Adano Ley (Swami Nitty-Gritty): “I’m trying to show the principle where love for love’s sake doesn’t generate the compassion until it is hurt, and then it can be a channel for compassion.

“And models of it, examples of it, will always pop up for us to experience, and the Samaritan as an example was a model of people being hurt and having to act under those circumstances to those who might hurt them or not hurt them.

“A man has a child. The child is told to obey. It does obey and the man loves the child. Never a moment, never a dull moment, not even no complaints.

“But one day the child refuses to obey and causes a serious accident to the father’s automobile. The father can be very vindictive or the father can be compassionate.”

Me: “I see. So even the term – if you go for what they call the higher level – like agape, if you have the feeling that the Universe has done something wrong for you, you’re gonna hate the whole Universe then too, which compassion wouldn’t do.”

Adano: “You’re sure it’s not ‘a-gape’? Totally blown away. And there is no excuse to make up, and so you’re ‘a-gape’ and have to swallow your pride, and they call it the agape love.

“And then how would you act out the agape love?”

Me: “Overwhelmed by it.”

Adano: “So it’s ‘a-gape.’ You’re thrown into a symptomatic nonbattle, total take-it-as-it-is situation. We find it difficult at times to turn loose our feelings and don’t know why.

“We want to love, we want to be compassionate, but until we’re hurt we don’t know how to generate it, and if you’re hurt, sometimes you never generate it.

“But the day we can generate it after we’re hurt, then we are able to allow others to be themselves.

“So the man who had a child that may do something to hurt him, he has a choice to punish the child, and then if the child comes back and makes up and tells the father ‘I’m sorry’ and restores it even though the father may not want him to restore it just to show that he’s in a better position to endure it.

“The restitution opens the father’s heart more by the prodigal son. The one that stayed home, he never did anything wrong, but then he was a love-for-love’s sake.

“The deeper anguish causes the deeper what?”

Me: “Compassion.”

Adano: “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! But it’s love. Who said it was NOT love?

“Compassion is a savings account put up in case the checking account runs out, but it’s all money, huh?

“Checking account is money, savings account is money, but the checking account, if it runs out …”

Me: “You got the savings account.”

Adano: “That’s what compassion is. The compassionate nature is a reserve that can override the cost of the love on a one-for-one basis for freedom.

“We love each other in order to be free, but until we hurt each other in that freedom we can’t override the cost factor of the hurt.

“Until we can be compassionate and write it off, that’s what the compassionate nature is.

“We get to experience it when we are put in situations of anguish, not before that.”

Melissa: “Which part do you experience?”

Adano: “You experience the expansiveness of yourself when someone hurts you or puts you in a situation where you have to vouch for them.”

Melissa: “Yeah, but what about when you receive compassion?”

Adano: “When you receive compassion, somewhere inside tells you that you will be making it up for somebody else or that same person.”

Melissa: “Well, wouldn’t that be love-for-love’s-sake if you were just going to make it up?”

Adano: “No, it is when a person who you’re gonna make it up to aggravates or hurts you, then you realize YOU can be compassionate.

“Until there’s an irritation or an aggravation there is NO compassion – it’s on a one-to-one basis.”

(the end)