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Empathy or Equanimity? February 1, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Consciousness, Communication, Emotions, Society, Personal Growth, Philosophy, Relationships, Beliefs, Abilities , 7 comments

I was recently faced with yet another new challenge of battling two concepts against each other and introspectively seeking out an answer on which one is better, if both are good or if neither of them are. It seems that this is what I do and it goes to show by the articles I’ve written so far. So let’s break it down into details and see if we can find a reasonable answer.

Empathy is the ability to listen to a troubled individual and literally opening your mind up so that all the problems, worries, negative emotions, traumas and anxiety can flow into you. You literally feel the pain as you balance the garbage so that the other person starts to feel better when the weight gets transferred off their shoulders and onto yours. This is basically what therapy is about, or starts out as. Therapy Doc Linda Freedman posted a great analysis of it.

Equanimity is then exactly the opposite of empathy as it’s an inner state of total deflection from external negativity, misery and nuisances. This means that whatever inner emotional state you are in is very stable, completely of your own making and other people’s misfortunes or troubles don’t mean anything to you on a mental/emotional level. Comedy and Humor blogger Andrew Brunelle wrote a more in-depth post about this state on his blog.

A quick overview of these two concepts makes you think that empathy is service to others while equanimity is service to self. But is it that black and white?

The pros of empathy is that people will love to seek you out and open their heart to you, if that’s what you want through mastering this skill. Moreover, empathy doesn’t necessarily mean that you only use it to acquire negative feelings, but you might use it to gather some positivism and greatness for yourself when you surround yourself with uplifting people. The con is that it might be hard to turn off that connection in places where there’s little joy to go around. Additionally, it may take time to rid yourself of the miseries that you’ve taken upon yourself from a ’session’. Empathy is to improve the world through suffering (or easing suffrage).

The pros of equanimity is that you fully embrace the concept of your thoughts creating your circumstances. It is also the way of living in total emotional balance and harmony as opposed to the roller coaster of empathic living. Whatever you’re facing, it won’t paralyze, discourage or disappoint you, be it either things or people that affect your objectives. The con of it is that you may find it difficult to spontaneously rejoice over your own or others’ fortunate events. You might also become somewhat of a recluse as people don’t find much interest in spilling their guts over you, because they feel distant in your presence. Equanimity is to improve the world through leading by example (as in showing people that you are calm and unshakeable when facing otherwise stressful, terrifying or wretched events).

Equanimity shouldn’t be confused with indifference though. Or that a person becomes incapable of taking action. Or even that such a person is foolishly unafraid or unaffected by immediate danger. It could be described as total clarity of the present moment, but without having emotions influence your decision making or mind-set.

I believe each person is innately orientating toward one of these concepts more than to the other - as with an MBTI preference. Even though one can’t experience both concepts simultaneously, the question is if one can master them both and use which ever state of mind suits a given situation. This would mean that you can have the pros of both and focus on lessening the impact of the cons of each that I mentioned.

Personally, I’ve always been following the discipline of equanimity very strongly. Empathy has naturally seemed to me as something I want to avoid as I feel I’m meant to orientate towards equanimity. My guess is that if I’d start to practise empathy with much effort, then my level of equanimity would suffer. But I’m not ruling out the possibility that a person can make such a mental shift as easily as pushing a button.

What I do suggest is that a person picks a side, any side. And moving from there it’s all about improving the chosen skill as far as possible to help balance society in the right direction. Both skills aim to reach a balance, either internally within each individual or then on the plane of interrelationships. So unless you happen to be a person who finds himself or herself capable of mastering both states whenever you want, my best bet is that you focus on the one that seems more right to you and that you practise it constantly to make it even better.

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Faith and Belief January 23, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Consciousness, Creativity, Personal Growth, Philosophy, Beliefs, Vision, Abilities, History , 3 comments

Which one do you subscribe to? This is a question of either relying on rationality or spirituality when it comes to getting adequate explanations to matters in life that science can’t address. Some people may hold the initial perspective that men of faith are those too simple and deluded to understand that atheism, duality, the theory of evolution or the absence of afterlife is the correct way to explain the universe, and some people that men of reason are those missing out on what life (and death) has to offer since they work their brains off to show that there’s no proof behind theism, non-duality, theory of divine creation or afterlife/reincarnation.

Let’s take it from the top. Belief is the mind pattern saying that proof and belief go hand in hand. Without proof, you won’t believe. Alternatively, without belief, no proof will present itself. Faith, on the other hand is a form of belief without any sort of proof. One could also say that the way I delve into something new, as explained in the link above, is that faith gets transformed into belief. I think it’s a very powerful realization that you can start out with blind faith, see whether a proof appears to you and draw your conclusions from there, and only if you’ve personally conducted this experiment first-hand.

This doesn’t come without risk or peril though as hard-core rational thinkers like to express their view on the matter. They reason that if you would e.g. start to show faith in God, then your mind and senses will start to play tricks on you and you would end up deluding yourself into believing that God has spoken to you, showed his might and power somehow or proven His existence through any other imaginable way. How can you tell if that’s the correct interpretation or if a divine power truly does influence people’s lives once they start to show faith?

That is entirely for you to decide and hopefully it is or has been a conscious choice. I’d still like to explain how I view this issue and live by. Maybe it’s helpful, maybe it’s delusional. Whatever your opinion, it’s very closely linked to the views I’ve shared on other intangible issues in past entries. So here’s my take on it.

For starters, I’m currently quite centred on the Judging - Perceiving scale of the MBTI, the only one of the four I’ve been a mover and shaker in. I want things to be open-ended and myself to be open-minded. Yet, I also always want to strictly belong to a certain model of belief, reality, causality or understanding that is structured, easy to understand, fulfilling to follow and plays a role in my results and progress as a human being. I find utter indifference in that which I can’t influence.

I’m also a devoted spokesperson on helping people awaken to make choices in their lives. Choices not originating from others’ programming and force, but arising from within, making the most sense and delivering the greatest results and purpose to everyone on a personal level. Since I find so much power behind choices, my greatest weapon in fighting either/or-thinking has been to first ask the following question for myself whenever I encounter issues like this one. “Can I choose both?”

Intangible issues are infinite. My view is that you may be as greedy as you want when it comes to answering these questions, so ask first if two or several choices can co-exist in your mind at the same time. Long-time readers may have noticed that I’m prone to do this. However, sometimes I fight and-thinking by evaluating two concepts that are both accepted in general. I end up eliminating one of them as I’ve found the other one to be useless. When it comes to faith and belief I allow both to exist and I use whichever suits best when I encounter something new and exciting. There’s something good to be found in them both.

Belief is such a fundamental pattern for explaining causality that man simply couldn’t function properly if he didn’t believe in proof. However, the trick lies in not using it excessively, only believing that which already comes with a proof. I think every form of belief that you currently hold was originally a leap of faith. Everything is first faith and slowly more and more of it transforms into belief. As an “unconscious” baby you have faith that somebody will nurture and nourish you. As your senses evolve and you become conscious of being the master of your bodily movements, you have faith that you can stand, walk, talk, touch and do anything that everyone else is doing. Would you rather classify this as seeing proof and then believing? Maybe so, but the truth is that I can’t do and can’t learn to do exactly the same things as others can. We come with different characteristics and abilities, which means that some actions require faith and not belief - if not all, as I view it.

Take for instance the faith in sailing across the Atlantic, the faith in flying through the air, the faith in running a mile under four minutes and the faith in landing on the moon. None of those happened until somebody experimented and decided to make them provable. The proof then turned the faith into belief. Without faith, humanity would not evolve. We would all do only that which we have proof of us being able to do. What humanity is doing is that we constantly take things previously in the realm of faith and transform it into belief. The downside of this progress is that some people have become lost in only accepting belief as their mental model of explaining how the universe works. This is why I subscribe both to faith and belief in helping myself along with everyone else to awaken to their true potential of what they can accomplish.