Compassion might not feel like anything in the sense of an emotional feeling. For example, when we're thinking about what kind of Compassion we want to obtain, consider you're at my interview hut and you're sitting there just by yourself. Down near the bathrooms is a little 10 year old kid riding their bicycle around, zoom, zoom, zoom, having lots of fun. You're watching the kid, the kid falls off the bicycle, scrapes a knee and starts crying. Now you're sitting on my veranda, you see the kid crying - do you cry? Do you laugh? Hopefully neither. Hopefully what you would do is leave the veranda, go down and help the kid. Now why do you help the kid? Because hopefully you have a degree of Compassion and Lovingkindness for the kid, you can feel with the pain. In the sense "feel with" the pain, but you're not going to suffer with the pain.
You know that pain from when you were a child. You also know there's a way out of the pain. That's the Lovingkindness side. The Compassion side identifies the problem is there, the Lovingkindness side knows the way out and goes and helps. Together as a unit they go and help. So when we go to help the kid there's no great "feeling" of Compassion, it's just an automatic thing that a lot of adults can do. Now compare that to the time when you did your first retreat and on Day 4, which was yesterday, we put a notice on the board. It was the newspaper clipping about the man who's been away and he comes home to his house in England and his wife and kids are dead. Now for most of you, maybe all of you, when you first read that, was there a bit of a feeling? For a lot of people yes, there was a kind of intense feeling. "Uh", this one hurts, this is big Dukkha. Now that can be a feeling of Compassion, but we don't need that feeling to actually have Compassion.
Sometimes a feeling will come, sometimes it doesn't come. You think of someone in that newspaper article, or you think of someone who just pushed their best friend off the pier into the water and they became paralyzed. A lot of people don't understand that story when I tell it. First time they hear it, they don't get it. Even second time, many don't get it. They don't get that story because they don't think it's real. I happen to know the man who pushed the other one off the pier. It's a real story. Did that hit a little? Maybe different to what you thought of the story before? This is a real guy who did it and he had tremendous self-hatred and grief afterwards. Fortunately he became involved with Buddhism, that's where I met him.
Now with the feeling of Compassion, it doesn't have to be there, it may come, it may not, we're not going to judge our degree of Compassion on getting a feeling. Let's expand this a little more. Suppose today is my birthday and you're having an interview with me and you find out it's my birthday, so you wish me Happy Birthday. First of all will be the question, do you wish it, second of all, will you mean it? Most of all would mean it. Third question - would you want anything back? In general the answer is no, you don't want anything back.
Now imagine you're on the boat going to Koh Samui, and you meet another traveler and you're having a nice chat. 20 minutes, 30 minutes go by, the person is really nice, you're feeling very comfortable with them, and then you find out it's their birthday. Would you wish them Happy Birthday? Would you mean it? Would you want anything back? Happy Birthday is a miniature Compassion/Lovingkindness wish. "I hope you have a nice day, I hope you're ok and it's a good day for you..." Most adults can wish it and most kids can wish it and they mean it! Yet there's no big feeling and they don't want anything back.
When you're doing the Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation, sitting on a thinking of different people, wishing them well, if you want a feeling all the time, then you're actually doing desire meditation. It's not Compassion/Lovingkindness. Compassion/Lovingkindness is a giving, it's not a wanting. So when you're clear, a feeling may or may not come, but that does not indicate how much Compassion we have. The sincerity of the wish is what is important. Do you actually mean it?
When you sit down and you think of your friends and relatives, "May so and so, so and so, so and so,...find peace of mind" it may go very smoothly. Then you think about your next friend or relative and your wish may also go very smoothly, and you're meaning each wish. After 10 or 15 minutes with just your friends and relatives, try somebody you don't like and watch your wish. Watch whether it flows easily or whether it becomes more like this: "May, hmm, so and so, hmm, so and so, hmm, so and so, find peace of mind." That's what often happens with those people we don't really want to give the wish to. It's not sincere. So you can find out for yourself, use it as an experiment, see for yourself. Do 15 minutes of people you really like and then bring up somebody who is a difficult person. See how easy the wish flows. Another experiment you can do to see whether you're sincere with the wish is to make a complete list of all your difficult people and do them for a whole hour. It's going to test whether you're sincere in a true, deep wish for people you have problems with. So in the sense of what Compassion feels like, we're not going to judge our Compassion on a feeling but whether it's sincere.