I recently have been thinking about what empathy is and I had a pretty profound thought. Is empathy really placing yourself in the position of someone else to feel their pain/feelings? I propose another view.
Consider this: what if empathy is you feeling everything for yourself and not for the other person? For example: someone trips and falls and breaks an arm. The common concept of empathy is to think/feel “Oh man if that were me, I’d feel like this or that. I’d probably be in so much pain. I wouldn’t be able to get to work properly. How will I take care of my responsibilities at home? How would I afford the medical care?”. A lot of “I’s” in there, huh? THIS is what we project onto the person(s) in question. We don’t have the ability to truly be in their place. In this fantasy you create in your mind, all of the sadness you feel is for YOURSELF, not the person who is going through it. Once you process this, you simply replace the “I’s” in the previous statements with “he/she/they”, but it’s still all originating from a point of view where YOU were in the situation. This makes me believe that empathy isn’t what we think it is.
Another scenario: You’re driving at night and you see an older man/woman walking in the bitter cold. Do you stop and ask to give them a ride? Why? “If it were me, I’d wanna be picked up” is what most would say. If you do decide to be kind and transport them, when you boil it down you are really doing it for YOU in the fantasy you conjured up in your head. Maybe we evolved this way on purpose. Maybe karma does exists and there is something we cannot perceive. Maybe our brains evolved to create the fantasies and push us to do things which help our karma? Maybe this is all part of the grand design and we just haven’t figured this out yet. I’ve aways read that YOU are the center of your own universe. This helps bolster that idea for me.
Who knows, but I truly believe what we call empathy is just taking care of the self, not others. As much as we pretend it’s the other way around.