The Virtue is Empathy
The Saboteur is Apathy
Empathy intuitively knows and apathy doesn’t care to know.
Spirituality is perceived through our intuition. It’s felt through our heart. There are many styles, methods and preferences for humans to express spirituality, it’s similar to language. We have many languages to express the same thing like love, amor and so on. Language defines our thoughts and feelings. We feel first, then we express ourselves through language. Empathy is a silent language. When we empathize with another person we sense that we have had a similar experience. We don’t have to know the details of the event, we feel and our intuition understands.
In our language we have a saying, “I feel you.” Sometimes it’s accompanied by a nod of the head or a movement of the hand. It’s a silent recognition between people that know one another, as well as people who haven’t been formally introduced. Our intuition senses the similarities in our experiences. Empathy and intuition work in concert, empathy feels the pain and our intuition gives us insight into that pain.
Spirituality is inherent, which means we all strive to be better. You may be thinking that there are criminal minds that not only don’t feel, but they don’t care about self improvement. This is a difficult thing to discuss because those amongst us who cause great pain to others are thought of as not having feelings. They have feelings, but they suffer from emotional impulses that control them. They haven’t developed the ability to access remorse. Feeling remorse can keep us from doing harm. It’s a good practice to learn to feel the pain of the other person because then we can learn to control the impulse to do harm.
Being empathetic keeps us free from harmful actions. Empathy opens our heart to deep spirituality. Mercilessness, betrayal and malice are poisonous to our heart, while compassion, forgiveness and goodness are the antidotes to such deep pain. All opposites are always found together. Up is always found with down, in always accompanies out and forgiveness is always inherent in betrayal.
What we think of as evil will never go away. Likewise, what we think of as good also will never go away. Opposites are always found in the same place. Spirituality requires great strength and intelligence to set our course on love. Empathy tells us that we all have pain and yet sometimes we don’t want to feel their pain, meanwhile, we’re screaming out into the dark night that nobody understands our pain.
Pain in unavoidable. Everyone has pain and it ranges from frustration to grief. We say that some people have no right to feel the way they do. We compete with one another about who has the deepest pain. I’ve even heard people wonder if animals feel emotional pain. All life feels pain and all life responds to kindness and goodness. All living beings are sentient and that includes our Earth.
The Earth is alive, a living Grandmother to all of us. Granted, we treat her as if she’s an inanimate object rather than our sacred Grandmother, but only life gives birth to life. All beings on this planet have bodies that are born from the Earth, we are all related. Everything in the Universe feels, everything is sentient. This is spirituality, intuitively sensing that there is a silent intelligence, a formless consciousness that pervades all life forms, big and small.
Pain makes us reach out for love, for understanding, for friendship. Apathy or not caring is just another form of pain. When we say, I don’t feel anything, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter to me what you do, it doesn’t mean we don’t feel pain, it merely means we’re walking away from the stimulus.
Empathy is like supersonic hearing, it hears pain even in the silence, intuition is like magnificent sight, it sees what’s beyond the dark night of the soul.
Peace be with you
Namaste
Such a profound and beautiful description- I am so thankful for your shared insight and the opportunity to continued growth and awareness with all that you share.