Kindness and Right Mindful Compassion

What is kindness from my point of view?

there is idiot compassion which I suppose is a form of compassion. This is doing something kind that might get you killed.

I suppose if someone was really skilled someone else might call what they do idiot compassion but if the other they are watching is truly skilled it just might be right mindful compassion. It just depends upon the provable skills of the doer in any given situation.

Right mindful compassion is what we all strive for because it is what I would call "practical compassion".

Practical compassion is where you use compassion in extremely skillful ways to the benefit of one or many people often including yourself.

For example, someone might start a non-profit that is for the benefit of others that sells something that people want but also like the fact that their money when they buy something through this non-profit is going to a good cause.

So, the more skillful you are with your compassion and kindness the more people can be helped sometimes in an infinite amount of ways.

So, the goal is always right mindful compassion helping as many people worldwide as possible in an ever ongoing way.

For example, Tibetan Lamas in the 1980s loved Copy machines because they could literally make infinite copies of their dharma practices and give them to many many westerners and thereby expand their prayer base all over the world.

They often would make jokes about this as Tibetan Lamas tend to about really happy things or really unbelievably sad things. It is a way that non-dualistic people avoid having strokes and heart attacks by laughing about good things or bad things so they just don't have a stroke or heart attack one day and simply die unexpectedly.

In a culture like ours here in the U.S. that is unbelievably afraid of death compared to other cultures that tend to accept death as a part of life more, being able to find a way to laugh at death in a constructive way might allow many people to not go insane or to kill themselves when a loved one of theirs dies (in our culture).

When I was in India in 1985 an 1986 I had to see dead bodies everywhere I went and not be picked up off the street because there were just too many people and most didn't have money to eat or get buried or even have anywhere to live or to have more clothes than were on their backs already.

So, bodies were common in the streets when someone just died from an illness or starvation. This was a common sight then. I'm not sure if it is still like this or not now.

So, I suppose it would be a kindness if bodies weren't left anymore on the streets if they still are in India. However, I always will miss the steam engines on trains during the 1980s. It was amazing to have the experience of steam engines still running in India then in 1985 and 1986.