Suppose we are building a staircase to a scenic spot on a hilltop. Suppose we make the steps so big that people have to pull themselves up by the force of their hands, as if they were climbing a steep mountain cliff. Those steps will discourage many people from even trying to get to the hilltop.
Seeing people’s struggles, we might decide to make the steps smaller and more easily climbable. But suppose we go to the other extreme and build a comfortable flat pathway instead of a staircase. Even if many people go along that path, not one of them will ascend to the scenic spot.
What applies to physical climbing also applies to spiritual climbing: to gaining the insights and adopting the practices that raise our consciousness from the material level to the spiritual level where resides and presides the zenith of reality. When we share with others the path to higher consciousness, we need to avoid presenting it in such a forbidding way that it seems incomprehensible or impracticable for them. Making our presentation accessible is compassion, for we are making that path as easy as possible.
But we need to avoid the temptation of making that path easier than possible. That is, we can’t dumb it down so much that neither the insights nor the practices retain the potency to raise human consciousness. Such dumbing down would be a compromise that would deprive others of authentic spiritual experience; it would give them the pseudo-comfort of thinking that they have become spiritual without enabling them to actually become spiritual. Pertinently, the Bhagavad-gita (03.26) recommends a balanced presentation of wisdom that is uncompromising but not uncompassionate.
One-sentence summary:
Compassion means to make the path to higher consciousness as easy as possible; compromise means to obsess so much on making the path easy that it no longer leads to higher consciousness.
Think it over:
- How is spiritual climbing similar to physical climbing?
- Using the climbing metaphor, explain what compassion is.
- Using the climbing metaphor, explain what compromise is.
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03.26: So as not to disrupt the minds of ignorant men attached to the fruitive results of prescribed duties, a learned person should not induce them to stop work. Rather, by working in the spirit of devotion, he should engage them in all sorts of activities [for the gradual development of Krishna consciousness].
To know more about this verse, please click on the image
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