I was just a lad. Just old enough to be taken to a drowning site on the river by a grandfather who knew the victim's father. Climbing into the car, I felt a sense of pride to be going somewhere with my grandfather other than church.
A young man had gone to the river that morning to swim with some friends. All of the boys had tried to show off their skills, but he had swum the farthest out and the river current had taken him under several times before he disappeared for good, another victim of the river.
When we arrived, his family and others had gathered at a point down the river where boats were dredging without any luck. That day I heard sorrow for the first time. Crying, wailing, and cursing filled the heavy river air, along with the usual smells of dead fish.
That day, for the first time, I began to place myself into others: The crying mother I became, the father who leaned moaning against a tree I was one with, the old grandmother, even her mind and her soul I inhabited. Then the strange feeling came that I was the victim, feeling the rolling waters around me, the gasping for air, the fear of dying.
Today that scene comes back at times. I'm one among probably just a few still living that were there. Since then I've heard of other people drowning, on T.V., reading the many news stories and listening to accounts from others about their own loved ones and acquaintances drowning. Every time there is a new awareness of a drowning I call up the memory of that first experience.
I can't remember, because I was so young, if the body was found that day, or what the victim's name was. I only remember that on a day long ago compassion arose in me, I experienced sorrow and knew I was a creature who could feel. There was a new consciousness born withing me, a realization of consciousness beyond the "life is all about me" way of thinking.
Who was the first to feel compassion, not just a missing of someone, because that someone supplied some need, but who was the first to cry real tears and feel deeply about the death of others? This primordial, scene, this first awareness of being connected with life so deeply, probably is knowledge consisting of when and where and who that will never be uncovered. But somehow the first experience of compassion was a beginning of the human consciousness that is repeated or not repeated in the development of each individual.
Can compassion for sorrow be a part of evolution? Is the capacity to feel compassion passed on genetically? There is a time in everyone's experience when we discover we are human and we know that our existence is not just about the individual, the ego, that becoming a creature of real feeling is a door opening into a kingdom. I think that evolution is concerned with the apparatus that receives a larger consciousness of which we are just the projection of. That consciousness does not have to evolve, it just is, and we are aware of it or not.
Belonging to the kingdom of love and compassion begins in walking through the door, and then is followed by the act of becoming more and more a being which loves beyond its own self. Compassion comes to us only when we experience sorrow and suffering. So it is born of sorrow. On that day long ago, the drowning, with all the suffering that ensued, brought about the birth of compassion within me. Also, there was the realization that my thinking was part of a higher thought process.
If all the accumulated experiences of this awakening, is placed in the frame of eternity, we understand the nature of suffering, we accept that nature, and we all become creatures of love, one by one. That is what life is about, loving beyond ourselves.
