kṛpa [compassion, mercy, grace, or kindness]
Mercy is widely understood as a key element for success in spiritual practice. It is said that the spiritual path we are on can only lead to its ultimate goal with the ‘help’ of mercy—be it Ishvarakṛpa, Daivakṛpa, Gurukṛpa, and so on. It seems that our spiritual ambitions can only be fulfilled through the compassion and grace of external powers.
This leads us to ask: How do I receive mercy? What are the requirements? Are there specific conditions? Should I offer gifts to the deities? Should I make special efforts to please the guru?
This transactional way of thinking—‘I can get mercy if I give that—confuses us, if only because the material gifts we might give would only bring material satisfaction to whoever receives them. Spiritual contentment is unattainable by material means.
Mercy is not a trade-off. Mercy is not even a thing that could be traded for something else, something that the ‘worthy’ will receive and the ‘unworthy’ will not, be it from God or guru.
Mercy is a kind of consciousness. It’s the realisation that what is, is the most perfect expression of what can be. Mercy is the realisation that our lives are exactly as the should be, that all the elements in our loves take part in a perfection that we only now, and never before, have been able to see. Mercy is the realisation of this perfection.
Mercy is the experience that what we desire is exactly what we need. It’s the convergence of what we think we are and what we truly are. Mercy is, in other words, consciousness of our soul: the self-understanding that comes from shedding our false ego, material attachments, and transitory thoughts.
Mercy is the oneness of desire and need—but not because we have achieved all we desire or completed a wish list, but because we realise that what we already have is everything we need.
Mercy is the moment when the last belief in a separation between us and the world dissolves. It’s the moment when we can say farewell to trying to ‘game’ the world, to exploit our material gifts, to bring our environment under control, or to maximise the advantages of our resources and abilities.
To ‘get’ mercy is to realise that our lives are already merciful. It’s the understanding that the world is already perfect—but in ways we could not comprehend or appreciate before.
Mercy is the meeting of chance and necessity, the realisation that what we thought came to us by accident, actually could not and should not be any other way. It’s the moment when the difference between our internal spiritual life and the divine life of the world around us dissolves into nothing. It’s the moment when the perfection of our eternal soul becomes indistinguishable from the perfection of the external world.
Mercy is the moment when the material world reveals itself as spiritual, not two worlds governed by two sets of rules, two kinds of rewards and two kinds of suffering, but one unified creation, made by one creator with one unique purpose. Mercy means looking around at the material world and seeing only souls that are part and parcel of that creative soul.
In other words, mercy is not something to give or receive, but a realisation that everything is as it should be. It’s the arrival on our spiritual journey to a place where we can lift our eyes above the struggle to be somebody by defining ourselves by the moment of fleeting happiness we can find, in order to see that reality is eternally what it can and must be.
Indeed, we have ‘had’ mercy all along, and we are only now, through this question of mercy, arriving at a place where we can understand just that. That our path is the path toward the knowledge of who we are.
That path goes through the heart.
Meditation, chanting, sankirtan, and association with spiritually like-minded people—all these practices bring us closer to our own self-identification as soul-beings. These practices carry us slowly and gently toward the insight that we are not this body. This body, along with the material attachments that nourish it, the ego that drives it, and the material pleasures it demands and receives like a customer in a convenience store—all these leave us with the lingering illusion that we are the masters of our lives and that the world exists for our pleasure, if only we are clever enough to take it.
Soul consciousness means understanding that, even if material desires are satisfied now, they will ultimately lead to the suffering involved in repeatedly satisfying them. This cycle of pleasure and struggle—this addiction to the material—has no mercy.
Discovering that we are more than this material rat race means understanding that at our core is a self, a heart, a soul, which, when fully realised, provides its own satisfaction, its own pleasures, its own mercy.
There is no need to look for mercy, to ask for it, or to beg for it, because we already have it. Mercy is the name of the perfection of the spiritual universe, in which each individual soul already and always already plays a complete and perfect part.