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EMPATHY: YOU IN ME, ME IN YOU
See yourself in others
Then whom can you hurt?
What harm can you do?
IONCE SPENT A DAY SHADOWING THE DALAI LAMA. IT WAS ONE of his early visits to the United States, and I was covering him for the local paper, but that was just my alibi. I wanted to take his measure, to see for myself what this incarnation of Avalokiteśvara, the deity of compassion, was really like when the rubber sandals met the road.
He struck me as bright and curious—an exceptionally nice man—but a living Buddha? Yet as the day wore on, it crept up on me: His caring never seemed to waver. He emanated a steady warmth without gaps, moods, or slipups. I watched him meet with the mayor of Denver, a stogie-chomping old pol whose small talk inched dutifully over the official terrain of tourism and molybdenum mining. The Dalai Lama stood listening, duck-footed, hands folded, eyebrows cocked, his trademark smile hovering somewhere near delight. Hizzoner presented His Holiness with a picture book of the state’s Rocky Mountain wonders, the sort you’d pick up at an airport gift shop. The Dalai Lama accepted happily, sitting down to leaf through it with what appeared to be genuine interest. When he came upon a color plate of a bighorn sheep, he told the mayor warmly, “We have this kind in our mountains, too!”
They chatted awhile, and before long the doughty old pol had cracked a smile, was heard to chortle; he liked this golden-skinned man in the maroon robes. He looked crestfallen when an aide whispered to him about a waiting appointment and a city to run.
As the Dalai Lama made his way from the reception area, a news cameraman leaned forward. “Your Holiness, can I ask you something?” he blurted, then lowered his voice. “About my wife...” The Dalai Lama halted in his tracks, his retinue bumping into one another like a vaudeville troupe. He inclined his head toward the other man’s until they nearly touched, placed a hand on his shoulder, and spoke softly with him for a while. The cameraman’s voice rose and fell in agitation, but I couldn’t make out the words. As they talked, the Dalai Lama’s face seemed to subtly mirror the man’s expression, as if taking on a share of his burden. And slowly the man’s own face softened, resolving into a look of gratitude.
And so it went, throughout the day and into the evening. Mayor or teamster, cabbie or king, each person received the same keen, heartfelt regard. The Dalai Lama seemed to enter intimately into each person’s world while remaining firmly grounded in his own. His quality of empathy, at once indiscriminate and specific, began to overwhelm me, not least because he made it seem so ordinary—ordinary kindness, ordinary consideration, taken to an extraordinary degree.
The Dalai Lama has often claimed he is a simple person. Though some find this a little coy, on one level it rings true. Isn’t our image of holiness just a placeholder for what we all might be if our best moments were multiplied to an n th degree of constancy? The religious icons of compassion reach out to us in an apotheosis of recognizably human caring. The Chinese goddess Kwan Yin weeps as she extends her thousand-armed embrace to those who need succor. The Hindu deity Hanuman, depicted as half-ape, half-god (sound familiar?), cleaves open his chest to reveal his naked, undefended heart. The sacred heart of Jesus, Son of Man, is pierced with thorns, bleeds real blood. Vulnerability, these images say, is holy. It is our capacity to be profoundly moved by each other that makes us whole.
IN ONE STUDY OF EMPATHY, A PSYCHOLOGIST POSED A QUEStion to a precocious eight-year-old named Adam: “If you knew how someone else felt, would you be more likely to help them than if you didn’t?”
“Oh, yes,” Adam answered. “What you do is, you forget everything else that’s in your head, and then you make your mind into their mind. Then you know how they’re feeling, so you know how to help them.
“Some kids can’t do that,” he added, “because they think everybody’s always thinking the same things.”
Adam describes the kind of empathy that advances through the gates of compassion. In its most basic form, though, empathy is just our biologically based propensity to get under each other’s skin. When I perceive your mood, a neuronal circuit flashes on. Your sadness or happiness evokes a corresponding feeling in me before I’m quite aware that it’s happened. Studies have shown that just seeing another person’s expression triggers, below the threshold of consciousness, the same facial muscles in the observer, which in turn stimulates the same inner feeling. A 2003 UCLA study revealed that when one person deliberately imitated another’s smile, the emotional centers in his own brain lit up with happiness.
We are designed to be emotionally entangled. If you live in a bustling city, this sort of resonance occurs a dozen times a day. You hear a child lost in a crowd of shoppers, crying for her mommy, and your heart instantly goes out to her (along with a half dozen other people who are already dashing toward her to help). When a laughing couple passes by, their arms around each other’s waists, you feel a scintilla of their joy. When a heated argument erupts on the street corner, your own adrenaline fractionally redlines.
Responses may vary, of course. One person may stride by a beggar with stony contempt, while another, stricken, puts a dollar in his cup. Someone might look at that pair of lovers and feel envy, or sorrow over a joy long departed, or annoyance at the lovey-dovey giddiness. But these are afterthoughts to a primal identification that has already occurred, as viscerally and immediately as stepping on a tack. Somewhere below the threshold of awareness, the mirror neurons have already launched into their oddly nondual theme song, you in me, me in you.
Of course, simply catching someone else’s emotion doesn’t necessarily lead to caring about them. Mengzi, a Confucian philosopher of the fourth century B.C., told of a king who looked out from his balcony and saw a man leading a piteously bellowing ox to be sacrificed. “Let it go!” the king shouted down. “I cannot bear its frightened appearance, like an innocent going to the place of death!” The man responded by asking how, then, he was to perform the sacred ritual. The king ordered that a sheep be sacrificed in the ox’s stead.
Mengzi pointed out that the king possessed compassion’s prerequisite: a responsive heart. “Superior people,” says Mengzi, “are affected toward animals, so that seeing them alive, they cannot bear to see them die.” On the other hand, Mengzi cautioned, the king’s deed was still only an “artifice of humaneness”: He had saved the animal that was suffering in front of him only to condemn an unknown one in its stead. It could be argued that the king had just acted to avert an upsetting spectacle, not out of any general concern for animal welfare. The story’s translator remarks that this sort of reactive empathy can be “fragile and a bit capricious Confucian self-development lies in how we treat this spontaneous feeling of compassion: We must extend it more and more broadly, and we must act on it consistently.”
Mere sentiment without moral action can be a dead end. We may weep at a performance of Les Misérables but spurn the panhandler outside the theater. Or perhaps we do hand him some money (because his misery gives us a twinge), but it’s more akin to putting a coin in an expiring parking meter. We want to avoid the aversive stimulus of a guilt ticket. (To act out of guilt can be better than doing nothing, of course—just ask the man who’s been given coins enough for a meal; or, for that matter, ask the ox. Some research even links “guilt-proneness” to the ability to take another’s perspective, the basis of the moral sense.)
But the prime example of perspective-taking, even of compassion itself, is often held to be the Golden Rule, regarded in all religions as a benchmark of moral development. Sometimes it is couched as a preventive: “Do not do to others,” says the Hindu Mahābhārata, “what would cause pain if done to you.” Counsels Confucius: “What I do not wish men to do to me, I also wish not to do to them.” Other times it is prescriptive, as in Jesus’ formulation: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” (Mohammed says substantially the same thing: “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.”)
The Golden Rule is an ethical stanchion, a virtual eleventh commandment. But what is it really saying? It does acknowledge that others are subjective beings, just as I am, placing us all under the same big tent. But the central tent pole is, well...me. I start with what I would want, assuming that another would want the same thing. George Bernard Shaw challenged this with a trenchant quip: “Do not do unto others as they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.” If we really think about it, the Golden Rule is less like putting ourselves in another’s shoes than imagining our own head transplanted onto their shoulders. Don’t get me wrong: I’d rate it as a moral triumph and ample reason to hang up my selfish-guy spurs if I could really live by it. But I can’t help but feel that empathy contains yet greater mysteries (perhaps a Platinum Rule: Do unto others as they would like to be done unto).
One day, running down the narrow hallway of my brother’s apartment playing “monster” with my three-year-old nephew, I banged my toe on a table leg and, in a perfect diamond cutter blow, knocked the nail clean off. I stood there gaping, a little stunned as blood welled from the empty space. I would have thought Nicholas would be scared or repulsed: Young children often cry to see someone in pain, and seek to be consoled. But he just bent over to peer at it more closely. “Does it hurt?” he asked, looking up at me with concern. “Want me to get a Band-Aid?”
His precocious response (so says his doting uncle) was an example of that other-directed empathy that goes beyond mere contagion or resonance. Studies have shown that it even has a different physiology: It is associated with a decreased heart rate, while contagious distress causes an increase. It may literally be a healthier response. The two states also have differing facial expressions and varying degrees of skin conductance. Unlike contagious distress, other-directed empathy shows “somatic quieting...which often accompanies an individual’s focusing attention on the external environment”—suggesting that it is a form of attention that reaches out to another’s plight rather than inward, to one’s own reactions to it.
Being able to feel our way into another’s soul, to sense what is going on behind his social mask, is the passkey to kindness. A friend gave me a quote a few months ago, a one-liner attributed to the Jewish sage Philo of Alexandria, that I haven’t been able to get out of my head: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” I’ve found, with a little practice, I can at least get this far.
"Sorry about the wait,” the cashier apologizes. It has been a long time. She’s been moving like molasses; the line at her register creeps forward by millimeters. According to the unwritten laws of retail, I’m entitled to a small display of petulance. Instead, I try to take her point of view. She’s been on her feet all day. She’s harried and underpaid. The job is repetitive, and impatient customers treat her like an appliance.
“Hey, it’s okay” I tell her, looking back at the line. “There’s only one of you and ten of us; we’ve got you surrounded.” She smiles, shooting me a relieved look, and I feel good to have made someone’s day easier. I’ve been lately trying to do this, a compassion miniaturist, as much as I can. I’m amazed it works almost every time.
I wouldn’t say it’s just a cheap trick, but I know it’s not a very costly one, especially when compared with what some refer to as “radical empathy.” Adam Smith, godfather of capitalism, a man whose name is forever linked to narrow self-interest, might seem an unlikely source of insight into the nobler regions of the human heart, but he came up with one of the better working definitions I’ve seen of, as it were, the emotional mechanics of high-level empathy. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he observed that true compassion is based on “an imaginary change of situations”:
When I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your grief I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die: but I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters. My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your account, and not in the least upon my own.
This swift jackknife dive into another’s pool of experience— some theorists refer to it as “alterity” —is an imaginative leap. Your tragedy may remind me of one of my own and make me weep; or your happy occasion may call to mind my similar one. But it is only when I become utterly alert to you on your own terms, open fully to your experience, that you know you are being seen, heard, and felt. This sort of empathy is enigmatic; it almost teleports us into another person’s frame of reference. Or perhaps it could be thought of as a form of bi-location: Centered in my own heart, I’m also, through some spiritual legerdemain, centered in yours.
The notion of a reversal of place lies deep within the DNA of all spiritual traditions. Ninth-century Buddhist sage Shantideva urged all who wished to follow the path of compassion to partake in “this sacred mystery: to take the place of others, giving them his own.” The saints wash the feet of the sinners, knowing themselves to be no greater than the least. The apocryphal tale of the Danish king who, in response to Nazi orders that all Jews wear a yellow star, donned one himself is emblematic of many Danes who were moved to risk (and sometimes lose) their own lives for their persecuted countrymen. In a more homely example, former senator Bob Graham of Florida used to take what he called a “workday” once a month, performing an ordinary job like bagging groceries or showing up incognito as a flight attendant to serve passengers their meals. It was good political theater but also a method of feeling his way into his constituents’ hearts, minds, and lives.
Still, it is one thing to feel for someone else; it is another to, in some sense, become them. Is it possible to take this exchange too far—merging with another at the expense of your own authentic selfhood, or even the possibility of genuine relationship? Martin Buber refused to use the word empathy because he objected to any connotation that the self could—or should—become lost in the experience of another. “A great relation exists only between real persons,” he wrote. “One must be truly able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.”
Psychologists are particularly nervous about any social bond that smudges the ego’s boundaries. After all, how many unhealthy relationships are based on a person with a fragile ego over-identifying with his or her partner’s needs? In the helping professions, which attract people capable of deep sympathies, there is an expression for sacrificing oneself on the altar of the client’s needs: overcaring. Some clinicians view what they term “affective resonance,” when one person’s heartstrings twang too closely in tune with another’s, as an outright pathology.
Writer Alfie Kohn sums up the prevailing guideline among psychologists as to when deep empathy is even practicable: “One must feel sufficiently unthreatened and free, psychologically speaking, to relax a vigilant watch over (and attachment to) the self and to risk adopting someone else’s perspective.” He adds, as an afterthought, that it may also require “a certain generosity of spirit.” Just so. But isn’t generosity of spirit the jumping-off point for a meaningful life, not just a cliff’s edge of psychic peril?
It’s an imprecise science, if a science at all. If a person’s ego boundaries are too thick, he or she may appear callous, obtuse, tone-deaf to others’ feelings. On the other hand, there are those whose antennae are so sensitive they can’t help being receptive to everyone else’s broadcast; they may lose their own signal in the din.
The insensitive are a common enough social archetype— those folks who know just who they are and exactly what they want, bulling their way through life’s china shops with little concern for incidental breakage. They’re as often as not valorized as self-assertive go-getters with robust self-esteem. It’s the hyperempathic who are viewed as weirder and, in a strange way, less trustworthy. It’s not only that their sensitivity can cause them to be invaded by our feelings; with their boundary-transgressing acuity, they may also invade us.
It’s not so surprising that the Empath has become a standard sci-fi character, though usually more a figure of pathos than threat. In a famous Ray Bradbury story, a Martian wanders into a human colony on the Red Planet. One of the last survivors of a superempathic race, he is a shape-shifter. For one grieving family, he becomes the spitting image of their lost son; for another, he is their dead daughter resurrected; for a lonely woman, he is her runaway husband, returned home at last. The Martian says he is “imprisoned” by others’ thoughts, captured by their strongest needs. When he tries to leave, he is surrounded by a crowd of clamoring Earthlings whose selfish desires for unqualified empathy turn him finally into a chimera, “melting wax shaping to their minds...his face dissolving to each demand...his face all faces, one eye blue, the other golden...” The story speaks volumes about our cultural anxiety that we may lose our very selfhood by being too open to others.
In an early Star Trek episode titled, fittingly, “The Empath,” the crew of the Enterprise visits a distant stellar research station and discovers a mute young woman who has an eerie power. When she touches a wound on Captain Kirk’s forehead, it miraculously appears on her forehead and then quickly heals. “Her nervous system is so sensitive, so highly responsive,” says the somber sawbones Dr. McCoy, “that she can actually feel our emotional and physical reactions. They become part of her.”
Here the Empath is a healer, albeit at a price to herself. Some might call it a bad case of overcaring. But she is also like the traditional shaman, who purports to suck illness from another’s body into her own to heal it. I’ve interviewed medical doctors—those who are not just good technicians but, in a way that’s hard to quantify, genuine healers—who describe this sensation of taking another’s suffering into themselves. “It does hurt,” one told me, “but I can’t explain it; it’s a good hurt—a giving hurt.”
The figure of the Empath, at once healer and freak, stirs unease in our autonomy-obsessed culture. We long for deep connection and unconditional caring, yet the contempt one hears for “bleeding hearts” reflects ambivalence, even outright prejudice, toward the highly empathetic. Their attunement makes us vulnerable to them. Besides, they must have a chink in their character armor as wide as a barn door.* We get an impression of mutability, of chameleons who take on the emotional shading of any person they stand next to.
The joke is on us, though: Researchers have documented what they have dubbed the Chameleon Effect in just about everybody. Whether we know it or not, we’re all a little like Bradbury’s Martian, unconsciously mimicking each other’s inflections, facial expressions, and gestures. (Not surprisingly, those who do this most readily also rate highest on the empathy scale.) Most of us, for example, feel an urge to yawn upon seeing another person do so. Psychologists have found that people who are particularly susceptible to this “contagious yawning” are also significantly better at drawing inferences about others’ mental states—in other words, they are more empathic. (If reading this just made you yawn: bingo! )
Is acute empathy neurotic or healthy, the ultimate spirituality or excessive codependency? All through the day, the mirror neurons sound their siren song— you in me, me in you— but in a single, near-autonomic flicker, we overrule them. We can’t afford to respond to everyone, gushing compassion like a hydrant without any shutoff valve of judgment. Each of us tends to strike our own balance—partly from upbringing, or conscious decision, or life experience, but also from differences in temperament. We are not all made the same. Our empathic style may have something to do with where we naturally fall on that sliding scale between head and heart—a scale that turns out to be very wide indeed.
I’VE JUST MET SOMEONE WHO IS ALL HEART.CASSIE* AND I have known each other for only ten minutes, and this elfin-looking eight-year-old has already taken my hand, gazed up at me with her widely spaced eyes, and exclaimed affectionately, “My good friend!” Her playmate Laurel, a dark-haired little girl dressed in purple and pink, is just the same, as outgoing and simpatico as can be. So is her friend Regina, as well as young Josh. They even look the same, with their narrow faces, broad foreheads, pointed chins, and quick, wide smiles.
“Like brothers and sisters,” Cassie’s mom marvels, and, as it turns out, these children are genetic relations in a sense: Each one is missing a few crucial genes on the seventh chromosome, producing the rare disorder known as Williams syndrome. It includes distinctive facial features (hence the misnomer “elfin-face syndrome” ), short stature, learning disabilities, and a slew of health problems (especially in the heart’s aorta). But despite typically mild retardation, Williams kids often show pronounced musical abilities, deft verbal facility, and an extraordinary level of empathy. Laurel has easily memorized songs sung in Gaelic and Arabic. She can play exquisite Indian flute, executing all the subtle flutters of timbre without knowing how to read a note. She’s sociable, quick, voluble. When I say, “See you later, alligator,” she chimes in without hesitation, “After a while, crocodile.” Yet I’d seen her minutes before unable to distinguish her right hand from her left.
What intrigues researchers is how these kids, deficient in so many ways, routinely score much higher than their peers in social skills—not only in remembering names and faces but in their pronounced empathic responses. All the parents tell me their kids are unusually sensitive to others’ pain. When I put on my eyeglasses and accidentally pinch my finger in the metal hinge, Cassie’s face is flooded with concern. She seems drawn to my injury like an iron filing to a magnet. “Are you okay?” she asks with great sympathy as she peers at the red welt. “Does it hurt?” Her mother, a hospice nurse, tells me of the time Cassie met one of her patients, an elderly dying man who “looked really scary—emaciated, jaundiced, tubes coming out of his nose. Cassie went right up to him, gave him a big hug, put her head on his shoulder, and said, ‘Grandpa!’ They became instant best friends. She insisted on visiting him every day until he passed away. ‘My little sweetie,’ he’d say, and light up like a Christmas tree.”
To Williams syndrome children, everyone’s a friend, a trait researchers call “hypersociability.” As one mother puts it, not without exasperation, “No stranger-awareness whatsoever. I try to teach her what a stranger is, but the farthest I’ve gotten is she’ll go up to someone and ask, ‘Are you a stranger?’ and then say, Now we’re friends!’”
We tell the kids that today we’re going on a treasure hunt. Treasure! They all look at each other, disbelieving their luck. “Treasure!” they say, their eyes wide, their mouths little O’s of delight, sunny little optimists on an impossibly sunny day. “Oh, thank you, Mommy!” says Laurel, and it comes from the bottom of her heart. They clearly are treasures to their parents. One parent contrasted her own chronic reticence with her daughter’s social confidence. “Here I had this little girl with all these problems, and she’d walk into a room full of people, never shy, never self-conscious, and say, ‘Hi, my name’s Katey. What’s your name?’ I would think, How did she do that? She makes it look so easy. She taught me how to forget about myself.”
I get the impression of little people with translucent membranes instead of skin—you can see their hearts pulsing. They exude affection. I watch Cassie march right up to a woman inching along on a walker and say with profound conviction, “I love your earrings.” The woman basks in the glow of the best compliment she’s heard all day. They chat, though Cassie’s conversation is limited. She’s fascinated by all things crystalline, and the diamonds in the woman’s earrings are what she most wants to talk about.
Cassie beams at her. “My good friend.”
I miss these kids the minute I leave; time spent in their company is utterly pleasant. It has given me a look at a form of human goodness, an innocence, both inspiring and tragic. I know there is anguish for the parents, even as they put on a brave face and tell me if they were forced to choose a disability for their child, this would be the one. Besides the terrible medical problems (Laurel’s had two heart surgeries) and the great likelihood they will never function independently as adults (and often die young), the emotional roller coaster can be overwhelming. If the children find they can’t soothe a playmate or if a baby gets upset in the market, they can become panicky and inconsolable.
“They have exaggerated emotional contagion,” explains Susan Hepburn, a researcher who specializes in the disease. “They may instantly pick up on your emotion and say, ‘You look frustrated today,’ but they won’t ask why or understand the context. Once they catch that someone’s angry or sad, they’re not sure how to proceed, how to figure out what they might say or do to help.” She stops and gropes for the right way to put it. “They don’t know how to think about feelings.”
Then there are those who are their polar opposites: people with Asperger syndrome (AS), a less crippling form of autism characterized by a lack of empathic ability. People with AS often can only think about feelings. They tend to excel at logical, literal, systematic thought, yet are, in the coinage of Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, “mindblind,” able only with extreme difficulty to discern other people’s inner desires and intentions.
They must make their own reasoned analysis of the alien world of emotion to live in relationship with others, devising what an engineer might call workarounds for their empathy impairment. Writes one mother with Asperger’s:
Tone of voice, facial expression, body language—people give a dozen clues about their state of mind without uttering a word. Unfortunately, I do not always pick up on this...I therefore have great difficulty following a conversation, listening, being tactful, taking hints, making small talk, knowing when to use polite deception, and knowing what subjects are appropriate to talk about.
She describes not knowing how to emotionally bond with her children or intuit the meaning of one cry from another “unless it was an obviously alarmed cry.” Instead she worked out a system to manage this most primal of empathic relationships, a set of rules to use when the babies were upset: first offering her breast, then checking their diaper, then rocking them in a process of elimination until they quieted down.
But she was a good parent, breastfeeding her children even though she took no pleasure in it, because, she reasoned, “I wanted to give them the best and nothing less.” She questions whether her way is necessarily inferior. “Lack of empathy is not psychopathy, and it is possible to use reason instead. Sometimes it is better— how many things do parents do, not because it is wise or best but simply because that is the way ‘everyone’ does it?”
Her sentiments are echoed on a Web site called Aspergia, which contends that adults with AS possess a unique set of traits that may have been shared by Mozart and Darwin. (Bill Gates is often cited as a presumptive nominee for the AS Hall of Fame.)*
Maybe, they argue, they are just more rational, like Trekkie fave Mr. Spock. And who’s to say that those they refer to as “neurotypicals” don’t have their own set of deficits? “Wars are caused by people with strong emotions of affiliation,” suggests someone on the site. Maybe, says another, there are reasons that evolution has conserved the AS gene. After all, far-flung Aspergia can count 20 million people worldwide, enough to populate their own Australia.
I met a citizen of the Aspergian diaspora. Sandra, a rotund and animated woman with a man’s haircut—she likes to refer to herself as “a monk” —sat in the front row of a lecture about the dwindling resources available to people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), freely expressing her outrage. “It’s a human rights issue!” she exclaimed when a particularly egregious funding cut was detailed. “How can we change this?” she asked loudly. “Absolutely!” she shouted with little self-consciousness whenever the speaker made a point she found on target. She is earnest to a fault, with an acute sense of justice, and not at all what I’d expected.
“Autism doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” she explains. “I’m influenced by Roman Catholicism, the Midwest, postindustrial society, and a degree in political science.” She tells me she approaches her faith in the rational tradition of Saint Thomas Aquinas. “I know we all need each other in society,” she says. “I know we need to give help, not just get it.” She talks to me about the friends who come to her for help “with the vicissitudes of life,” about the social skills group she runs for others with ASD. She reels off the highlights of her social network, waving her hand as if diagramming its key nodes on an invisible blackboard. “I have three godkids. I have twenty-four nieces and nephews, and I’m proud of every single one of them.”
She knows she has certain deficiencies, but she reasons her way around them. “A professor taught me to read fiction by breaking it down into pieces of stories and characters. I need to chart the motivations. Things have to be explained in a logical manner. Like, why is that children’s book hero called Captain Underpants?” (By contrast, I think of the Williams syndrome adult who said she loved fiction “because I can put myself in that book and be right in there with the characters and feel them go through these experiences.” )
It could be said that Sandra is all cognitive empathy: It is logical that we are not separate; it is a logical imperative to serve one another. She is just one more example of the inborn drive for reciprocity and connection—for what Vietnamese Zen priest Thich Nhat Hanh has called “interbeing” —by which we define our humanity.
A drive and, to varying degrees, an unbidden imperative. Speaking of her Williams syndrome patients, Susan Hepburn says, “Their empathy makes them too vulnerable,” and it’s true. Even in normal people, one psychologist suggests, “the sense of self must be protected by an ‘empathic wall’ lest we be taken over by those around us.” Williams kids are without walls entirely: no stone wall against neighbors or against strangers, those unmet friends; no castle wall against the enemy; no interior wall to brick in the heart. They have broken down my own categorical walls, as well: the ones that would define their condition as purely pathological rather than a poignant glimpse into our human capacities, that might deem them wrong and the rest of the world so right.
“I often have a feeling of wanting to just protect their naiveté,” admits Susan Hepburn, “to somehow miraculously change the world into a place where you could safely like everybody and safely assume that everyone would also value you.” She looks wistful.
Meeting these unusual people, I’m struck anew by how keen is our common desire to make contact. After all, we neurotypicals are not monochromatic. We each show up along a continuum from all heart to pure reason. We each have our own ways of reaching out to one another; we all burn with that ardent flame to, in E. M. Forster’s words, “connect, only connect.” But how much? How deeply? How far?
THE GREAT MYSTICS SEE THE CONTINUUM AS A SINGLE CIRCLE, fusing the pure extremes of emotional and cognitive empathy into one blinding arc where the me-and-you distinction flares to transparency. This erasure of the border between I and thou is such a persistent perception that it can’t be ignored.*
Saints of all religions have presented it as an apogee of compassion, one which they insist is attainable through inspiration, humility, and spiritual elbow grease. Said Meister Eckhart: “You need to love all persons as yourself, esteeming them and considering them alike. What happens to another, whether it be a joy or a sorrow, happens to you.” Similarly, Shantideva recommends applying the thought “they are myself” habitually to every creature so that “one will come to care for them as much as one now cares for oneself.”
We’ve all had, from time to time, an ineffable taste of nonseparateness, as with the lovers in a Pablo Neruda love poem where “There is no I or you / so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand / so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.” But Shantideva puts forth the Buddhist notion that there is no self in the first place—that what we think to be the “I,” the “me” is finally an illusory construct, a flowing process, not a thing. And if the self is unreal, so is all concept of “other,” since the two terms have meaning only in relation to each other. To make a distinction between “you” and “me,” he says, is as impossible as “to cut the sky in two with a knife.” He promises that those who “cast aside the ordinary, trivial view of ‘self’” are sure to gain “an attitude of wanting to protect others as oneself, and to protect all that belongs to them with the same care as if it were one’s own.”
I struggle to understand this rather rarified notion of selflessness. What if it’s not a matter of my being generous to you but more that you and I really are two hands of the same being? If I refuse you when you’re in need, it’s like the right hand refusing to remove a thorn from the left on the grounds that it’s the left hand’s problem.
You might try this exercise proposed by a Buddhist scholar to illustrate that the self/other dichotomy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: Put your right hand on the back of your left. Try to feel the warmth and texture of the left hand’s skin solely from the right hand’s perspective, as if you’ve just placed your hand on your lover’s. Feel how, from the right hand’s point of view, the left hand becomes a fleshy object, an other.
Now try reversing it: Shift your subjective attention to your left hand. Feel the right hand’s weight and warmth upon it. Without changing anything but your mind, the left hand now feels like “I” while the right feels more like “other” —when, in point of fact, both are “me.”
It’s hard to avoid experiencing both hands as your own. But even so, you may notice a peculiar flickering back and forth, like one of those Escher optical illusions of a staircase that appears to be going up and going down at the same time. Albert Einstein himself once referred to our sense of separateness as “a kind of optical delusion of consciousness” —a delusion that limits our caring because it “restricts us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.” To live in the world we’d really like to see, he continued, we must undertake a deliberate change in perspective: “Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all creatures and the whole of nature.”
I’ve known a few people who make it seem possible. I met Brother David Steindl-Rast years ago, when I was fresh out of the hospital for cancer surgery. I had gone to a conference but, in lingering postoperative trauma, found myself barely able to cope.
People spotted my distress and for the most part gave me a wide berth. Maybe it was the raw surgical scar across my neck, as if I’d been decapitated and had my head sewn back on, or maybe it was the shell-shocked look in my eyes; but even in a crowd, I felt terribly alone.
Brother David was coming down a path from the opposite direction, a gaunt man in a black-and-white habit who somehow exuded calm. Perhaps touched by something he saw in my face, he paused, sat down on a low rock wall, and gestured me over by patting a space next to him. We talked, or, actually, I talked. He encouraged me to unload the whole dump truck of my woes—his steady gaze told me he could take it. He was the first person who didn’t flinch away.
He conveyed a few words of advice and comfort—something about an “unknown guidance system” that kicks in when you’re really lost—but mostly he shared my pain without trying to do anything about it. When he quietly told me, without a speck of dogma, that I shouldn’t assume that my suffering had no value, I never forgot it. I knew somehow that he had been there himself; that he had, in a sense, never left.
A tiny intervention, perhaps, but there doesn’t seem to be much that’s too small for him to notice or to care about. We’ve met again a number of times over the years, and I’m always reminded of his exquisite sensitivity to the living universe. Once, he described to me walking through a park and, seeing a board lying on the grass, being overcome by “how hard it was for the grass to breathe; it felt like I couldn’t breathe.” When he lifted off the board, he told me, “I heard the grass rejoicing.”
You might think, Oh, brother, spare me. But he’s not of the quaking aspen school of spirituality. His mysticism is infused with knowledge of the real world. I mentioned to him once how wrenching I’d found the beggars in India’s Old Delhi, entire multigenerational families living on a single patch of sidewalk they’d claimed as their own. I couldn’t imagine that the crumpled rupees I dropped in their hands could make a difference and had felt crushed by charity’s impotence.
“I’ve seen those same people,” he said softly. “It hurts the heart. Still we mustn’t just regard them with pity but see what they have to teach us. They take care of each other every day as an extended family. They practice values many of us have lost. We should help, yes, but our compassion should be connected with gratefulness for what they offer us.”
The thought took me aback. I’d been looking at them as if through a one-way mirror. In fact, we were each other’s reflections. No self, no other. I was reminded of the way one Christian writer differentiated two forms of compassionate love: “Charity extends the privileges of insiders to outsiders; while agape erases the line between insiders and outsiders entirely.”
Brother David tells me that he is inspired by the three Catholic rosaries known as “joyful,” “sorrowful,” and “glorious,” which produce in him a “deep poetic stimulation of compassion.” Contemplating Jesus’ scourging, he feels a oneness with every beaten-down person in the world. It is not religious masochism, he says, pointing out that the earliest crosses were adorned not with Christ in agony but with jewels that symbolized “the triumph of suffering transmuted.” When he meditates this way, he says he feels a fullness, a wholeness. There is no longer any part of life that can’t be embraced.
Still, he says, “Sometimes, I have to protect myself. I can’t take it all in.”
I ask him how he deals with it. “Saint John’s wor—,” he says in a low tone that muffles the consonant.
“Saint John’s word?” I ask, thinking of Dark Night of the Soul, that medieval masterwork of anguish redeemed.
“Saint John’s wort,” he corrects me, then laughs heartily. “But his word too.”
The last time I saw Brother David, he mentioned a dream he’d had the previous night. “I dreamed I was eating a pear,” he told me. “A wasp landed on it. I brushed it off, and it fell into my glass of water. The whole dream was about trying to fish it out.” A few nights before that, he said, he’d dreamed of an ant struggling in the middle of a pond. He was trying to rescue it with a branch, but every time he came close, someone threw a stone in the water and the ensuing ripple washed it back out. Finally, the ant drowned, and he awoke feeling bereft. I thought of poet William Blake’s comment on compassion: “He who would do Good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.”
For in the end, empathy need not scale great spiritual pinnacles or be vetted with a psychological seal of approval. The minute particulars of relationship, in most cases, will do just fine. A friend once told me a story about his mother. On her first day in a new city, she had struck up a conversation at the train station with a woman making a stopover on a long journey and had unthinkingly handed her a sandwich she’d been saving for later. It was the beginning of a twenty-year friendship. After my friend’s mother died, he found a packet of the women’s correspondence. One thing had particularly struck him. “So many of the letters from this woman ended with the same words: ‘I’ll never forget that you fed me.’”