Whenever people talk about empathy, it’s always positive, as if were the single most desirable spiritual quality to have. It is seen as weakening the limiting effects of ego, or some other bullshit.
Let me tell you a true story.
I was born with extreme empathy always turned on. Today I would classify it as strong involuntary samyama, but as a child, it took me more than a decade to even guess what was going on. I simply became a different person when surrounded with different people. It’s not that I absorbed the qualities of the environment, but more than what happened inside my mind changed; its flavor, emotions, thoughts, general attitudes. My entire existence was different when I was with my grandparents compared to being with my parents. School was a nightmare. It wasn’t so much a change as destruction and negation of everything I am in the incredible deluge of chaos. Too many children, all crazy, wrecked my my mind so badly I sometimes wonder how I was able to function there at all; but it was in the 7th grade or so that I started figuring out what was going on, when my technical drawing teacher expressed doubt that the drawing that I did for homework was done by me, because it was so much better than the stuff that I did in school; she thought I had my parents do it for me. I thought to respond “But of course it’s better, I did it at home, where it’s…” and then it clicked. It’s calm, at least compared to school. There were no thoughts of others, chaotically interfering with my own like very loud hissing of white noise. At home it’s not like watching TV signal without an antenna, in an area with poor reception.
To me, empathy is not some positive spiritual quality, as it appears to be to people who talk out of their arses and who never actually experienced what it means to have no personal boundaries, to have such strong perceptions of thoughts and emotions of others that it completely overrides and erases your own, to the point of taking decades to figure out who and what you actually are.
To me, empathy is a terrible, debilitating mental illness that I have to live with. It’s like having no firewall and no antivirus on your computer, and having it constantly hacked and invaded by others, only it’s not your computer but your mind, and it’s not only invaded by those who mean to, but by everyone, all the time. It never ends, it never stops. You cry with other people’s pain and laugh at what they find funny. When you dream, your dreams are mixed with the background noise created by others. When you’re surrounded by a mass of people, you’re flooded with chaos, completely disorderly and senseless, like hundreds of people talking at once. When you’re with one person, you simply adopt his ideas, point of view, way of feeling and thinking, basically you are an empty vessel that is filled by that person’s content. You cannot effectively argue a point, because if that person isn’t receptive, your mind simply stops working. When that person explains his point of view, it becomes yours.
That’s what it feels like to have no ego and to have extreme empathy.
I was completely and utterly confused in elementary school. I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t know that something was going on. I was just completely and utterly messed up. In the two last grades I started getting my shit together slightly, though, because I started to consciously perceive the differences in the way in which I exist when alone or with different others. Also, I started to self-medicate, so to say.
You see, this extreme sensitivity doesn’t just work for living humans. When I read a book, it recreates aspects of the author’s consciousness in me, in the exact same way the consciousness of living people overwhelms me in person, and I learned that I can drown one influence if I magnify the other. I could, for instance, read something created by a wonderfully organized mind, like Stanislaw Lem or Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert or Arthur Clarke, and basically “format” my mind with it as I would a floppy disc, allowing it to overrun the chaos and the inferior people’s influence. I couldn’t just turn it off; it never turns off, really, but I learned that I could change the channel, so to speak, and if I chose to fill my mind with one content, I could completely suppress the unwanted noise. I must have looked like a total weirdo in high school; I intentionally adopted a contrarian attitude in order to preserve my identity; I was intentionally reading things that nobody else was reading and doing things that nobody else was doing, just to create some form of a mental boundary between self and others. Also, since I became aware of the difference between self and other influences, I began to perceive my own consciousness under the influence of others as one would perceive a movie screen with movie playing. It took me a long time to understand that I was a movie screen, but then I started to consciously “watch the movies”, so to speak, and it confirmed a hunch I had for a few years at that point, that I was fundamentally, structurally different from all the others that I have met. My own consciousness, when I managed to put it under control, and that was never easy, went deeper than theirs. When I did samyama on deep thinkers and deep ideas, I found out that my own ability was always able to stretch farther than the object on which I did samyama; it was just that I ran out of deep templates on which to focus. I found several ideas in books and several pieces of music that stretched me to my limits and then I could feel things that were so far above my physical life it drove me crazy. I could also feel the Presence, the high consciousness that was always there, always aware, but never actually communicating. Between the violent hell at home caused by my mother’s quickly progressing madness and evil, and chaotic noise and constant bullying I had to suffer at school, and a bus ride in between, and a limit I hit in my attempts to find and explore things that were beyond this darkness and evil that always tried to swallow me and destroy everything that was me as separate from them, I became a combination of distress, frustration and anger, and, unable to find any hope or a way out, I tried to kill myself.
When that failed, I was completely wrecked, because I had absolutely no hope of ever having an existence that’s worth having. I was mentally assaulted by humans and rejected by God, I was locked up in a lunatic asylum, in complete power and control by people who perceived me the way a butcher perceives a pig, and I had nowhere to go. I would have sold my soul to Satan then, had he made me an offer; it was that bad. I gradually pulled myself out by mere contempt and hatred for humans: I simply didn’t feel like allowing the beings that were such incredibly pathetic pieces of shit to defeat me.
Can you imagine what it’s like for an extreme empath to be locked up in a lunatic asylum, among crazy people in a drug-induced stupor, and you’re given psychosis-inducing drugs that limit any attempt to preserve your own identity? It’s worse than a death sentence. However, I learned to adapt. I finally succeeded at learning AT, and I became so good at it, I could re-program my liver to neutralize the drugs they gave me. Having done that, I started to recollect my faculties and replay the strong points from books and music in my head, and I regained coherence. I finished highschool from there, basically learning the entire year’s worth of material from two subjects every week and giving exams. I had to take two weeks for maths and literature respectively but that’s the way I did it. I was so incredibly good at it, I used it as leverage to get myself out, because the false narrative that my psycho parents told the psychiatrists in order to shift the blame from themselves, and onto me, crumbled. The order of magnitude of the problems I had to solve gave me the level of self-confidence I later used to solve other difficult problems, and basically limits my compassion for other people’s whining, because whatever you had, I had worse. Some people may have had one worse week than my average, but that’s it. And I learned how to solve problems, how to shield myself from others’ influence, how to keep strong focus for a long period of time under unyielding, devastating pressure. I learned how to overcome my debilitating weakness.
And that’s how I view empathy. It’s my debilitating weakness, a mental illness that I was born with and have to compensate for in order to be able to exist as a person of distinct and separate identity, will, thoughts, emotions and intent. That’s why I don’t see ego as a spiritual flaw, and empathy as a cure. I actually see it reversed, I see empathy as a spiritual flaw that threatens me with complete negation and destruction of my identity, and ego as cure for that deadly disease. I see ego-boundaries as a shield I learned how to raise in order to first identify myself as a cinema and not as a movie, then to play other movies more to my liking, and then to create my own content, of a higher order of magnitude.
When I say that I learned how to meditate in a bus, in a crowd, while interacting with others, do you have any idea what that means to me, with my inherent weakness?
That’s the cause of my crushingly strong willpower and intent. That’s the cause of my ability to touch the consciousness of others, and then change it; I learned how to turn it the other way, how to influence others instead of being influenced. It’s just a matter of power, and the level of power that I had to master in order to merely survive the shit I was buried under, is essentially unheard of. I find it silly when some “spiritual people” talk about their more-less failed attempts at controlling their own minds. And that’s supposed to be difficult? Try controlling your mind that’s constantly open to every single form of outside influence, by design, from birth, so much that you have no distinct identity, then learn to compensate and overcome, while in a position of slavery, under others’ total physical control, under extremely harmful and invasive psychoactive drugs, without any resources at your disposal, with everything against you. I see how people envy what I am now, and they think they would like to be me, but they certainly don’t want to go through what I had to in order to become me. It’s like sausages: the result tastes good, but you don’t want to know what went in there.
