Equality

The most difficult thing about having compassion for everyone is letting go of the idea that the natural state of the world requires that people be unequal. Whether it is a matter of having the same compassion for the self as one does for others, or avoiding conditioning compassion on any other factor, the idea that all people are equal is central. And with that comes the understanding that the divisions we make between people and the levels of hierarchy we create to rank them are fundamentally arbitrary.

This is not to say that they are wrong. One person may be more valuable to us than other, or people may differ in terms of how we regard them. And those distinctions may be perfectly legitimate. But they are born of ourselves and not the people themselves, and for that reason, they do not alter the persons to which we apply them, as even though they may seem real to us, they have no reality beyond us.

Therefore, if compassion is to act within the world as it is, rather than as we judge it to be, it should transcend our judgements, rather than reflect them.