Luminist Archives

ON EMPATHY

The crisis we are facing, we face as a species locked into the paradigm that civilization, in order to placate itself, must act through selfish means. We govern by selfishness. Business is selfish, corporations are selfish. The whole world operates as if the sole principle was in gaining more. While we are busy gaining, the world is crashing to a halt because it cannot sustain the brutal ravaging it experiences at the hands of over-populated humanity.

I propose that we learn to function by embodying Empathy; that we govern through Empathy; that we measure all our affairs through how empathic we are being for all people and all life around us. Selfishness is traditionally on top and Empathy is trivialized, misunderstood and put last. This must be reversed. That is the Apocalypse in a nut shell. That is the crux of the choice. Empathy must be placed on top, and selfishness put last. As a species it is time to learn to govern for the greater good and not otherwise. Perhaps then humanity will arrive outside of its narcissistic terminal disease of violence and greed.

Often people refer to the opposite of Selfishness as Generosity. Be that as it may, the true functional opposite is not being generous, except in the most general terms, it is being Empathic. When a person becomes empathic they can no longer act selfishly, because selfishness becomes abhorrent to them and is seen as a pathology, not as a practical behavior. Acting through empathy may become not merely a guideline for all future behavior; it may by necessity become the very foundation of a new form of civilization.

It means we have to understand that selfish action is violence and that violence does not have to be our norm, and that it opposes living fruitfully. If someone says that we are violent by our very nature, it is because they exist within and are blinded by a four thousand year old preconception, in which this state of violence is perceived as normal, whereas it may not be normal for human beings in the long run. Violence emerges when people feel threatened due to scarcity, when they feel that others are taking from them, or not respecting their autonomy, or they are fooled into hating others because those others appear different even though they may not represent a true threat. Thus it becomes a psychological problem, and ends up in violence. Violence becomes more than a standard; it becomes a stranglehold, due to its brain chemistry of adrenalin rushes. In this way, reliance on angry, forceful paradigms is actually a chemical addiction.

Masses addicted to the chemistry of anger have caused untold havoc to the Earth, to other human beings, and to the Planet, because part of the addiction to anger is lack of the ability to care in general. Caring in general means one must feel empathy, what others feel, and the pathology of violence obstructs this process.

Which ever way it is viewed it is still a pretext, and that pretext must be discarded.  I believe that when we can finally become, if not fully compassionate, but begin the rooting of our perception to Empathy we will gain understanding into how to be truly psychic, how to be in harmony with everything on Earth, how to reach out spiritually to others on Earth and in other worlds, and other realms — the so-called spiritual which the selfish paradigm also summarily dismisses.

How can an ego-centric paradigm ever embrace something so foreign to itself as the idea of a universe which manifests itself in greater harmony and  which operates through both spiritual and natural laws, of which empathy for all else is paramount?

Empathy means that one embraces not only a friendly view toward all life and its suffering state, but to spiritual understanding which comes from the kind of spiritual contact as described in mediumship, shamanism, tribalism, the paranormal experiments since William James and the Societies for Psychic Investigation. The denial of this part of
human history is part of the rigid paradigm of denial which pervades the culture of selfishness. It means embracing our fullness, instead of always inferring that we, as beings, are simply icing on the cake of physical bodies in the endless seas of random chemical interactions. It means that the shift in the way we view what we are comes to pass, and that new technologies extend from the inclusion of that awareness, once that awareness becomes our norm.

If religion is rooted to anything, that anything would be Empathy. Christ’s, Buddha’s, Mohammed’s teachings can all be reduced down to that one thought, to feel what others feel so that you act in ways which do not bring pain upon them.
This means embracing what is in another’s heart, body, mind and soul. That lesson precedes cosmic contact in real, nuts and bolts time. If and when it is forced upon us or achieved, it will not necessarily bring us into relationship with occupants of UFOs, but with our own spirits. If one imagines how a world of spirits governs itself, then we must find that in order to exist in finer and finer vibrations, we must govern by dint of our nature, and in the spiritual realms — that nature is empathic.

All the psychic gifts are forms of Empathy. All the most heartfelt and enduring books of wisdom are so, because they are empathic, reaching into the core of each who reads them, and signaling there that sense of well-being and connection which are the earmarks of Compassion and Empathy. For us who must exist in a selfish world, we are made to feel like slaves to a paradigm which simply does not fit. We are not comfortable inside it, and like butterflies wishing to escape the cocoon which confines them, we sense that our escape is immanent. If we discover that death is such an escape, not into oblivion, but into unobstructed beauty, then we can die knowing an adventure awaits, and that in doing so, we will come into a world governed by Empathy and Compassion.

If we die into a realm, adamantly asserting that it will be the same as this, with every spirit for themselves, and the rule of causing pain to continue, then that delusional state won’t be anyone’s achievement, but the foolish extension of the world of the violent and the selfish.

So I will remain among those who envision a world of greater harmony and Empathy than on Earth — and that will be my heaven, nothing less. No one can say what the world of UFOs is really like, but we can say what the world of Spirits is like, because we can empathize with them and know their hearts. Their hearts are our hearts.

This to me is the central issue symbolized by the rude awakening or destruction of humanity at its own hands. Either we continue for a short while longer on the path of violence and greed and selfish action toward ourselves and life in general, and most likely perish, or we embrace something different.

Since there is only one thing which is the other side of greed, that is the answer we are looking for: Empathy. That is what is needed to guide us back to our own hearts, to open them up and keep them open, so that we can reinvent our civilization based on it, and be connected to everything alive and everything which supports life on Earth.

This dream of mine must come to pass. It has to be believed in as an edict of Spirit and ultimatum of Life. The truth of the matter is that it comes off as a pipe-dream. This is due to the nature of the corporate mentality of ruthless betrayal of everything but profit motive. Whether we are speaking of organized drug lords whose spirituality is basically Patrist, or governments that appear on their surface to be liberal, but who in fact impose a scenario upon its masses which benefits the few and denies the security which wealth could bring to the masses.

We must believe in ourselves as a species which deserves the security of health, home, education and arriving outside of the four thousand plus years of angry, violent, power hungry government and religious thinking. In the name of God no violence and only understanding should be meted out. When it is not, then it is a false perception, which does not include the knowledge gained directly from spiritual sources, but only from the fattened and blinded ego of the power elite. The conflict of the right and left, the church and synagogue and Islam, the enslavement of women and children around the world, the extreme poverty of the multitudes which remains invisible, the brutal resource of endless weapons from ones held in the hand to those triggered from the comfort of computers and cushioned in safe havens of the military, and all such symptoms of the modern dilemma are not new. They are the same symptoms of a world which is so used to behaving in this way that it has succeeded in ruling out all other modes of behavior for itself.

So where to begin? Begin with yourself, ourselves, myself, and the children. There we replace violence with problem solving skills. Simple child psychology. The tools exist but we need to teach ourselves to reach for them. On a societal level we may need to rebel, but keep in mind that violent rebellion always yields exactly the same society which the rebellion attempts to overthrow. Why? Because we have yet to fully examine the nature of our emotionality, and the real reason why the culture of violence has been allowed to exist for over four thousand years, and as if that is acceptable.

It is said that to live life fully we must live in every moment. Be there intentionally in each waking moment. The more clever among us revel in their dreams, becoming lucid and exercising control while they sleep, transmuting their inner being to untangle the knots of binding neurosis, and old habits. We are complex and our waking minds, although it is the focus of our identity is not the total self. In some of the more profound spiritual philosophies we are told that we are One with the Universe. Indeed. But that is not the sense of self we experience daily in work, or as a human being through whatever the experience of life. What is happening, you say, is happening to me, not some Universal field of identity or connection with Life, or of the Planet.

In the subconscious fabric of selves operating distinctly, such as in waking and in dreaming, we can see the plurality of being unfold. Yet the cultivation of a sense of universality seems superfluous. Who wishes to bother in a civilization composed almost entirely of exterior stimulation? From the moment we awake from sleep, to the moment we return to it, we are occupied, completely exteriorized into whatever it is we behold.

In the rich countries that exteriorization takes place as endless object fascination. Among the helpless third and fourth world peoples that occupation is in the deep agony of suffering states brought about by the antithesis of the worlds of bounty. Our contentment, our fatness results in the destruction of those people who go without. Only an unfeeling fool would argue that their state of being is their choice. That is a rationalization so that no caring is justified in the conscious minds of the society of bounty. Call any effort to redress, to rebalance this horrific inequity Socialism, which is demonized to mean the new Communist threat — while the actual new Fascist threat, the only fascist threat, is ourselves, as we consume everything to keep ourselves selfishly placated. Why is it we don’t hang our heads in guilt and shame? Instead we find that the majority vote is pro-selfish and anti-humanity. However, the process of rationalization covers this in direct assertions as sleep covers the conscious mind.

Our escapism is in supporting the troops, which is good. It shows the limitation of our caring. That it is nationalized, that we cannot reach any further than what the media shows us and instills in us. That is why we need Empathy, because empathy extends us beyond the parameters justified by media and the ego it is in service to. Empathy takes us beyond the shell of self into another’s heart. Empathy moves through us as a breath of connection to that which is outside of our bodies. Sympathy is contained within the self, as a reflection of sadness for another’s pain, but through Empathy we not only can walk a mile in another’s moccasins but feel what they feel.

Telepathy is a step even further out into the unknown vagueness which empaths know. Here the hint of someone else’s thoughts can be clearly understood. You can receive their message and respond in kind. This is not something human beings have yet to achieve. Instead it is commonplace practice among many ancient cultures, aboriginal, Maori, tribes all over the world who know how to communicate in this way.

Believe or deny, the fact is plain: telepathic communication happens; shit happens. Clairvoyance is yet another deepening aspect of Empathy. Instead of just hearing, one is also seeing, and perhaps, as in Clairsentience, feeling what others see and feel as well. The selfish cannot comprehend these possibilities which bring us closer to others, and also to all things. But this is the path we each inevitably take at death.

There, in dying we feel, see and hear spiritually, and the weight of our suffering is either lifted as we move on, or that same weight grows heavy upon the soul to drag us down and pin us to the place of our self-created illusions. Those rooted to the physical cannot glimpse the fleeting nature of the soul’s journey. Those who would concretize this process of becoming spirits say it is not possible and therefore cannot be. Like Scrooge before the ghosts who come to aid his transformation, the Scrooges yell, “Bah! Humbug!” They refuse to acknowledge what has been told and retold throughout millennia, calling it old wives tales, urban legends, delusional thinking, a dream, a downright, blatant lie. But then, let them define Empathy and make it work for us all!