Emotional Awareness

You can only really understand in others what you can find and understand in yourself.  Self knowledge is a prerequisite, in my understanding, to empathy.  If you cannot feel compassion for yourself, there is no use trying to send it out into the world.  Whatever you are sending is generic, non-targeted, impersonal, and in most cases often wrong.

Now, it is obviously possible for people who know nothing about themselves to develop an understanding of the signs indicating different patterns in other people, which they can then manipulate, sometimes by simulating feelings in themselves they do not actually feel, like compassion and understanding.

Things I think I personally understand are why people are consciously cruel, why they kill themselves, why they pick unnecessary fights, why they cut themselves, why they self sabotage, why they feel depression, why they get confused, why they become addicts, and why they lie.  This is a short list.  I have found every vice imaginable in myself.

With regard to evil specifically, what I think happens is that the lack of love–and associated emotional pain and social disconnection–is so intense, that a sort of sub-personality takes over.  The role of this personality is to hide them from their pain.  They in turn CAUSE pain, so they can retain some relationship with it.

It can be and often is useless reasoning with people in this state, since the entire PURPOSE of this way of being is to tell themselves important lies about who they truly are: helpless children, feeling spit on and hated by the world.  To ask such a person to truly understand themselves is to open up a world of pain those who have not felt it can scarcely imagine.

For myself, I think I have been to the brink of what is endurable.  Much more pain than I have felt is certainly possible, but not, I don’t think, without pushing someone over into this other world.  We all have built in circuit breakers, where beyond a certain point, that emotion simply disappears into a hidden folder, beyond our conscious awareness.  It doesn’t disappear, but the immediate sensation of hell diminishes.  This, in turn, conditions people to avoid this place.  To do otherwise is to walk back into the flames, and very few are willing to do that.

The reason I have done it is I can feel the pain of internal division. I can feel my separation from the world, and have long been willing to pay any price to find my way home.  Not back home, but to a new one, which I am both finding and building.