This is not a question, it's actually a statement, but I think I can guess what the question is. Am I doing something wrong because I do not feel lots of Compassion for the people and their families? The type of Compassion we're looking for here is not a big emotional upheaval. It's solid, it's steady, it's strong, it's balanced with Equanimity and Wisdom. I was in America on 9/11, the day when the New York buildings and the Pentagon were hit by the airplanes. My father used to work at the Pentagon for twenty odd years, and they live very close to it now. We were there when it occurred, only about ten miles away. We actually started seeing it on the TV within moments after it occurred, we missed the second crash. We were watching TV all day long, it was showing it over and over again. People were all totally shocked, America was shocked and so was the rest of the world.
My immediate thought was - didn't people expect it? Don't you expect it? Have you ever thought about it? Berlin, London, Paris, anywhere? The fact that it has not occurred so bad - amazing! It's a big credit to the Police, FBI and all the other agencies involved, a big credit that worse has not happened. I expect a football field to go up with 40,000, 50,000 people at once some day.
Why isn't it expected? Because people mostly don't want to think about it, they don't want to open to the Dukkha which is all around them, they don't want to have the Compassion going every day, all the time. They don't want it because they think it hurts, because they haven't got a balance. Within this practice we want to have it open all the time, we don't want to be selective, just for the "biggies". We want to open to it all the time.
Open the newspaper - every day something in there deserves your Compassion. Do you read it, do you open your heart when you read it? Or do you kind of not even want to look at these stories, because it hurts too much, because your Compassion is not balanced enough? If it's like that then you need more practice, you need to open your heart better in a balanced way, so that then you can actually produce the most benefit. The world needs people who have their heart open all the time.
Now, there's a fellow, I think he's British, Bob Geldof. He is a music singer and started many years ago, trying to raise money for Africa, for the starving people of Africa. He's been working very hard, he's still working very hard, I saw his name in the paper the other day. And as much as he has been working hard to help the fact that a thousand people die every day because of sickness, malnutrition, diarrhea, people die from diarrhea every day, despite the fact that a thousand are dying every day, his agency, his organization has never gotten so much money as people were pumping into the Tsunami disaster. But he's been working for so many years and people won't do it, day in and day out they won't give the money, even though the catastrophe of Africa has been there forever since any of has have been born.
So what I'm saying here is that we want to open the Compassion so it's there all the time, then when the Tsunami occurs, yes, it's a bigger disaster but it's still just another and another and another. There are people calling out for your help every day. Are you helping? I could go for a few hours here but I think I'll stop. I hope you got the point.