Empathy

After writing the last post, I continued to contemplate empathy and I want to record what I was coming up with for future reference. As I see it, empathy as most people practice it is a subject to object sort of thing. In other words, one imposes one's point-of-view upon an object which in most cases, would be another person. During my experience on Wednesday, I experienced my mother's feelings, subjectively. In other words, briefly I became her, feeling what it was like to have her daughter assist and be with her and at the same time, I was feeling what it was like to be me assisting and being with my mother. I also had a sense of the dynamic of the energy or probably Source and Its part in this interaction. So, I was both subjects experiencing their own part in our interaction and at the same time I was something greater than the two parts that was assimilating the energy. Or something like that. It is so difficult to describe. But subject versus object is how most humans handle empathy: if somebody did that to me, this is how I would feel, therefore I know you must feel the same way when it is done to you. So one can see how in most empathetic situations, one imposes one's viewpoint on the other person. This is adequate until one experiences the other way in which one suddenly finds one's Self experiencing life as the other person at the same time that one is experiencing life as one's Self: really, one becomes two Selves interacting with each other.

Namaste