Wednesday, April 10, 2013

The Story of Empathy

Empathy is the capacity to understand the experience of another in a very visceral way. It is a capacity each person has. And yet it is a capacity that lies dormant to a great degree in most, expressed only in flashes here and there given an appropriate catalyst. For most people, empathy is a conditioned response to circumstances that their minds deem appropriate or worthy of such response. In other words, empathy is closely tied into your mind's most fundamental value systems. You are more likely to empathize with people and circumstances that mirror your own ideals than those that do not. As a result, your ability to express empathy becomes a function of how you tend to classify yourself. The limits and conditions you place on yourself translate into the selective manner in which you empathize with your environment. And so, empathy extends beyond just the capacity to understand another. It is more fundamentally a reflection of your capacity to understand yourself.  As you deepen and expand your understanding of yourself, so also does your capacity to feel empathy deepen and expand.

We are empathetic beings by nature. As children, our capacity for empathy is vast and largely unconditioned. Children are sensitive to their environments and function primarily using intuition. They have an innate ability to connect with people, creatures and objects in a far more direct way than do adults. That is because the filter of their cognitive-interpretive mind has yet to be fully lodged into place. When a three year old navigates its environment, it does so instinctively, whereas an adult is conditioned to take a much more calculated and measured approach. Morality, ethics, facts, opinions, value judgments and other means of classification that we are taught to use in order to analyze and segregate our experiences, are as of yet unavailable to the three year old. The child simply operates according to what piques its curiosity in the moment and, as a result, has a much more direct experience of the elements within its environment. Its awareness is unburdened by mental processes.

Conditioned Empathy

As an adult, you empathize as a result of your mental and emotional conditioning. You draw comparisons between the objects of your empathy and yourself and the more common ground you are able to find, the more your capacity to empathize increases. For example, you may feel more connected to someone who has experienced a circumstance of tragedy that you yourself had experienced. You may feel moved to share your experience with them because you have this sense of feeling their pain. As a result, you may feel united, or brought together, by the similarities in your circumstances. However, the sense of feeling the other person's pain is simply a projection of your imagination. Your mind, recognizing some of the similarities in circumstances, merely triggers memories of your own experience of pain or grief and projects it onto the other. On the other end, the recipient of your empathy is doing something similar. This person's mind, having drawn a similar comparison, projects his/her own experience of grief and imagines it to be yours. This mutual projection between the two parties seals the illusion of a shared experience whereas in reality there has been no such experience. The illusion becomes more apparent through the passage of time when circumstances begin to change and the things you once shared in common begin to gradually become less relevant. As the common ground between you and the other begins to shrink, so does your empathy. No longer are you able to feel the other person the way you once did. No longer are they able to feel you as they once did. As the circumstances that unified you slowly begin to fade, so does the unity. 

This mechanism of conditional empathy operates within all facets of human experience and relationships. Friendships are largely circumstantial, based on the commonalities people share. You often feel closer to friends that are going through the same experiences as you are than those that are not. Friends, who were once close in their youth, begin to drift apart when one gets married and has children while the other remains single and career driven. Marriages fall apart when the mutual interests and romantic drives that first created the sense of being united and in love, begin to fade into the mundane repetition of daily life, with each spouse finding the other increasingly incapable of satisfying their needs. Members of a community once united in a common political or religious ideology become polarized and conflicted when these ideologies or beliefs begin to change. Nations that were once faithful allies become sworn enemies when their interests begin to diverge.  

The ways in which you empathize with other organisms is also subject to this mechanism. You have a greater empathy towards more complex life-forms than towards simpler ones, since intelligence is one of the parameters by which you are taught to value yourself. The killing of dolphin evokes greater emotion than the killing of tuna, because people identify dolphins as being of a higher order of sentience, in other words "more human like" in their ability to emote. Eating horse meat is more horrifying than eating beef, because the horse is an animal associated with strength, beauty and grace - all prized virtues within the human experience. People are far more likely to be in an uproar over the government euthanizing stray dogs than rats, because they feel a greater sense of kinship with dogs. Witnessing a rabbit being hit by a car causes more distress than watching a fly being mashed against the windshield. Your empathy extends to a greater extent towards those beings with which your mind can imagine some sort of bond of identification. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines empathy as "the imaginative projection of a subjective state onto an object so that the object appears to be infused with it". The more complex the organism, the more room your mind has for imagination 

Within society, people find it easier to feel empathy for the poor, the unfortunate, the victim than they do for the greedy, the fortunate and the exploiter. The public hero's untimely demise is met with widespread grief and vigilance whereas that of the despised dictator is marked with celebration. It is far easier to feel empathy for the misfortunes of a law-abiding citizen than it is for those of a convicted felon. The same voice that demands for freedom for the oppressed, demands for the imprisonment of the oppressor. The empathy you feel for members within society is contingent on how closely they uphold the principles on which society is based. Because, the principles of society are to a large extent your own principles. You have acquired and assimilated them over the years. Your whole sense of identity is based upon it. 

Unconditioned Empathy     

The empathy that an infant or toddler feels on the other hand is not yet subject to this mechanism and is, as a result, largely uncontrived. The child does not know the difference between a citizen and a convict, a Catholic and a Muslim, a democrat and a republican, a celebrity and a bum. The child experiences its environment spontaneously and responds with an equal spontaneity. Its mind has yet to fully develop the faculties of self-awareness. What the child experiences as "himself" is essentially different from what you identify as your Self. The child has no opinions to express, no ideologies to believe in, no facts to reference. Even its emotions are experienced more as energetic sensations and are as yet unclassified by the mind as happy, sad, angry, jealous etc. The child feels what it feels from one moment to the next. With little material with which to define itself, it experiences less of a separation from its environment. The boundary between where its own self ends and where the rest of the world begins is somewhat blurred. The result is that the child experiences itself more seamlessly in relation to its environment. The sense of ownership that most adults feel about their experiences is virtually non-existent. 

As a result, the empathy a child feels is of a more constant and consistent nature. As long as its attention is directed outwards into its environment, its natural response to everything it interacts with is one of empathy. This is why infants tend to be so liberal with their affection. Unless it feels threatened in any way, a child will smile as easily for a stranger as it would for someone familiar. Children have an innate ability to form instinctive bonds with animals and even insects that most adults would find repulsive. They are far more eager to touch, taste or otherwise interact with the world they live in. They would much rather get dirty than stay clean, engage than retreat, roll around and absorb as much as they can of the world around them than attempt to stay removed and unaffected.  All these are marks of empathy.

It is only in moments when fear or hunger strikes that the child becomes suddenly aware of itself as a needy, individual identity, and its attention shifts away from the world and onto itself. In this moment it is consumed with its own body's cravings and it becomes a separate isolated entity struggling to survive. And yet, the moment its needs are met it goes right back to immersing itself in the world again, unconcerned. 

And so even the child's empathy is not entirely unconditioned. Rather the conditions are basic and fundamental to its survival and in most cases easily met. However, as the child grows and its faculties of self-awareness develop and sophisticate, so to do the number of ways in which it chooses to identify itself. Previously, where hunger and fear were the only mechanisms by which it became aware of its own separate existence, it now begins to use its name, its gender, its family, its school, its religion, its nationality, its talents, its desires, its dislikes, its frustrations as means by which to define itself, all of which are inherited, none of which are inherent. Its capacity to lose itself or become absorbed into its environment gradually diminishes as its capacity to lose itself and become absorbed in its own mind gradually increases. Even in moments of distraction or daydreaming, it is reminded by the society that rears it, that there is greater value in concentration and focus. At a certain point, its capacity to become self-aware from time to time begins to take over until it finally becomes pathological.   

The empathy it expresses as an adult is less consistent, greatly distorted by its belief systems and for the most part contrived by a need to perpetuate its own self-image. 

Completing the Circle 

As adults many have experienced the disillusionment that results from the shattering of one's belief systems, yet few use this as an opportunity to embark on a journey of self-inquiry and investigation. The nature of life is such that no illusion can be sustained for long. Every mind-made ideology and institution must eventually collapse no matter how resilient it appears in the moment. This includes political, religious, scientific, social, moral, familial and individual ideology. No matter what you believe is true about yourself, the circumstances of your life will sooner or later bring it into question. The manner in which you choose to respond to this circumstance will determine how your understanding evolves. Most people are unable to let go of their definitions unless forced by circumstances to do so and even then most are likely to trade in one set of definitions for another, because the human mind craves and finds security in its own definitions. To live in a manner in which you use no parameters by which to define yourself is unfathomable to most people. And yet that is how each person was born. It is what comes most naturally to you.

Catalysed by the suffering which is an eventual and unavoidable aspect of any experience that the mind attempts to control, you move from one experience of life to the next growing increasingly disillusioned with the entire process. When you were younger the world seemed far more vibrant and full of possibility. Love, excitement, travel, adventure, family, friendships were the promises that spurred your journey forward. Yet as days turn into years, marriages fall apart or hold together by a thread, work becomes monotonous and stressful, friendships become dry and lacking sincerity, even religion and spirituality become a chore, you begin to question the point of it all, the reason why the whole journey happened in the first place. Far less than the capacity to empathize with another, you hardly have much empathy for yourself, so disconnected have you become from the image you have of yourself in your mind. There is an intense sense of living "someone else's life". That's because you are.

When you begin to turn the mind's attention back onto itself, you have the opportunity, to witness all the mechanisms that have been operating behind the scenes. As you watch and begin to grow familiar with each of them, you are slowly able to recognize how each mechanism, each belief structure, distorts your experience in some way and creates a separation between yourself and your experience. The process begins with some of the more overarching belief structures like religious ideology, ethnic identity, political affiliations, career ambitions, social relationships etc. With each one you gradually begin to see the ways in which you inherited and adopted it and how it plays itself out in your experience of life and in your relationships with others. One by one, as you reveal each of these beliefs as false and gradually release them from your mind's grasp, you move into the subtler and more fundamental mechanisms that continue to remain in place. These may appear in the form of your own morality, your principles and ethics, your loyalties, your close and cherished relationships. These are more difficult to recognize and trace, yet with a keen enough perception you are able to see how even these most intimate of identities are all mechanisms that you inherited during your upbringing. 

At any stage during this journey of inquiry you may feel that you have endured enough, because inquiry is not a leisurely process. It is disruptive and grossly discomforting to the mind which is accustomed to relying on the security of its own beliefs. And yet, the inquiry is not complete until there is nothing left to inquire. Drilling down into the very depths of your existence you are compelled to question even the most fundamental assumptions you made about yourself - about your identity as a man or woman, as a human, about life and about death. The inquiry process is not a constructive one, it is wholly destructive. Its only purpose is to consume each and every mechanism that you have ever used in order to define yourself. When even the most basic of definitions is found to be baseless, you are left with nothing more than a barely structured thought that "I exist". And yet, even this basic sense creates a seeming separation with your environment. The subjection of this most fundamental thought to the power of your inquiry reveals that even this most basic and primal assumption is no more than an abstraction of the mind. Free of your mind's compulsive need to qualify your experience, you are now able to experience yourself as the totality that you are rather than simply the fragment you represent. 

Compassion 

The journey of empathy has effectively come a full circle. Unfettered by your mind and its identifications, you once again experience life in a seamless and spontaneous fashion. Your attention remains naturally resting and absorbed in the moment to moment transitions of your experience. And yet you have not lost the power for abstraction, analysis and imagination. In fact, your ability to use them in a much more focused and positive manner is enhanced. You no longer turn towards your mind to provide you with a sense of self. Your Self is what you know yourself to be in each moment as the total experience of that moment. Any mechanisms you continue to use to separate the experience are simply practical skills in your repertoire, rather than actualities.    

You express empathy naturally and unconditionally through no effort on your part, but simply because to express empathy is what feels most natural to you. You are most wholly yourself and that is reason enough. Empathy unobstructed by conditions or limitations is Compassion. To feel compassion is to empathize with all of life without separation, bias or discrimination. It is only when the separation and bias within your own self has subsided that you can perceive from that same perspective. Only then can empathy can flow without restriction. Only then can the mirror reflect without distortion.

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