Narrative, Vulnerability, and Empathy
Narrativa, vulnerabilidad y empatía
A question about how empathy relates to the experience of duality, and whether truly feeling another person's experience is imagination or something deeper.
Narrative, Vulnerability, and Empathy
A question about how empathy relates to the experience of duality, and whether truly feeling another person's experience is imagination or something deeper.
I'm getting a sense of the duality you speak of, how we experience ourselves as the subject or the object, being in the present. How does empathy fit into all of this, when you're feeling the other person deeply?
You can start by looking at what the lack of empathy is. It is usually going to be a form of contraction, a very deep identification with a story about you and about another. It involves some kind of judgment, a worldview, a narrative that you are holding, but that is not necessarily the other person's reality.
Questioning the narrative
The more you can see that and question your belief in your own narrative, the more you start moving towards empathy. The belief in your own narrative creates a false sense of separation. What I'm pointing to will shift the sense of what you are towards something much more open, much closer to what the other person also is. It will shift you towards vulnerability, because you are going to be able to live in more uncertainty if you question your narrative.
The illusion of control
Your narrative is contracting you and giving you a sense of control, a sense of understanding reality, and it is limiting. There is a sense of safety in that control, but it doesn't only cut you off from the other person's reality. It cuts you off from your own. It cuts you off from your own deep feeling, because ultimately it is controlling what you feel.
The more you shift out of that, seeing that those beliefs, that narrative, are just a narrative and not an absolute representation of reality, the more open you become. That subjectivity, that presence, that beingness, that intimacy with life, is going to be a lot more accepting, a lot more vulnerable, a lot more open.
Shared beingness
At the deepest place, that beingness will be known to be the same as the beingness of another. That recognition creates much more harmony. It brings down barriers and defenses, because you can be okay no matter what the other person is going through or feeling. And when you are okay, you can be open to what they are feeling, to a point where you can actually feel what they are feeling. That acceptance and that connection at the feeling level starts to move towards what we call empathy.
When you're experiencing what the other person is experiencing, how does that fit in with duality? Is that my imagination? Is that my subjectivity? Is that the noticing?