These
are the distinctions that I’m going to discuss with you.
Let us subsume under the term
empathy or sympathy and with different writers not realizing they’re talking about different
facets are really, I think, different phenomenon.
Emotion recognition is the easiest and it’s the first it’s, as cynics well know, you
have to know how
another person is feeling.
Most people don’t need to be taught that.
That appears to be the case.
Some people need to be taught what to do when you realize what another person feels.
People
with Asperger’s Autism or Schizoprenia do need to be taught emotional recognition.
We have a
tool on the internet that other scientists have shown corrects, brings them to the level
of a normal
person in less than an hour.
So realize that the torturer needs emotional recognition, to know how
you feel doesn’t imply whether or I’m going to try to relieve your suffering or
inflict it or just
have no concern, but if I don’t know how you’re feeling everything else just falls
by the wayside.
So let’s talk about emotional resonance.
Now, I’d like to distinguish two types of resonance:
One, When you realize that someone is in
pain, feeling anguish, you can have that same feeling and resonate to it, and actually physically
experience it from what we can tell, by measures of physiology, that you have the same.
Darwin and the Dalai Lama are right; that, I would call “identical resonance”.
But when you
say “oh, you poor baby!
I’m so sorry you’re feeling that way.
What can I do to help you?”
I’ll call that reactive resonance.
I don’t feel their pain.
I
have an emotion in response to their pain.
Everybody loves people who resonate.
If you are like
my daughter, an emergency room worker in San Francisco’s only trauma center, if you feel
their
pain, 8 or 12 hours a day, you’ll burn out.
The Dalai Lama says he feels the pain, but just very
slightly and just for a few seconds, and it passes.
So familial compassion...
I’m done with emotional resonance: two types.
Incidentally, not
everyone resonates.
There’s reason to believe that people with anti-social personality don’t
resonate, but they’re able to act as if they resonate, because they know other people
like it and
that allows them to manipulate.
But if you actually look what’s really occurring within them,
they don’t resonate; they wouldn’t be able to do what they do if they resonate.
Resonance is
crucial to our relationships with our loved ones, with those we care about, and it’s
a vital step in
the views of both Darwin and the Dalai Lama on the path to familial, global, sentient,
and heroic,
so let’s move on to those.
Familial is giving; the seed is the both Darwin and the Dalai Lama say, its mother-infant,
but to be politically correct, I’ll say “caregiver -offspring”.
It raises very interesting questions about infants who were brought up without a single
caregiver, infants who are brought up with a parent who has a very distant attachment.
What do
we know about their capacity for familial, let alone the others.
But the Dalai Lama and Darwin
would say is they’re going to be problems.
That’s the seed; the flower won’t grow without the
seed.
I don’t know whether they’re right; that’s an empirical question.