing. Brothers say they love each other. The whole world talks about love, sings about love — and can you find any other place so loveless? Love is absolutely absent, because the first step has not been taken yet. The first step is: accept yourself as you are.

Courtesy Osho International Foundation/www.osho.com