The elements of empathy

Sunday, June 26, 2022

8:50 p.m. Our little conversation this morning didn’t meet a lot of response. One agreed with us, two laid out opinions on the Roe v. Wade opinion, and one went off on a tangent. Nobody has proposed burning me or you at the stake yet, which I suppose should be encouraging. But – my reason for pulling out the journal – I am always surprised how few people seem able to actually get inside another point of view. I figured lawyers would have to be able to do it, if only to anticipate challenges. Chess players have to do it, in terms anyway of their opponent’s strategy. Poker players must be able to figure out something of what their opponents are feeling, if not thinking. But is it really so rare for us to be able to place ourselves sympathetically inside another’s viewpoint? And if so, why? Don’t we contact one another on a non-3D level?

You are thinking to have a session for tomorrow so that you may continue to work on the novel?

That’s the hope.

We don’t encourage two sessions a day as a general thing.

I know that. Does that mean you won’t do it?

We are reluctant, for two very good reasons (over and above acquiescing in your commencing a bad habit): vitality and focus. You don’t want to be sapping your vitality by over-indulging in this effort, merely because it is pleasurable. And even if you discount that, the resulting sessions would begin to lose intensity, would in effect lose focus. You can’t avoid taxing your system merely by refusing to acknowledge effects.

Just to be clear, I take it these are limits for me, not necessarily for one and all.

That’s correct. Some won’t be able to do one a day with any regularity. Some may be able to do more – or, more likely, longer – sessions. It is highly individual, dependent upon variables not of will or even of intelligent application, but of vitality and ability to refill the wells. You will remember that Carl Jung ascribed his survival of forces that had shattered Nietzsche as largely a matter of physical endurance. Jung has a stronger frame, and a more resilient constitution, and so he survived what was, in those days more than a century ago, a very difficult stretching. It is far easier in your day, and will become easier yet as the age progresses. (We mean the progress of the yugas, not any superficial social changes wrongly called “progress.”) However, any process has limits, and we are advising you of yours. Verb sap.

Well, I’ve set out the theme. Maybe we can pursue it in the morning.

That would be much better.

 

Monday, June 27, 2022

6:05 a.m. Very well, can we begin where we left off a few hours ago?

We can. You say “a few hours,” but, after all, nine hours is not a mere blink of an eye. You are generally prone to underestimate the physical requirements of a 3D system. Something that is only somewhat real, is real within those limits. Hit your finger with a hammer, and see how well mind over matter works. It won’t hurt us, outside 3D. It won’t hurt the part of you that is outside 3D. But the part of you that is within 3D is liable to feel it! The 3D isn’t everything, but it isn’t nothing, either.

Yes, I get the point.

For the moment.  Very well, to your question, and to the elements of your question that may appear to be unconnected to it.

To begin, we understand, but we smile at, a question that asks why people can’t usually get inside one another’s viewpoint. The question itself is an example of the phenomenon, you understand.

Yes, I suppose it is. But perhaps that only reinforces it. I don’t think I was holding myself as a solitary exception to the rule. And in fact I have become acutely aware of how little of people’s motivations and thought-processes I understand.

Still, you do pride yourself on your ability to think through to the other side of an issue.

I begin to see. This is a little bit more layered, more complex, than I was thinking it.

And perhaps now you see why we were reluctant to address it with your energy tanks half-empty.

Hmm, that’s part of the answer right there, isn’t it? The ability to see more deeply is connected with the amount of psychic energy one can bring to the examination.

Yes, that’s part of it. Carl Jung as an analyst brought to the table immense learning, continually greater experience, great natural gifts of empathy, great mental horsepower, tremendous ego-strength used constructively – but what good would that combination of gifts have been, if he had had to express it through an underpowered or ailing body? A Nietzsche, even if identical to Jung mentally, could not have done what Jung did, because his body was not adequate to support the task.

And I suppose as Jung’s body faltered with age, his own ability to do such active relating must have declined as well, channeling his energy more into isolated scholarship and less into the general practice of medicine.

Age brings limitation, and limitation is, itself, as useful as anything else for 3D beings. But let’s talk less of Jung and more of DeMarco and friends.

You brought up Jung, not me.

Yes, as example, not as central core. However, yes, the total energy a person can bring to life – psychic force in the sense of mental force, not in the sense of ESP – will be a factor in how much empathy a person can bring to bear on a regular basis. But it is one factor, only one.

Another is one’s pattern of assumptions. Clearly – we hope it is “clearly” – someone who believes the world is chance and the collision of various forces is not going to find it easy to assume that anyone else’s impact on his or her life is part of a pattern. Much easier to believe that things are random. To believe in a close connection between inner and outer will seem to be superstition.

The relevance of this isn’t yet clear.

Well, if you are considering another person’s reactions, and you are considering your own reactions to their reactions as if they were unrelated phenomena, you will take no responsibility for your part of the equation. You will say, in effect, “My reaction is perfectly natural! Any reasonable being would react this way.” And that silently excommunicates as “unreasonable” anyone whose reaction is not the same as yours.

Oh, sure. And that means, by extension, “People who hold these views are unreasonable or stupid or malicious.”

Don’t you see it around you on all sides, particularly on the personally anonymous internet, where people can quarrel while safely immune from a punch in the nose?

I fell prey to that mindset myself, in younger days. When you’ve put time and thought and intensity into forming a view of life, and something challenges it, the natural response is not to say, “Maybe I’m wrong, I ought to think about this,” but to say, “You jerk! Go evolve, will you?”

And there is another part of your answer. First, the amount of energy required to investigate one’s own views; second, one’s investment in one’s constructed mental world – which, after all, includes one’s values, chosen repeatedly over a lifetime.

A third factor is sheer imaginative ability, or lack of it. You have to be able to “think inside of somebody else’s head,” as Hemingway has his character put it. If you can’t do that, then to some extent (usually a pretty big extent!) your other person is going to remain a mystery to you, and you are going to flail around trying to ascribe motives for behavior you don’t understand. But people don’t do things for no reason. We’ve been telling you that for years.

Yes, and I have gotten the message – except, I realize now, less so in actual person-to-person contact than absolutely.

Yes, and you know why? It isn’t as simple as that your emotions got involved. It is that person-to-person contact comes at you like life itself: immediately, without cessation, without your having time to think before the next moment is upon you. To understand takes time. To react, doesn’t. That is why it is so important how you choose, on an on-going basis. It constructs the source of your reactions for times when you don’t have time enough to understand.

And that is another variable: one’s speed of perception and analysis. The slower one reacts, the more overwhelming the stimulus. So, the better prepared on is (due to prior choosing establishing good habit systems) and the more one pays attention, and the better attuned one’s sensory and intuitive abilities are, the better one can respond.

We have come a long way in a direction I didn’t anticipate. Does all this really address the question of why it is so hard to see our adversaries/opponents/opposite numbers – think of them as you will – as they see themselves?

Bear in mind, being able to understand others is not a universal desire. Many people have no interest in understanding; they are content with choosing a stance and condemning those who don’t shared it. You may not like it, but they’re part of reality, too. If everybody in 3D were alike, there would be a whole lot less choosing going on.

Every attitude plays its part, I suppose.

And everybody has more sides to them than is consistent. A very tolerant person may be quite intolerant of intolerance. A very rigid person hay stand up for principles of tolerance for viewpoints he finds personally repugnant. Life is always more diverse than one’s thinking about it – conceptualizing it – would tend to make it.

Today’s theme, then?

How about “Resonance and intolerance?

Maybe. Alternatively?

“The elements of empathy”?

Maybe. Our thanks as always.