Compassionate action -- balanced by wisdom -- is a very important component of spiritual life. It opens our heart and puts us in touch with the happiness that illuminates existence and gives us the strength and courage to continue on the path.
There is the silence in which everything exists, and then there is the noise in my head that I have come to take as the natural background to my life. It has occurred to me that perhaps the trick is to begin to see the silence as the background and the noise as moving across it. The silence, the plain existence of things, is what is real; the thoughts are clouds.