March 28, 2008

• The Difference Between Possible and Doable

  ADDENDUM:
  The doable and the possible are below, but when I posted that, I forgot to post the latest All Alaska SweepStakes standings.

  Within an hour both ways from midnight last night, the leading three teams passed through the Council checkpoint on the return leg toward Nome:

  1. Jeff King at 23:15
  2. Mitch Seavey twenty minutes later
  3. Lance Mackey fifty-nine minutes after Seavey

  ---

  I was tuning up to blog about something completely different.  Then I did my routine morning check of my feedback log and discovered that about 2 AM Alaska time, somebody in Romania accessed an old post of mine.  It wasn’t the ever-popular Maidenform bra post or any of the ones that are most often accessed, so I clicked on it to see what it was.

  It was …got it figured out, my exposition on the solution I’d found to a conundrum I had mentioned on the day before that post.  What caught my attention this time was the first line of a lengthy comment:

  “Empathy is within the grasp of anyone who is willing to place themselves in the other person’s shoes.”

  I don’t recall whether I responded to that statement at the time.  I might have let it slide because I didn’t want to get into a futile exchange with someone whose mind is made up.

  I’m fairly sure that, even overlooking the grammatical issue, I would have perceived it as bullshit at the time, but in the meantime I have acquired more information that makes it easier to refute the bullshit, while at the same time I can perceive an issue here that might mean that in one sense, this is not bullshit at all.

  It all depends on semantics.  Defining “empathy” one way, this would be true.  The sense of the word, “empathy,” for which that statement would be true is an imaginative state, a voluntary effort to identify with someone else’s feelings.  This brand of empathy is even available to sociopaths and pathological narcissists.  In fact, it is an essential tool for such people if they are going to get along in society, avoid being ostracized or murdered, and stay out of jail.

  This is not the brand of empathy experienced by the empaths of empaths alike.  That one, the one I am talking about when I discuss empathy, the one that psychologists are talking about when they say that people with narcissistic personality disorder are incapable of empathy, is not a voluntary imaginative state.  I think J.B. Rhine would have categorized it as a type of telepathy.

  Coming upon this old post engaged my attention today because of a recent bit of anecdotal information that came  from HappyHeathen, regarding the connection between adrenal insufficiency or exhaustion and empathy/telepathy.  What he told me meshed with what I had previously read about the neurotransmitter acetylcholine’s role in telepathy and empathy. 

  Andrija Puharich, decades ago, studied shamans, the dancing and drumming they did, and the psychoactive plants they used to attain the paranormal powers of their trance state.  He related how prolonged activity such as dance would first stimulate the adrenals, then exhaust them, leading to the state he called “cholinergia,” in which acetylcholine flooded the brain after the adrenals were exhausted.

  It is all very interesting to me, but having this knowledge does not make it any easier to communicate about what I think of as “true” empathy and how it differs from imagining oneself in another’s shoes, when I’m addressing someone who doesn’t believe in the reality of telepathy because his brain chemistry won’t allow him to experience it.  It might make it easier for me to help some of the distressed empaths who post on the tribe.net forums, seeking ways to shield themselves from the barrage of other people’s emotions, if their belief systems encompassed neurochemistry, but most of them are looking for magickal rituals or talismans. 

  In my belief system, in an infinite universe of eternal time, anything is possible, so that part of that extravagant statement above, in a limited sense, is true.  However, whether a thing is doable for a given person or not depends on many factors including, but not limited to, the individual’s Will (capitalized because I distinguish between a simple willingness to do something and having the true wholehearted Will for it) and neuroelectrochemistry.  In that sense, people with NPD, sociopaths, and probably the person who wrote that comment, too, are incapable of the kind of empathy we empaths are talking about.

  I want to tell the world that, in terms of human emotions, addictions,
  and human mental capabilities, the explanation is as simple as ABC:
  It is all brain chemistry.  (It is really electrochemistry, but “simple as abe” just lacks something for me.)

  

  • 3:42 pm
  • 9 Comments