Compassion

It’s a curious aspect of psychological or cognitive symmetry and psychotherapeutic insight that compassion as expressed inwards or outwards is effectively and irreducibly, logically identical; our relationship with the world constitutively is our relationship with ourselves and our inner worlds (and words) are essentially the reordered experiences and components of the outer worlds and persons or places and events we perceive and revisit or fabricate in or as memory and imagination.

Brains (and – or as – sentient minds) do not functionally differentiate or discriminate at the foundational levels of experience as awareness. Concepts of inside and outside or difference occupy higher levels of cognitive processing such that kindness lives at a kernel, core level of awareness before identity and difference or language and narrative even begins to form.

This is why external turbulence is so implicit in internal dissonance, and vice versa; before we even begin to rationalise in language or project structure upon experience, it is just experience, awareness, unshaped and unbounded and we absorb, process and incorporate these external experiences into ourselves before we are even aware of it. Compassion provides a logical short-circuit or reset of the rationalising cognitive and information-processing system(s) between our ears by appealing to a much lower level of the functional architecture and in some senses by resetting the confused and chaotic operating system that Self can become in difficult times.