When you are helping without reason, it is compassion

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question: Sir, do love and Compassion play a role in the process of awakening?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Love and Compassion are not instruments. Love and Compassion are not stuff that can be used as a means or as a method. Awakening, Love, and Compassion are all synonyms. They are three different words only because we talk of them in different contexts. It is like one thing being looked at from different sights in different moods from different perspectives.

Essentially, all three of them are pure Emptiness. What we call as Awakening is not really an awakening. To awaken in the normal sense of the word means to become Conscious. To awaken in the normal sense of the word means to have a mind that is now ‘active’. You start saying that now you can think, analyze, see, determine, conclude, and compare, that is what you do when you are awake; in the common usage of the word.

Real awakening is actually more like going to sleep. I repeat real awakening is actually more like going to sleep. You have become empty to all that which use to happen during normal awakening.

Let’s examine what happens during normal periods of waking consciousness. What is that keeps happening, what is…