sympathize, help and , do all that is within your power to lessen others' suffering

 

You can understand, sympathize, help and can do all that is within your power to lessen others' suffering. Who can dispute that?  However, that action has nothing to do with one's personal pain.  Your pain is yours and my pain is mine. If you are a doctor and you are able to measure someone's pain you can at least decide the dosage of medicine. Have I said that we should not care about the pain of others?

First, some people just feel happiness if someone else is in a worse condition. Such physical or psychological comparisons are futile, bad and mean too. Such comparison is immature too. What is the special benefit for one cashier who lost lesser if someone has lost more cash than he has? If I lose a relative, I will be sad. Is it not just nonsense to state that I am better off just because my neighbour has lost two or three relatives? A fellow who compares himself with others especially in disadvantages is just silly and immature. If I am starving, today how can it be of help to think that my neighbour is starving for many moredays? Only supply of food can help me when I am starving. Krishna talked about stitaprajnas in Gita but what sort of people we have around are thriving on and revelling in mutual comparison and snobbery

Yes, one has to suffer mental pain individually. Others can say nice words like doctors giving medicine. However, the mind has to live with agony and heal all by itself.

Empathy, emotional intelligence, kindness, all are great ideals and principles. These make life as a social animal tolerable.Without concern for others and kindness for all beings we cannot have a wholesome life. However, we should never lose sight of the fact that apart from physical activies and connecting with others, empathy forms the core of our peripheral living and social existence. In addition, there is a tough yet sublime, hard yet transparent, visible yet invisible core in every one of us. We can share that only with our God, if we believe in him. One can perceive such activities, pleasures and pains of that core exclusively as the individual himself. . We will talk of sharing hearts, love, feelings and so on- but the core materials can never be shared, except perhaps with God.

Refer to Narayanospanishat for a sort of imagery.

पद्मकोशप्रतीकाशं हृदयं चाप्यधोमुखं अधो निष्ट्या वितस्त्यान्ते नाभ्यां उपरि तिष्टति..

We have to attempt to integrate Golding’s Emotional intelligence with what we knew in our culture millenniums ago. However, that attempt will only reveal that what the modern lifestyle pundits discovered is very little. We chant litanies and mantras without knowing the core and the meaning.

We wisecrack, we write homilies. However, we do not understand the core. Blind bhakthi and reading old stories and drawing imagery for silly things from stories like puranas is not spirituality.

Krishna who is the master of the world, the teacher of Gita is great. We need not bother much about the fellow who stole butter or played with cowherd women. We should know the difference between the grain and the chaff.

The spiritual gurus usually cheat us there.

You are talking of transmission of a signal that one is suffering from pain. Nature provides many a means for thst. Pain even creates sympathetic symptoms causing suffering for others too. Nevertheless, that hardly takes away the original pain of the initial victim.

I can understand how one should respond to noble deeds. Even if we cannot reduce the pain of others if we can feel sympathy and have genuine desire to help, then god is working with us.

To cry seeing others’ pain is a noble gesture, and to help others in pain is even nobler.