Henry: I can see that as long as any others have objections to being happy – which is a universal condition – then they have the leverage over me to illicit sympathy. As long as I am sympathetic, I am not experiencing happiness or (ultimately) harmlessness, though I have believed that what I was doing was the most harmless approach.
It’s not ultimately a harmless approach because it verifies the suffering for myself and for them – they got one more ‘vote’ in favor of the validity/reality of their suffering. […]
But now I see it’s pretty straightforward – the sympathy is not, contrary to popular opinion, harmless.
Hi Henry,
You are spot on – sympathy is not, and has never been harmless. It is, at best, reaffirming the entity inside your fellow human beings and thus perpetuating their (contingent) existence –
Richard: She [Devika] would also say that Richard does nor support her, as an identity that is, at all … which lack of (affective) caring was disconcerting for her, to say the least, and my current companion has also (correctly) reported this absence of consideration.
Put simply: I am unable to support some-one who does not exist (I only get to meet flesh and blood bodies here in this actual world). (Richard, List AF, No. 25a, 10 June 2003).
Whereas actual caring aims to bring suffering to an end, forever –
Richard: You see, the difference between you and me is that I actually care about my fellow human being and will leave no stone unturned, if that be what it takes, to understand them, to comprehend why they say what they do, so as to facilitate clarity in communication … I like my fellow human being and prefer that their self-imposed suffering come to an end, forever, sooner rather than later. (Richard, AF List, No. 74f, 2 Feb 2006).
If you are interested, this is what sympathy means at root –
• sympathy (n.), ‘affinity between certain things’, from Middle French sympathie (16c.) and directly from Late Latin sympathia, ‘community of feeling’, ‘sympathy’, from Greek sympatheia, ‘fellow-feeling’, ‘community of feeling’, from sympathes, ‘having a fellow feeling’, ‘affected by like feelings’, from assimilated form of syn-, ‘together’ (see syn-; viz.: word-forming element meaning ‘together with’, ‘jointly’; ‘alike’; ‘at the same time’, also sometimes completive or intensive, from Greek syn (prep.) ‘with’, ‘together with’, ‘along with’, ‘in the company of’) + pathos, ‘feeling’ (see pathos; viz.: ‘quality that arouses pity or sorrow’; 1660s, from Greek pathos, ‘suffering, feeling, emotion, calamity’, literally ‘what befalls one’, related to paskhein, ‘to suffer’, and penthos ‘grief, sorrow’). ~ (Online Etymology Dictionary). (Richard, Abditorium, Sympathy)
Sympathy is ‘fellow-feeling’ but often it means ‘suffering together’ and as such is a very close relative to compassion, which also means ‘suffering together’, so highly praised by Irene when she was in her ‘Matriarchal ASC’. Viz.:
IRENE to Vineeto: Compassion is not what is understood by Richard – [he calls it] the hopeless game of compassion – at least I don’t have that view at all. To me compassion is the full understanding through experiencing all the accompanying emotions of a particularly testing aspect of life, that this is what it is to be grieving, or to be angry or to intensely hate or to be desolate, lonely, utterly discouraged in all of life etc. and to accept it as belonging to the all-round human experience in order to become wise. Not that only the so-called negative feelings will grant wisdom; the positive ones can be even more important in that respect! The richness, the depth of each human feeling reveals the understanding of what it is to be a human being in such an empirical, intimate way that it is later instantly recognised in a fellow human being who is going through the same emotional, human experience and who can then be met by compassion, that very kind understanding that you will have enjoyed with another, not only when life was being particularly difficult or sad, but also when you wanted to share your utmost joy or love. It is indeed such comfort to talk to someone who doesn’t lecture you, but who is right with you in your deepest pain or your exquisite happiness and doesn’t condemn you or suggests all kind of predictable therapies. The reward is first of all in the understanding of being human and secondly it is a privilege to be of genuine help with a person who feels alone, confused and abandoned in their circumstances. Or to be invited by someone who wants to share their most precious feelings with you.
RICHARD: Hmm … you have well described the trap of compassion – as I call it – for the giver and the receiver thus remain firmly locked into the piquant and seductive snare of the beauty of pathos. Literally the word ‘compassion’ means pathos in common … and actually starts out as nothing more impelling than a coping-mechanism designed to alleviate – not eliminate – the existential pain and distress of being human. For to be human is to be suffering and to be suffering is to be in sorrow. Indeed, all sentient beings suffer – not only the human animal – and one can travel deeply into the depths of ‘being’ itself … and come upon Universal Sorrow. The piquancy of one’s personal sorrow pales into insignificance when confronted with the pungency of all the sorrow of anyone who has ever lived or who is living now or who is yet to be born … for one is indulging oneself in self-justifying grief. There the beauty of this universal pathos reveals what lies eternally silent at the heart of the mystique … a god or a goddess that is The Truth.
And thus is a new religion born – and another sect to wage their vicious wars – which is why I call the alluring beauty of pathos ‘The Trap Of Compassion’.
There is, however, a third alternative to being human or divine. (Richard, AF List, Irene, 11 Oct 1998).
Henry: I have some history in my early 20s of aggressive people in my life that I can now see left me with a very avoidant and timid existence. Luckily I can now see the line of causation clearly, which means I can easily interrupt it: when I see myself being avoidant or timid, I can see the connection to fear of aggression. When I see the fear and do not give it any sustenance, it quickly fades – along with the auxiliary emotions and behaviors. […]
Already at work I have had some encouraging interactions, where I would start talking to someone that I was told was having a terrible time, but after a short time they seem to be doing just fine. Perhaps a few minutes ago they were indeed struggling, but it must have passed quickly – and I’m certain the lack of sympathy helped.
I can see how this dynamic is holding everyone in thrall, it’s part of what makes it taboo to be happy and harmless. However, that is nothing but superstition – it’s amazing to see how all the ‘state of the art’ psychology falls apart on that one point alone. In the end, it was all just a belief. There is something far better. (link)
This is excellent, Henry. I find it fascinating that you first had to deal with fear and aggression in order to see that people don’t like others to be happy and from there you could see that sympathy is not harmless. And you also experienced instant confirmation that due to “the lack of sympathy” the client’s “terrible time” and “struggling” “must have passed quickly”.
There is indeed “something far better” –
RESPONDENT: … I don’t see much point in thinking about you] or your claims any longer. Whatever it is you’ve discovered …
RICHARD: There is no need to be coy … you know quite well what it is. For example:
• [Respondent]: ‘Trying to imagine someone who has no feelings, someone who is incapable of empathy, incapable of feeling sorrow or compassion, one naturally tends to think either of someone who is heartless, uncaring, ruthlessly self-centred (a ‘psychopath’ in popular parlance), or someone who is dull, lifeless, emotionally flattened. I am still bothered by this sometimes, even though I know it needn’t be so.
I was thinking this over again recently when I remembered the day two summers ago when I took a long walk in the country, ate two ‘magic’ psilocybin mushrooms, and had 4 hours of PCE on earth. Back at home (still on the fringes of the aptly described ‘magical fairytale-like paradise’) I was talking to my girlfriend on the phone in Sydney. She was crying, telling me about a problem at work that was getting her down. As she was going into the details I was lying there on a sofa looking out a window, watching the sky, observing a magnificent snowy-white cloud drifting way up there in the cool blue immensity. Everything was utterly immaculate. (…)’. (Wednesday, 16/02/2005 6:27 PM AEDST). […]
RICHARD: Here is what you went on to say (in that e-mail of yours already part-quoted above) a year ago to the day:
• [Respondent]: ‘… [Everything was utterly immaculate]. What she was telling me belonged to a different world altogether. I heard it, I understood it, I knew she was concerned about it, but it had no relevance here. And the important thing is, I knew it had no relevance there either – but there was no way she could really see that unless she could experience … this’. [emphases in original]. (Wednesday, 16/02/2005 6:27 PM AEDST). […]
RICHARD: And here is the very next paragraph (from that e-mail you wrote a year ago to the day):
• [Respondent]: ‘To say that I was callous, cold, indifferent, uncaring, flat, dull or lifeless at that moment would be totally off the mark. No way! What I really wanted was for her to experience the world this way, and to realise that whatever problem she had was made redundant by the perfection of the sky, the clouds, the trees, the air. It’s true to say there was no compassion in me, none whatsoever, because there was no sorrow, and no way I could endorse anyone else’s unnecessary sorrow either. At that moment I was literally incapable of conventional compassion … but there was genuine caring, and plenty of it’. (Wednesday, 16/02/2005 6:27 PM AEDST).
RESPONDENT: Whatever you’ve got, enjoy it, but keep it. (Richard, AF List, No. 60j, 19 Feb 2006).
However, a year later the Respondent had forgotten/pushed aside his experience of genuine caring (“but there was genuine caring, and plenty of it”) and bemoaned the absence of sympathy and compassion in Richard.
With being happy and harmless comes genuine caring for one’s fellow human beings.
Cheers Vineeto
