Empathy is more than emotional following along, it’s a transmission.

“Unexamined beliefs are not worth having.”
― Socrates

Transcendent Knowing

Thomas Ray is an ethnobotanist interested in the transcendent effects of psychedelics. He proposes that the landscape of transcendent experience does not just have one peak, but several. That these different peaks represent deeper insight into and experience of reality and human nature than are normally accessible to us.

Rays says that our intellect has evolved away from this understanding because our intellect breaks things down and linearizes things, rather than building things up and appreciating their connected nature. He maps these peaks according to our emotional landscape but the peaks are not simply extreme emotions, they are more than that. They are transcendent experiences that are reached through the combination and refinement of emotions. Moreover, they are neural pathways that are opened by certain neurotransmitters and their associated psychedelic substances.

“It appears that children are dominated by the affective domain, while adults are largely dominated by the cognitive mind, at the expense of emotions, feelings, and intuition. When we mature into adults, we find ourselves knowing the world largely through language, logic, and reason. We tend to lose touch with the way we knew the world as children, the archaic way of knowing, through feelings, through our heart.” — Thomas Ray (2016)

Rational thinking is our first recourse. We’re either trained to believe or experience has led us to believe that a reasoned approach is the most effective. Compulsory education is directed entirely toward shaping our reasoning skills. There is no emotional training aside from suppressing it.

Even the stereotyped advice of couples counseling, embedded in the admonition, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” is a subtle direction to do what’s reasonable, as if you’ll be happy without regard to what you feel. What if this is all wrong?

Emotional balance is not a reasonable thing. One can balance one’s resources reasonably, and one can get one’s basic needs met reasonably, but are love or freedom reasonable? Can you measure them or put them in an equation? Does it help knowing how to describe or use them in a sentence?

Ways of Learning

I want to address the question of how to learn empathy. I don’t think that question can be answered reasonably. I don’t think there is one answer but there may be several.

If empathy is something you can have or not have, then it’s either a skill or a trait. If it’s a skill, then you can develop it. If it’s a trait, then you can express it, unless you don’t have it in which case you might regain it or else it’s simply not available.

Empathy is built on mirroring. It taps the elements fundamental to all sharing. Empathy is like a column resting on our basic social ability and supporting all aspects of caring for one another. If we can teach empathy more broadly, then we can improve the human species. Where is empathy in us, and what does it require of us?

You don’t need to reason in order to empathize. We share feelings with dogs and other domesticated or domesticable animals. Rats can laugh and octopi maybe. My naturalist friend Walter used to assert alligators had a sense of humor, but I don’t believe him.

Empathy is a sense of shared emotion that you either trigger or evoke. You don’t reason it into existence but you might remember it. If you’ve never had it before in your life, you may still be able to genetically remember it in the way that some people have genetically remembered balance, musical ability, or facility with language.

Learning empathy is a special kind of learning. It is not a conceptual process, it’s a recovery or invocation, both of which rely on memory. You won’t gain the same feeling through reasoning. Real empathy is a combination of resonant feelings for which words are secondary. If memories are the roots, empathy is the trunk, the situation emerges as branches, and thoughts are the leaves on the tree.

You can only empathize to the extent that you can recover and re-experience the emotions that comprise another person’s experience. And you can only do this if you can re-experience each of these emotions in yourself. You’re presented with two tasks: to discern the emotions involved and the amount of each.

Ways of Hearing

A shadow that looks black beside the glaring sunlight of a white wall will look white against a pitch dark hole. An ice cube against the skin will raise goose bumps on one occasion while the same ice cube on the same skin will raise a burn blister in another whose only difference is your expectation. So it is with all perceptions. All perceptions are filtered through consciousness and this is all the more so with emotions.

We can’t know if we’re experiencing the same emotion as another. Since emotion is a nest of feeling, consequences, and associations it’s fairly certain that we are not. We believe that there are general aspects of shareable emotion even if these are not available to everyone. We mix these similarities to recreate the recipe of another person’s state of mind.

We share some sensations, but sensations are not the same as perceptions. Chemistry and physiology determine sensation, but contrast and association determine perception. The key to having similar emotions lies in what you imagine them to mean. We don’t all have the same imagination and we don’t all have the same associations.

The key to empathy with another is both sharing the same breadth and depth of emotion, and also sharing associations and imagination. The magic “chemistry” that happens between people is the result of this, and the less you share, the less chemistry there is between you.

Words are the deceptive filter. You can share the same vocabulary and body language, but if you don’t share the same emotion then these presentations are superficial. Learning empathy is then a question of not of acting but of being. Do you have an emotional range to match another’s, and do you have the insight, intuition, and control to follow their recipe. Some of these recipes are quite delicate, such as love. Others, like resentment, are easy to whip up and have a long shelf life.

Ways of Knowing

Building empathy is a second order of business, the first order of business is to expand the range and depth of one’s emotions. However, with regard to a specific sort of empathy, there is a specific recipe of emotions such that you may have what’s required for one situation but not the next.

The project of learning empathy grows larger as it presumes emotional skills, and there are ranges of emotion whose access varies from person to person. I believe that with greater emotional aptitude empathy comes naturally. Intention and attention are required, but the empathy results from the emotional resonance.

Consider the piano as a metaphor. Emotional chords are those played by another person. You are the sounding board and if you have the proper resonance and bracing, designed to respond to the emotional strings of your combined sensibilities, then in a natural way, you will resonate.

We can go another step and envision more nuanced perceptions. These might be built from combinations of emotions and perceptions, such as connection to nature or feelings of transcendence. Thomas Ray describes these as “Mental Organs,” which we’ll consider in another post.

Building empathy is a second order of business, the first order of business is to expand the range and depth of one’s emotions. However, with regard to a specific sort of empathy, there is a specific recipe of emotions such that you may have what’s required for one situation but not the next.

The project of learning empathy grows larger as it presumes emotional skills, and there are ranges of emotion whose access varies from person to person. I believe that with greater emotional aptitude empathy comes naturally. Intention and attention are required, but the empathy results from the emotional resonance.

Consider the piano as a metaphor. Emotional chords are those played by another person. You are the sounding board and if you have the proper resonance and bracing, designed to respond to the emotional strings of your combined sensibilities, then in a natural way, you will resonate.

We can go another step and envision more nuanced perceptions. These might be built from combinations of emotions and perceptions, such as connection to nature or feelings of transcendence. Thomas Rays describes these as mental organs, which we’ll consider in another post.

Gaining Access

Childhood is the realm of emotion. It’s when emotion was flowering and after which your emotion was shackled by right thinking and appropriate behavior. To reconnect to your emotion, to release or reshape it, that’s where you should return.

Several things keep you from regaining your childhood mind. First, your brain’s rhythms have increased and this has led to a shorter emotional attention span and more distant access to childhood memories. Second, you’ve internalized vigilance, incessant thinking, and the belief that you are the single, social persona that has been polished into being. And third, your ego has created a protective shell around your vulnerabilities that projects your image to the world and dulls expression.

You can reconnect with your older and more primary self through dreams and hallucinations, to some extent through meditation, relaxation, and recreation though these means are still filtered through your ego. It’s not until the ego steps aside to allow what social behavior does not allow that you can reconnect with wider and wilder feelings and imagination.

Dreamwork is a doorway to a deeper emotional connection, but dreamwork is work and not casual dreaming. It must be directed, solicited, engaged, and recalled because otherwise it will not interfere with the ego.

Psychedelics can be a doorway, but they also require work. This is not entertainment because the ego, in its role as protector of your fabricated self, will filter and your psychedelic experience so as to protect itself. Those psychedelics termed entheogens seem particularly able to lift a person above the fences of the ego and enlarge ones’ vision. Preparing oneself properly is like getting in the center of the road, straightening out the steering, focusing straight ahead, and being able to navigate without running off the pavement.

Opening A Door

Hypnosis is a third doorway. Hypnosis directs you toward emotion, provides a safe environment, and is done in a way that directs and protects your focus. Of these three doorways, hypnosis is the only one that keeps you in the driver’s seat throughout the whole process. In hypnosis you plan your experience and experience your plan. You can bring yourself to any time past, any emotion, or any place. You cannot command your past to present itself to you, but you can present yourself to your past and invite it to emerge.

This is self-hypnosis, a process of regressing yourself with or without the aid of a hypnotist. Actually, few hypnotists would know what you wanted to accomplish outside of a regression into your past. I can lead this sort of regression and I will offer to teach other hypnotists how it can be done.

Hypnotists are taught regression to cause, where the cause that’s referred to is some watershed event that has become ingrained in your unconscious and now underpins an unwanted behavior. Regression for the purpose of reconnecting with an earlier self or a more powerful emotion is not a standard protocol.

I believe work of this sort better prepares a person for dream and psychedelic work. By accessing, engaging, and directing the subconscious before exploring subconscious associations, one is better able to focus and address these emotions and the skills needed to manage them.

For example, if you aim to strengthen your connection with creativity and vulnerability of the heart, then one should build an intentional dialog with those characters who guard and mediate these experiences. These could be characters who you associate with early periods in your life who existed in real life or in imagination. That is, they could be real or imaginary care givers that you relied upon in your youth or that you rely upon now.

For example, if you conduct dreamwork in search of security, then you’ll encounter characters who seem to know more about your situation than you do. These characters are creations of your mind built from people you’ve know, situations you’ve experienced, and unexpressed abilities you contain. These characters exist outside your conscious mind. They are separate from your ego identity. You can build a bridge from your ego identity to them through focus and intention. Building such bridges sculpts them into greater resolution as emergent aspects of yourself.

On the other hand, if you don’t build these bridges in the subconscious, then your conscious intent will be weakly attached such that your subconscious will pursue its own agenda in the realm of dreams and hallucinations. What you want to forge is a kind of steering linkage that connects conscious direction with the traction of subconscious thought in the terrain of forgotten associations.

Creating Consciousness

References

Jatinder, H. (2021, Jan). Artificial empathy? Humanity is not yet ready, J. Roy. Soc., 114(1), 4. doi:10.1177/0141076820975753

Ray, T. S. (2016). Mental Organs and the Origins of Mind. In Liz Swan, Ed., Origins of Mind, pp. 301-326.

Leading the client into a hypnotic state, the hypnotherapist can suggest a heightened state of mind. Consider the enlightened states Tom Ray associates with the various great world religions: compassion with Christ, open perception with the Buddha, the flow of nature with Taoism, and so forth.

Then, using the hypnotic technique called Affect Bridge, you are asked to find this state, or as close a state as you can find, in your own childhood memory. Through elaboration, retrieval, and imagination you pickle yourself in each of these states until they become familiar. You note those states that are unfamiliar and map their images or sensations. This is done in trance, in state of childhood recollection, or a state that’s even further dissociated.

(To be continued.)

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