I’m watching the coverage of the LA fire and multiple things cross my mind.

The first is compassion. It’s extremely easy to get caught up in it, and I’m thinking, if I had to map the areas of the world where the most guilty people for all of today’s evils live, the place that’s burning would be in the top 3. And yet, when a man’s house is burning down, you feel bad for him and want to help, especially watching from a distance, when you don’t know who the man is. And that made me think further – what do we even know about all the people who are suffering? If we knew the karmic background, would we still be feeling sorry for them? We see a little girl who lost her limbs in a petal mine explosion and we feel sorry for her, but what if she were a cruel man who raped his baby daughter and this is his hell? If we saw him before, we would feel righteous anger and curse him with all our strength to be punished by God to all the extent of justice, and yet, now that we no longer see that past life and the context of the suffering, we see the maimed little girl and wish damnation upon those who caused it – and the godless people of course always blame God for such instances. In case of those Americans, we know that all the leftist propagandists live in those burning houses, we know that most of those people are the ones causing the virtue signalling hysteria, insisting that men can menstruate and women can fight men in combat sports, insisting that women be hired as firefighters and soldiers, and that some stupid fish species should be given its favourite brackish water at the expense of the LA water supply, because imagine the suffering of all those little fishes in water whose salinity isn’t to their liking. So, misguided compassion can be said to have greatly contributed to their misfortune, and now I feel misguided compassion watching their fate.

Would we ever feel compassion for anyone if we knew the whole karmic background? It’s easy to see the victims and instinctively think them innocent, but innocent victims seem to be a very rare kind in this world: basically, the Christians think there was only one in history, and his suffering was redemptive for all of mankind. If they are hard pressed to think of another, they will name his mother. And yet, I don’t think it’s all that simple. The circle of evildoers who in turn become victims is for the most part merely an aspect of this world, where the wheel of samsara turns to make both evildoers and victims from everybody, and they all keep investing their energy into the system, trying to make things right, trying to have a better opportunity, trying to live a better life, causing harm, trying to repent for it and fix it, ad nauseam. People who are deluded and think they are doing good, but are in fact doing great harm, while pontificating about virtue by eating their vegan gluten-free toast. People who watch their houses burn and feel compassion for the innocent victims, investing energy and focus into the world, bleeding into it to make it fertile.

Buddhists have the right idea about compassion – they will say that the intelligent person will see all that cycle of projection, suffering and ignorance and feel compassion at those suffering from it, but the solution is to detach them all from the world, from this entire cycle, and not keep feeding this fire with gasoline. Essentially, proper compassion is the kind that liberates from the world, not the kind that gets you entangled and the kind that gives the world’s victims the feeling of validity of their endeavours here.

Another thing I noticed is how illusions shatter. Expensive homes, expensive computers and other gadgets in them, expensive cars, the illusion of untouchable and powerful America, it all burned down and turned into a heap of burning trash. It suddenly doesn’t matter which model of car, phone, computer or microwave oven it was, when it’s all lost – and guess what, that’s what happens when you die. You lose all your material possessions, it no longer matters which brand your watch, handbag, car or phone it was. No more status symbols. It’s just you, and what you are, in your true nature, stripped of things and illusions.