TheMysticMan

Interesting article, although it should be noted that “life is suffering” is not a noble truth and the Buddha never said that. The first noble truth is simply “dukkha” - “suffering.” It simply acknowledges that suffering exists. Probably the closest the Buddha gets to saying “life is suffering” is something like “sabbe saṅkhārā dukkhā”, which could be literally translated “all conditioned things are suffering” but in context reads more like “all conditioned things are marked by suffering.” I think “all conditioned things are marked by suffering” feels a lot more intuitively true, circumvents the misunderstanding that the erroneous “life is suffering” engenders and helps point people more skilfully to the point you are making in your own post here.

Something I try to remind myself: - The strong mind finds a way to stay steady ... even when plans fall apart. - The strong body finds a way to train ... even when the day doesn’t go your way. - The strong relationship finds a way to reconnect ... even when things get rough. In a sense, what matters most is how you respond on the bad days, not the good ones. - Anyone can smile when life goes smoothly. - Anyone can train when they feel great. - Anyone can be kind when the relationship is easy. It's how you act when the situation isn't optimal that makes the difference.

Empathy is, always and everywhere, courage in disguise. Each of its components - its patience, imagination, compassion and humility - are unnatural, conscious refinements of a base animal inheritance we all share: the instinct, in the face of fear, to fawn. We've all fawned. We've all insincerely lowered ourselves to make ourselves pleasing to a powerful person that we didn't truly admire. Fawning is an ancient behavioral relic, a Jurassic social dynamic preserved in the crudest structures of our brains. At its worst, it's manipulative groveling, and at its best, it becomes the impossible beauty of glamor, the persuasive charms of politicians, and the reflexive savoir-faire that makes up the fabric of social reality itself. I'm not judging anyone for fawning, mind you. We do it compulsively when we are too stressed, before we've recognized we've lost hold of ourselves. It's occasionally a bare requirement of participation in work, love and society. It's deep in our genes, and we begin to socialize each other toward it at an extremely young age, long before we're capable of true virtue. The lack of empathy is often a lack of resources, knowledge and a safe, supportive attuned relationship in which to develop it. Empathy is a virtue. It takes conscious effort, a conscious overcoming of fear. It is not a natural product of our unconscious behavior. Interestingly, precisely because empathy is conscious, subverting the deeply unconscious process of fawning, this means that its development in the self is a fundamentally masculine process. It requires hard effort against the formless dissolution of unconsciousness. It won't develop on its own without training, and it requires maintenance - a constant struggle against one's own instincts, in the service of a greater order. It requires force, the strenuous direction of energy where it wouldn't naturally go, until it is trained deep into the bones. That it is masculine does *not* mean that empathy is somehow a natural male trait, or that women are not empathetic, or anything so ridiculous. Women are every bit as virtuous as men, and in some ways, by their nature, are more effortlessly so. The fact that empathy is masculine only means that it's a product of transcending nature. It must erupt from undifferentiated yin, and strive against it for as long as it remains differentiated. In this sense, it comes from virtus, or yang, the eternal masculine spirit that lives in both sexes. True empathy, then, is a product of this spirit. It is that which enables our access to the I-Thou relationship - the unconditionally loving relationship of the divine and human beings. This I-Thou relationship usually only unconsciously arises in the parent-child relationship, which recapitulates our relationship with the divine. With empathy, we consciously create this relational space between equals, for the rare, precious duration that we can maintain it. This is the relationship from which our best and most valuable patterns flow, that which helps us to recognize the divine in one another, and to revere one another in all the ways we choose to relate. False empathy, then, is nothing more than objectification. It's a skilled fawn response that has been camouflaged and manipulated to be as beautiful as possible, since human beings use beauty as a proxy for truth. And so it often appears deeply true to us, though it's always insincere. Because submission is flattering to our natural narcissism, it's naturally glamorous. It casts a spell on us, pulls us into an animal reality that reifies our most ancient instincts. Unalloyed by virtue, the nervous fawn response becomes, in a sense, the raw material of the poisonous feminine shadow, in the same way that the nervous fight response becomes the raw material of the tyrannical dark masculine. For all its thin, empty promises of power, seduction, grace and peace, fawning only cements the rigid, impoverished patterns of the I-It relationship. It is, fundamentally, an objectification of the other, because it's born out of a primitive, fear-diminished relational capacity that can only see others as objects. Stress in our nervous system naturally narrows and strips us of our most complex and beautiful cognitive faculties. Because fawning is born of a stressed nervous system - because it is born of fear - its products are always, necessarily, a near enemy of the truth. There is no such thing as "too much" empathy or "suicidal" empathy. Empathy isn't a delusion, but the virtuous overcoming of delusion - seeing through the aeons-old, samsaric nightmare of biological hierarchy, which spiritually separates us from one another. The glamorous righteousness, the graceful self-abandonment, the uncomfortable silence, the uneasily kept peace, the ruthlessly suppressed need for truth, is nothing more than our oldest spiritual enemy: Our bare fear. Empathy, then, is courage in disguise. Or more precisely, it's the product of courage, which is the fundamental virtue that undergirds all others. This means, fundamentally, that empathy starts in the same way that courage does. It's the same way that every heart is fortified, every fear overcome. It's the same way that every meditation starts, every prayer. It's the same way Buddha woke up beneath the bodhi tree, the same way every consciousness is renewed, the same way every birth on the planet begins, the same way that God brought Adam to life: With a good, deep breath.

The Imaginal expresses itself through metaphor and myth in the mind, but it’s just as much already there in your body and heart. Like your breath or your heartbeat, you don’t need to add anything to experience to feel it, but sensitise to an element of what is already there.