“Unexamined beliefs are not worth having.”
— Socrates
Ways of Knowing
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…
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…
Thomas Ray proposes that the landscape of transcendent experience does not just have one peak, but several. These represent deeper insight into and experience of reality and human nature than are normally accessible to us…
“We tend to lose touch with the way we knew the world as children...”
— Tom Ray
Empathy V - Ways of Knowing (podcast)