STOP REACTING AND START RESPONDING
To put it in another way, we must stop reacting to circumstances and start responding to them. A reaction is emotional and unconscious, while a response is rational and conscious. As mentioned earlier, the difference between an animal and a human being is that animals are passively reacting emotionally to circumstances, while human beings have the capacity to respond rationally to circumstances, by consciously delaying the reaction to get sufficient time to decide, the appropriate response to make in a given situation. Yet the normal human being does not always choose to respond rationally, they often react emotionally like animals. This means that the normal human being is a kind of animal, carrying the animal nature; until, of course, one has fully evolved to the fully human level, where one does not react emotionally to circumstances any more but instead responds rationally to them.
All this explanation means, the normal human being is not yet fully evolved. This is why we have to go through this process of psychological evolution and learn through meditation to evolve, and grow up. This growth is a conscious psychological process rather than an unconscious biological one. The normal human being, when fully evolved, becomes a supernormal human being, who is free from selfish emotional behaviour. He is no more an “ego” or “self,” but a “Sublime” individual who is perfectly “selfless.”
This means, all emotions are self-centered. True selflessness is not an emotion. True love is selfless. It is called metta the universal benevolence, which is the absence of lust, hate, and the delusion of self. When metta is fully developed it results in karuna, which is universal compassion, where there is no distinction between oneself and others. Others become as important as one-self, to the person with karuna, just as a mother thinks of her only child. Here one looses oneself in the interest in all beings. Therefore proper development of compassion results in the freedom from unhappiness called mudita, which is the happiness of selflessness. This happiness is not an emotional excitement. It is a state of tranquility of mind, of peaceful happiness, which is introverted rather than extroverted. This means this happiness is not dependent on external circumstances. This introverted state of mind also facilitates introspection upekkha. Introspection facilitates apperception (abhinna), which is the awareness of “experience” (meaning: how we perceive) instead of “existence” (meaning: what we perceive). By “experience” we mean the process by which we become aware of what we perceive. This helps one awaken from the dream of existence, through a paradigm shift from “existence” to “experience.”