I’m not altogether clear about the distinction you’re making – can you explain?

I remember very clearly the first time I met Lily, when the family checked into the Edgartown Inn in Martha’s Vineyard — I saw the two middle aged parents, with sort of faded European gentility, a girl with wild hair, and a cherubic boy — I thought “is this the Addams Family?” — give her my best regards –

Of course, it might be that achieving a clear meditative state could indeed invoke a compassionate connection without that capability necessarily being of divine origin, which I take to mean flowing from a God assumed to exist.

But either way, there are genuine possibilities for us. And for some reason – whatever that reason may turn out to be – I agree that compassion is good.

But don’t be too quick to rule out the possibility that compassion may have adaptive value. In fact, evolutionary psychologists seem quite happy to rule it in.

So that leaves only one’s sense of whether it am or it ain’t. A clear meditative state often presents a compassionate connection to all beings. Let’s hope this is not self hypnosis.
If it is real, I like to think that it burps to the surface in everyone. That the sadness is more than just self pity about our own mortality.

Not a link – it is “nuh uh” no web site.

When you ask “so what is it?” do you mean what is the source of the sadness you feel? As is obvious from the post, I feel it too. But is it necessarily of divine origin? It might be nothing more than that we realize our own lives will be utterly forgotten as well.

What is that link you posted as your website?

First thinking how long I have known you and later Nina yet never knew anything of her parents.
And now being so pleased to know it.
And why is that? I’m not a terribly sentimental guy, but I always feel a sadness about the evaporation of life stories. Even people I am not really connected to. This seems innate even if you are some nasty thug. It is not a trait that would seem to aid evolutionary survival. So what is it?
Add it to the list of things pointing to the mystical and divine.

I’m well acquainted with this view, and have mentioned it often to console the bereaved. And it is the opinion, generally, of physicists that the “block time” of general relativity is the truth of the world, and the our perception of the moving present is a persistent and mysterious illusion. Aquinas also saw God’s viewpoint as being outside of time, seeing all of time as an eternal whole.

But for those of us here below, at least at our present state of development, we are like the falling leaves.

But perhaps in some sense he will not be gone, ever. You might check into Julian Barbour’s book The End of Time. If his theory of time is correct, that time, and every moment of time, doesn’t just ‘disappear’ into ‘the past’ but exists independently, forever. It makes for a different perspective to consider it. As for whether it’s true, I suppose only time will tell…