For a month and a half, as part of MTP (Meditation Teacher Program) under the guidance of Mingyur Rinpoche, I worked on the subject of mindfulness, love and compassion. Imagine it: a month and a half of thinking and meditating every day on this one subject… It was an amazing experience!

In that time I read a huge amount of literature – traditional Buddhist texts, scientific papers, studies – and each of them opened up some new side of it. This article is an attempt to sum up what I have lived through, felt and understood over this month and a half. In short, the conclusion is this. Our personal happiness is impossible without love and compassion for others, and not because that is right or noble. It is because love and compassion are the instrument through which we feel our connection with all living beings. Without them we lose that connection and are left alone with our own “I”, which seems separate and independent, although in reality it is not.

Why I start from far away

We cannot talk about love and compassion straight away. First we have to sort out what lies under these words, otherwise the conversation starts in the wrong place.

I will start with the fact that these words, as definitions for describing experience, are not much to my liking. Love, compassion, mindfulness, acceptance, presence: all of it has been rubbed so smooth by endless coaches, courses, mailing lists and promises to change your life over a weekend that the words have almost stopped meaning anything. They are spoken so often and so lightly that they have worn away, like a coin that has passed through too many hands.

And it is not only that these words have been worn out. A living experience does not fit into words at all: a thought once spoken is a lie, as Tyutchev put it.

So I will start not with definitions but with a simple observation. Love and compassion always have an addressee, the one they are directed at: myself or another living being. Which means that on their own they do not exist. They need a space in which there is me, there is another, and there is something that joins us. That space is worth looking at before the feelings themselves.

Because a question comes up at once. How are we able to respond to someone else’s joy and someone else’s pain at all, if each of us is “locked” in a separate body and a separate life? Another person’s pain does not hurt me physically, yet something in me responds to it, sometimes more strongly than to my own. So the boundary between me and the other is not as solid as it seems.

That is where I will start: what this boundary is, who built it and how real it is. And when that becomes clear, it will also become clear what stands behind the words “love” and “compassion”, and why it makes sense to look into them.

Why the scientific explanation is not enough

Let me approach this boundary from the side people talk about most often today. There is an explanation that any modern person accepts. We are social beings, loneliness harms health no less than smoking, people with more connections have a stronger immune system and live longer. Kindness to others lowers anxiety, helping others makes us happier than buying things for ourselves. All of this is true, all of it has been measured.

This explanation shapes a motive, and the motive matters more than it seems. It says: be kind to others, because it will make you feel better. Which means relations with others stay a means, and at the centre there is still a separate person who draws a benefit from them. Such an explanation does not touch the main thing. It leaves me the same isolated “I”, only with better numbers. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche described this in his book “Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism”: any practice easily turns into one more acquisition for the very “I” it was supposed to loosen.

The Eastern view begins where this one ends. It says not “other people are useful to you”, but “that separate you, to whom they would be useful, does not exist in the way you picture him”. And this is not a nice phrase, it is a description of how our mind and the reality it creates are arranged.

How the mind builds walls

Our brain works by distinguishing. It draws lines all the time: this is an object and this is the background, this is edible and this is not, this is dangerous and this is mine. Without that you could not live a single day. A baby does not tell its own hand from the blanket; then it learns, and the first and main boundary appears: here is me, and out there is everything else.

After that the mind does not stop, because it does not know how to stop. It keeps drawing new lines all life long. My body. My family. My things. My work. My reputation. My views. My people. Each line gives a sense of certainty: here I am, here are my boundaries, I exist. And each line at the same time creates something that can be lost.

This is the whole mechanics of anxiety. Whatever has a boundary has a threat outside it. The more I have marked out as mine, the more perimeter I have to guard. Life quietly turns into an endless defence of a line I drew myself. We spend our strength defending a drawing.

And we do not notice that it is a drawing. We take it for a discovered fact and not for a model of reality built by our brain. Meanwhile, try to find the boundary itself. The air I breathe in, is it not mine yet or mine already? The food I ate an hour ago? The bacteria in my gut, without which I could not digest my lunch, are they me or not me? The language I think in was not invented by me. The thoughts that come into my head are assembled out of what I have heard from others. My character was formed by how I was treated as a child and by who was around me. If you take away, layer after layer, everything that came from outside, nothing separate is found underneath. Not because I do not exist, but because I am not a thing, I am a process. Not an island but a current.

Existing and being separate are not the same thing

Here is the hardest idea for the Western mind, the one that is often misunderstood. It is not that nothing exists. Everything is here and everything exists: the table is hard, pain hurts, my son is a living, particular person whom I love. The point is that no thing contains a separate essence of its own. Everything exists only as connection.

This is easiest to see in a wave. A wave is completely real, you can measure it, it can knock you off your feet. And yet there is no wave as a separate thing: there is water, wind, the bottom, movement. A wave is the name we give to the relations between them. If you look for the wave by itself, apart from the water, you find nothing. But that does not make it a fiction. It is real precisely as a process, not in spite of being one.

With a person it is the same. I am real. And at the same time I consist entirely of what is not me. That a thing exists, and that it has no separate essence of its own, are not two opposite statements, they are one and the same thing said from two sides. This is exactly what the Buddhist “Heart Sutra” says in its most famous line: form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

From here comes the answer to the question of why we should feel connection with all living beings at all. Not because it is noble, and not because it is good for your health. But because it is closer to how everything actually is. The sense of separateness is not a neutral feature, it is a constant small distortion, and almost all the rest of our unease follows from it. The less distortion, the calmer the mind. This is not a reward for virtue, it is simply a consequence.

Why love and compassion in particular

If it is the boundary that is the problem, why can we not simply decide that it is not there? Because the one deciding will be the same one who holds it. I can tell myself a hundred times “I am not separate”, but the one thinking it is still that same separate me. The mind cannot move the boundary.

Love and compassion work differently. When I sincerely wish another person happiness, or freedom from suffering, at that very moment my attention is in fact outside the boundary. It is not reasoning about it, it is on the other side of it. When I truly feel sorry for someone else’s pain, my care system switches on just as it would if the pain were mine. In that second the boundary lets something through, not because I dismantled it, but because I used the fact that it is permeable.

That is why love and compassion are not about good behaviour. They are a way of seeing. They loosen our isolation from inside, by themselves, and there is no need to fight with yourself or to talk yourself into anything.

And from here it becomes clear why the circle has to be unlimited. If I love only my own family, the boundary has not gone anywhere, it has simply moved further out. “My family” is an enlarged “I”, with its own perimeter and its own fear of loss. The same goes for my people, my team, those who think as I do. Any stopping point of the circle is a boundary drawn again, only further from the centre. So the widening has to be without conditions: not because everyone deserves it, but because any condition brings back the very boundary we are trying to loosen.

There is a very simple side to this too. When a child falls down next to you and starts to cry, you flinch before you have time to think whether the child is yours or someone else’s. The separation comes later. The first reaction does not recognize it.

What this looks like in ordinary life

This idea stops being abstract when you see it in simple things. The examples below are not about kindness being profitable. They are about something else: in each of them you can see that the boundary between “for myself” and “for others” is artificial, and in reality it is simply not there.

I want my whole family to be happy and free of suffering. Which means I have to be around for as long as possible and help them deal with whatever life brings. Which means I have to look after my health: move, sleep, eat properly. The sport I do for their sake benefits me as well, and by now it is unclear where care for them ends and care for myself begins. That, in fact, is the whole idea in miniature: the boundary between these two kinds of care turns out to be drawn in.

It is the same with everything else.

When I cook dinner for the family, I try to make the food fresh, and I start eating better myself than when I cooked only for me.

When I explain something to my son about breathing, attention or the mountains, I have to understand it clearly myself, and I notice the gaps in my own understanding.

When after a quarrel I sincerely wish someone close to me well, the resentment starts to melt. The one who holds the resentment has the worst of it. I replay that quarrel in my head again and again, and it is me who feels bad, not him. When I sincerely wish him well, there is nothing left to replay, and the resentment goes away by itself.

In a traffic jam you can be angry at everyone who cuts in front of you and arrive worn out. Or you can think about who is behind the wheel. Maybe an old man who spent two months getting ready to visit his grandchildren, has not driven for five years and is now lost, because everything around him has changed. I do not know this and never will, but it is enough to allow for it, and the anger goes. The road is the same, but I arrive a different person.

I said hello to a neighbour, he answered and smiled too. It took nothing at all, and the day became a little brighter for both of us.

I picked up some rubbish on the trail. The next person will never know that someone did it. And I got the feeling that this is my mountain too, and that I am at home in it.

In all these cases there is no need to choose between yourself and others, because there is nothing to choose from: it is one action described from two sides. In the tradition there is a simple practice for this, called the dedication of merit. Before anything you do, big or small, you stop for a few seconds and say to yourself: may what I am about to do bring benefit not only to me. And when you have finished, you dedicate the result to others just as briefly. The action itself does not change, what changes is its direction. The benefit that comes to me I see as a consequence of this wish for others to benefit. And this is exactly what is called giving up dualistic thinking. The non-dual traditions are built entirely around it: the Indian Advaita, whose very name means “not two”, and the Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahamudra. They are not about becoming kinder, they are about no longer splitting the world in two automatically: me and not me, mine and not mine. Each short intention of this kind loosens that habit a little.

How to dissolve the boundaries

It does not happen by itself. The boundary rests on habit, and a habit gives way only to repetition, like any other.

It is best to start with those close to you, because there it comes almost without effort. Then widen it: acquaintances, neighbours, strangers in a queue, then the ones who irritate you, then the ones who are truly difficult. It is an exercise like any other. At first it works for a second, then for a minute, then you notice that on the way to the shop you look at people differently than you did a year ago.

And at some point a shift happens. Connection with other people and with all living beings stops being something you think about and becomes something you feel. You understand with your body that I am not an observer looking at the world through glass, but a part of the same movement as everyone else. Such a state does not last long, it passes quickly. And nothing new appears in those minutes. It is just that for a while the habit of separating yourself from the rest stops working.

By the way, this is exactly the state used to describe those who are called “enlightened” or “realized”. Usually people see something supernatural behind the word, but if you take away the mystical coating, the descriptions of the state of such practitioners come down to simple things: in such a person the boundary is almost absent, their own “I” has stopped being the centre, and they feel the connection with all living beings constantly. These are not a special kind of people, and it is not a miracle. They simply see reality as it is far more clearly than the rest of us.

And here it becomes clear why personal happiness built only for a separate “I” does not exist. It is not a matter of a weak character, it is in the very structure: that very focus of attention on yourself, for whose sake the whole thing is started, is the source of dissatisfaction. You can spend your whole life improving the conditions inside the circle, but what troubles you is not the contents of the circle, it is its boundary. That is why the path to your own happiness necessarily goes through others. Not as an exchange and not as a payment for personal happiness, but because it is the only direction in which the boundary becomes thinner.

This is what I came to over this month and a half. My happiness cannot be only mine, not because that would be selfish, but because a separate “mine”, in the sense in which I usually picture it, simply does not exist. Love and compassion are not something I add to my practice for the sake of others. They are a way to gradually stop considering myself separate from everyone, and to feel myself a part of something far greater.