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CHAPTER 2. SOURCE OF VIOLENCE IN MAN
another's difficulties. We become fully delighted in others' miseries. So when you go to show your sorrow in others' miseries, try to examine within you whether you derive some pleasure or not at that time.
In such a situation. one interesting thing is that you feel you are the person showing sympathy and the other is in a position to receive it. When that another person comes into the position of receiving sympathy he becomes a beggar and you become the donor effortlessly. When That person comes into the state of receiving your sympathy, you come into a patronising position and he becomes an humble or low person. And if you check up within your heart, you will find the presence of a kind of pleasure in showing your sorrow for his condition. You are sure to get it. And if you don't get it, you will be the person who can be completely happy in another's happiness. We become jealous of another's happiness, we are resentful. So, the other aspect of this matter tells us that we are unable to be unhappy in another's unhappiness, but we have been naming it'sympathy'. I have been talking of this kind of feeling which is generally known as sympathy. So I thought it proper to select another word empathy.
'Sympathy' is a false thing, it is deception And if we understand fully that if the sympathy of someone is genuine, that is, he experiences unhappiness in another's unhappiness and experiences happiness in another's happiness, even then it remains as violence, it cannot be nonviolence because as long as there is another, it cannot fulfil the conditions of nonviolence. Nonviolence is an experience of non-duality. It is the experience that apart from the other there is also l. It will certainly be violence if your experience of feeling unhappy on seeing another unhappy is false. And even if the feeling be true, I remain I and the other remains the other. The bridge between the two is not broken and there is no possibility of nonviolence. To know the other as the other is also violence. Why? Because I am living in ignorance as long as I consider the other as the other. In fact the other is not the other.
Empathy does not mean knowing that the other is becoming unhappy but it means I myself have become miserable. It is not knowing that the other has become happy, but it means I myself have become happy. It is not like this, that the moon is shining in the sky; but it is I too have been shining. It is not that the sun is rising but that I have risen. It is not that flowers have blossomed but it is I who have blossomed. Empathy means nonduality. Empathy means oneness. Nonviolence is oneness.
So, there are three states: one is false sympathy, which is violence, pure and simple; two, genuine sympathy which is a very subtle form of violence, and three, empathy which is nonviolence. It may be violence or a subtle form of violence; it may be genuine sympathy or false sympathy - all these are happenings at the mental level. Empathy is a spiritual happening.
It is never possible for us to be one on the mental level with someone else. My mind has a separate entity, your mind has a separate entity. My body has a distinct entity, your body has a distinct entity. It is not possible to have unity or oneness on a physical and mental level. Unity or oneness is possible only on the spiritual level, because we are already on the spiritual level. Just as the water in a pitcher sunk in water is the same as the water outside the pitcher, there is only an earthen wall of the pitcher between them. If that wall is broken, the two waters would become one.
There is a wall of mind and body which prevents us from meeting the other, which stops us from becoming one with another. We all are like earthen pitchers in the ocean of consciousness. Pitcher
The Perennial Path: The Art of Living
19
Osho
