Compassion

Actually your personality does it a lot during the day: being compassionate. But what is it? You perceive something (or imagine it) that happens to somebody else, and you interpret it more or less like it happens to yourself. Now this is followed by a feeling which arises in you, a pleasant one or an unpleasant one, and now you experience the need to do something with this feeling and/or get rid of it.

It can be triggered by issues which come to mind through the news (newspapers, radio, tv, conversations). But any other contact will do as well, e.g. when someone tells you about a pleasant or unpleasant experience. Even fiction will trigger this: reading books and watching a movie are all based on this principle.

Your feelings are likely to be less intense than the ones of the person to whom it actually happens, since you miss the direct experience. This also shows the limitation (and yet also the pleasant part) of this personality mechanism: you miss the power and intensity of the experience itself, the context, others who are there, the insight you will get from it, the strength a person can find in himself, and what all this is doing to a person. Also, each person reacts in a different way and experiences things in different ways, since each person has different life experiences.

As a compassionate outsider you spend a great amount of time each day with imagining what it would be like for the other person, however, when you are truly honest with yourself, you do not act on the result of this mechanism, it is only mental activity based on the personality pattern of interpreting and calling forth feelings, combined with especially nót looking at yourself. This time it cannot even be traced back to you, ánd your experiences are less intense, and you may more easily close your mind on them if you feel like. And yet it still offers a lot of unpleasant feelings during the day, and when you are 'good' at this mechanism, you are even likely to be called 'sensitive'.

Compassion is a socially very appreciated personality mechanism, because of the impression it gives that you are open to the needs and feelings of other people, and because of the way you thus help to strengthen personality interpretations (pleasant ones or less pleasant ones). But you have seen this is only a small aspect of it, and on top of that, you do not actually react to it as well, whilst you are bombarded with situations that should justify a social response according to this mechanism. In return, this is likely to induce feelings of guilt in you - another personality's specialty.

Even while compassion is a socially highly appreciated thing, practically it can also be seen that reacting from this interpretation need not be the best way to deal with a situation. Imagine you are in trouble, and what usually works best to help you out: a person who shows you the way out and/or gives you some practical assistance on that, is usually more effective than the one who sits next to you, enforces your judgment on the seriousness and difficulty of the situation, thus making only the personality interpretation more real to you.

Your inner Self deals in a different way with these situations. When you strengthen your inner Self in a certain situation, then it is more easily accessible to others as well. Thus you offer them a truly long-lasting solution: a better contact with their own Source of inspiration. This does not mean that you will not be practically involved in taking care of some outer circumstances - depending on the inspiration you will receive, simply ask your inner Self - yet this will be a neutral act in itself.