What Do You Experience About the Haiti Earthquake?

Q. Gary, what do you think of this quote from Wayne Liquorman's Advaita Fellowship Newsletter?

When faced with images of human pain and misery as with the recent earthquake in Haiti, many of us are moved and touched. We empathize, which is to say that we feel within ourselves some of the pain of others. It is an aspect of our humanness. Only the most spiritually naive dismiss it as unreal, an apparition, a dream. After all, it is as real as you are and it is logically ridiculous to assert your own unreality. Depending on your nature you may be moved to action or you may be moved to seek to understand or more likely to some combination of the two.

A. One of the great questions. Honestly, my own personal experience is that i feel nothing that i can detect with regard to events like the Haiti earthquake, for example.

It isn't due to my denying the reality of the situation in an intellectual sense, which, is as Wayne points out, naive.

It is because there is no one there to hold the other end of the experience, no experiencer to be the subject seeing the virtual (because we aren't there, so it's all images in the mind gathered third-hand) object of the earthquake, and then building a story in my own mind about what others might be feeling, etc. Without a "story maker", there is no story.

In my experience, if i were there, what typically happens in such situations, is that some action spontaneously manifests that is totally appropriate for the situation, without a doer taking credit for being compassionate, helpful, "Christian" or loving. The "right" action just occurs, and then the next action occurs, etc. as they arise.

As Wayne says "it is as real as you are" - if there is no "you", it just doesn't arise.