Empathy

This page is a personal homework reflection for Kira's Ways of Knowing workshop.

As a starting point, I define empathy as an emotional insight into the experience of others.  As an overall felt sense.  Not just a feeling, but a complex capacity of emotional intelligence.

More than just responding, mirroring, being affected by another's similar feeling.  I may have an empathic response that is different in quality than the one person I'm responding to is experiencing.  It might reflect a latent possibility in the other, something that could enter their awareness.  Now I'm curious about in what different ways that experience could be latent.  A subconscious or repressed feeling?  A feeling that could come into them from some transpersonal source?  An emotional insight that could result from a learning process or a shift meaning due to some new knowledge ... a changed narrative ... a new perspective? 

How does empathy "work"?  Part of it seems instinctive, unlearned, pre-linguistic present in human infants and animals.  This doesn't mean it is pre-social though.  I believe we're social animals in a way that's more basic than language and conceptual thinking.  This is the energetic basis from which conceptual meaning arises and returns to as a reference.

I like the religious figures of the baby Jesus or the Buddha's Mind as symbols of empathy.  Maybe these are metaphors for the basic  pre-cognitive, pre-reflective capacities humans have for emotional connection with others, before it is formed, structured, and conditioned by relational learning and by rigid learned patterns wrapped around pain.

Can I "have" empathy?  If so, about too much, or too little of it? 

Can empathy be "objective" in different degrees?  I think so.  Sometimes I feel more balanced, free, and open, and then I seem to have a wider and deeper range of responsiveness to others.  I'd call that more objective, since it is determined more by the other.  The sometimes I have my own emotional processes going on and can respond mainly through how these resonate with and interact with other people.  I'd call that less objective, or more subjective, in that it is determined more by me and less by the other.  But always there is a blend.

Some schools of philosophy define "reason" and "emotion" as conflicting opposing tendencies and favor reason.  Certainly strong emotional activation can block cognitive thinking, and the reverse is also true, that strong mental activity can block emotion.  However, newer psychological paradigms of multiple intelligences say these different capacities work together and in synergy as a part of a dynamic unity.  The emerging knowledge of brain structure supports this perspective.

Can empathy be developed or schooled?  I think so.  Mind can be used to sort through ideas -- to learn to make choices and acts of attention that either lead to or block one's own emotional insight into the experiences of others.  I think it is even more essential to do two things to cultivate empathy.  First, to resolve or heal emotional "knots" -- rigid patterns of feeling and behavior that originated through adaptation to painful social circumstances.  Second, to regain awareness of the primal feelings of connection with people and with the world that go by names such as Buddha's Mind, Original Face, Holy Spirit, Christ Consciousness.  Religious traditions have worked to preserve our access to these capacities, but I also believe they are scientific phenomena.

When I'm more empathic or empathetic, my experience is that I'm also more intelligent and more aware of all aspects of my world -- both the natural and social environment  -- and including myself as part of it.  I call this world "reality" and this embodied awareness "presence".  So in this sense, when I'm more empathic, I'm also more "real".