A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,
Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;
Love in her was wider than the universe,
The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.
Sri Aurobindo
Savitri, Book I, Canto II, page 15.
Compassion and gratitude are essentially psychic virtues. They appear in the consciousness only when the psychic being takes part in active life.
The vital and the physical experience them as weaknesses, for they curb the free expression of their impulses, which are based on the power of strength.
As always, the mind, when insufficiently educated, is the accomplice of the vital being and the slave of the physical nature, whose laws, so overpowering in their half-conscious mechanism, it does not fully understand. When the mind awakens to the awareness of the first psychic movements, it distorts them in its ignorance and changes compassion into pity or at best into charity, and gratitude into the wish to repay, followed, little by little, by the capacity to recognise and admire.
It is only when the psychic consciousness is all-powerful in the being that compassion for all that needs help, in whatever domain, and gratitude for all that manifests the divine presence and grace, in whatever form, are expressed in all their original and luminous purity, without mixing compassion with any trace of condescension or gratitude with any sense of inferiority.
The Mother,
Words of the Mother III, CWM volume 15, page 277.