Empathy Trumps Conscience

Preston Harold tells us that over time, our empathy will begin to replace the role of our conscience:

If, in time, under evolution’s “psychic entropic” working, abuse and error should decrease, then empathy, not fear or conscience, would guide man into the paths of compassion and decency – that is, the voice in conscience in man must lessen as empathy takes over its role, governing action from a higher level of consciousness. In the Gospels the voice of conscience calling man to repentance comes through John the Baptist, whereas the voice of empathy, the Christ, speaks of abiding love and says: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.”

We discussed the identifying of John the Baptist with conscience in an earlier post here. Preston Harold continues that discussion:

The voice of conscience, John the Baptist, says of this voice of truth: “He must increase, but I must decrease…” The concept that conscience must in time lessen as evolution’s purpose is fulfilled may be a startling one, but [Robert] Ardrey’s words are also startling – he says: “…conscience as a guiding force in the human drama is one of such small reliability that it assumes very nearly the role of a villain….Conscience organizes hatred as it organizes love.” Jesus says of conscience – that is, of John the Baptist, it’s symbol – “Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” In the kingdom within, conscience must have little part – does empathy take its place?

“Conscience organizes hatred as it organizes love.” Quite a statement and an idea that has never crossed my mind! But thinking about it, I can understand. If my conscience tells me to take a particular side, I certainly may develop an aversion for the other. How many times do we find ourselves in “over and against” situations, whether it be religion, politics, or any other human endeavor? And how much energy is spent feeding this “over and against-ness” in our media, education, and professional lives?

Harold continues to explore empathy:

If a core of perfect empathy exists in the unconscious, it provides for man’s capacity to love others no matter how far they fall and to love his own soul whatever its hue. How many people have glimpsed in their dreams this inner realm that is utterly theirs?… As yet, psychologists offer no satisfactory explanation of a sublime self-love that draws the soul or ego-group together toward “home” – neither do philosophers. Both seem blind to all but lust. Francois, Duc de la Rochefoucauld describes man’s lust…: “All unknowingly it breeds, nourishes, rears a variety of affections and hatreds, some of them so monstrous that when it has brought them to light it fails to recognize or refuses to acknowledge them.” And so they are repressed – as psychologists have observed – but Love takes them in, reverses and reclothes them, makes them sufficient to re-enter the conscious domain and under life’s supreme law be redeemed.

And that does it for Chapter 6! We now move on to Chapter 7 where we will look in depth at the concept of the number One. Until then, peace.

Striving for Equilibrium; Pt. 1

Sir Arthur Eddington says thermodynamic equilibrium can theoretically be projected in an ideal, isolated state:

Under these isolated conditions the energy will be shuffled as it is bandied from matter to aether and back again, and very soon the shuffling will be complete… With infinite divisibility there can be no end to shuffling. The experimental fact that a definite state of equilibrium is rapidly reached indicates that energy is not infinitely divisible…in the natural process of shuffling.

Preston Harold goes on to interpret Eddington in psychological terms:

Psychologically translated, this would say that passion is not infinitely divisible into good and evil force – rather, the two forces are shuffled up to the point that “psychic equilibrium” is a fact accomplished. And then – will passionate striving, the fine tensions of life, the vice turned spice, be gone, leaving man no sense of being or becoming?

Eddington describes thermodynamic equilibrium:

It would not be true to say that such a region is timeless; the atoms vibrate as usual like little clocks; by them we can measure speeds and durations. Time is still there and retains its ordinary properties, but it has lost its arrow; like space it extends, but it does not “go on.”

Preston Harold then elaborates on our experience of time and timelessness…

When man senses that time “goes on,” he must measure himself against it: as lagging behind, or rushing to get ahead, his life measured by its passage. But when time extends like space into the blue or starry skies, he experiences a moment of perfect freedom, realizes the here-now of infinity. He cannot experience this without experiencing also a deep-seated satisfaction simply in being.

Harold’s words remind me of the end of Act 1 of Wagner’s “Parsifal” in which Gurnemanz tells a young boy as they approach the Grail castle that “in this realm, time becomes space.”

Preston Harold finishes today’s post up by continuing to combine the scientific with the psychic:

Man’s lump sum of lust may be likened to the source of heat in a system; just as heat turns up as an almost unavoidable side-product and as a very probable end-product of any job he does, so, too, with lust in the psychic realm…In man the lessening of lust may be too small to meet the eye, but one may project its decrease until there is a lust-death in consciousness when all has been experienced in mind or in deed; but as this is accomplished, one must project the increase of empathy until in the perfect shuffling of lust it becomes a divinely human desire for the beloved, love of life itself; or one might say that as lust decreases, compassion increases so that in time empathy is fulfilled and man’s passion is maintained at a desirable level. This is to say, there is no psychic stillness, stagnation, or death of desire under the condition of perfect empathy any more than thermodynamical equilibrium stills the exquisite life of the atom.

We will continue looking at the parallels between psychic and thermodynamic equilibrium in our next post. Until then, peace…

Expending Our Evil

By the process of “sowing our oats” we find there is no permanent value in self-seeking behavior:

Each man has now a capacity to expend and to receive violence, but he has a mechanism available to alter his mental images that define this capacity – thus, the law does not make man a slave to his past nor to the untried…Using imagination and reasoning power, man may try evil-doing in his mind, both sowing and reaping it upon himself, having done with it if he will follow through in his envisioning to the final harvest, not stopping at the point of momentary gratification in the act. That is, he may exhaust the possibilities and bore himself with evil’s final, empty reward.

But even if we find ourselves bored with evil, it’s a built in part of the deal of life:

But since good and evil interfuse each act, as do the two frequencies of a light wave-group, even if a man could always live by the Golden Rule he would still do evil. Because this is so, however, he may spend his life acting upon the voices of conscience and love, knowing that he expends his quota of evil, which must be expended in order that he be delivered from it – and since every person is a field in which both good seed and tares are sown, his life’s harvest will be of good and evil. The measure he has meted out during this experience, however, constitutes the sowing of a new field, provides a future working capital of memory-images, and the evil that comes back to him in kind will be in attenuated form. The sum of his memory-images both today and tomorrow ad infinitum spell out his empathy and they also spell out his lust: his need to experience, to know.

With each step in experience throughout life, we are building up more empathy:

Eddington says, “Progress of time introduces more and more of the random element into the constitution of the world.” The psychological parallel would read: there will be more empathy in the world tomorrow than there is today – and the question arises, can empathy be complete? Can thermodynamical equilibrium be achieved?

It is these questions we will look at in our next installment. Until then, peace.

Judging Righteously

Human beings participate in judging every day. We have to make all sorts of judgments in order to live our lives in ways that are appropriate for ourselves and the social order. But where do we cross the line with our judging, extending this ability beyond it’s rightful bounds? Preston Harold continues to tell us this is a “big picture” issue:

The need to suffer could reflect failure to learn from experience, or failure to experience and thus to learn. This poses the necessity to teach and to learn, to experience in childhood punishment for failure to abide by nature’s laws and man’s laws because in childhood punishment can be mild. The degree, the kind, the measure of power exerted by a man and exerted upon him, particularly in childhood, makes the difference. And if “with the same measure ye mete,” it shall be meted out to you, a man who has abused the innocent, either deliberately, or through omission of his duty, or involuntarily, cannot suffer the exact same measure himself until he himself is innocent and this cannot be until he is in a new expression of conscious embodiment. Jesus said:

Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgement.

And yes, here we have a nod to the necessity for reincarnation for true justice to work itself out. Continuing on…

Under life’s law man’s violence is expended from generation to generation – the organization of psychic energy is negotiable, and so is the disorganization or psychic random element. Each life is a totally new expression and endeavor. Each person is born innocent of what he has done and innocent of what he will do. Jesus said:

Judge not, that you may not be judged yourselves…

All men must experience all – in kind, somehow, somewhere, on some level – before life can fulfill to the last iota the law of empathy under which, without compulsion, harmony exists.

In our next installment we will look at how this law of empathy goes about working itself out. Until then, peace.

Moses and Khidr

Continuing from our last post, we now go into the psychic parallels which arise from the science of light. Preston Harold continues…

Thus, in psychic parallel, one might say that as a person comes into each life experience, the measure of good and evil he must or can expend is determined by the measure of the opposing frequencies associated in his ego-group, and there is one measure in him that can act as (+) or (-), to give or to receive, and it terminates each action, providing also the boundary to his life-experience when his capacity to exert constructive and destructive force is both fulfilled – that is, both expended and received to the precise extent premeasured for this only life experience. How he fulfills this measure is a variable, but with each move some of both forces is expended and received – the man is “salted”: he gains a measure of immunity to evil-doing because the sum of his memory-images, and thus his capacity to act and react to any stimuli or the suggestion of it, is altered and his empathy turns him out of certain paths, into others.

Most of the time it is difficult for us to see the reason or sense in any evil. We usually equate all evil to be of the same measure; to transgress one part of the law is to transgress the whole. But the wise among us are able to see so-called evils in a larger, wider context as is illustrated in the legend of Moses and Khidr:

That a creative process is involved in much that appears on the surface to be purely evil is projected in the legend of Moses and Khidr which Dr. von Franz presents in discussing the aspect of the unconscious that Jung called the “shadow.” She says:

The ethical difficulties that arise when one meets one’s shadow are well described in the 18^th Book of the Koran. In this tale Moses meets Khidr (“the Green One” or “first angel of God”) in the desert. They wander along together, and Khidr expresses his fear that Moses will not be able to witness his deeds without indignation. If Moses cannot bear with him and trust him, Khidr will have to leave. Presently Khidr scuttles a fishing boat of some poor villagers. Then, before Moses’ eyes, he kills a handsome young man, and finally he restores the fallen wall of a city of unbelievers. Moses cannot help expressing his indignation, and so Khidr has to leave him. Before his departure, however, he explains the reasons for his actions: By scuttling the boat he actually saved it for its owners because pirates were on their way to steal it. As it is, the fishermen can salvage it. The handsome young man was on his way to commit a crime…By restoring the wall, two pious young men were saved from ruin because their treasure was buried under it. Moses, who had been so morally indignant saw now (too late) that his judgement had been too hasty….Looking at this story naively, one might assume that Khidr is the lawless, capricious, evil shadow of pious, law-abiding Moses. But this is not the case. Khidr is much more the personification of some secret creative actions of the Godhead. 

The legend would seem to say that one is short-sighted when he turns his back on humankind or God because he cannot reconcile within his concept of morality life’s apparently witless, useless evil.

Job (oil on canvas) by Bonnat, Leon Joseph Florentin

In this sense one recalls the Book of Job, one of humanity’s oldest books asking one of humanity’s most important questions: why do we suffer? Good and evil can certainly be relative when the big picture is seen. This is why Jesus tells us not to judge. It is with this thought in mind that we continue on to our next installment. Until then, peace.

Noogenesis and the Psychic Law

In this study, the second law of thermodynamics is seen to parallel the psychic law Jesus spoke of, saying that it must be fulfilled to the last iota, that it is far easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for this law to fail.

To suggest that something in man, or in consciousness, parallels entropy’s increasing measure will, no doubt, appear fantastic to many scientists – yet, a great scientist, Teilhard de Chardin, writes:

…there is in progress, within us and around us, a continual heightening of consciousness in the Universe. For a century and a half the science of psychics, preoccupied with analytical researches, was dominated by the idea of the dissipation of energy and the disintegration of matter. Being now called upon by biology to consider the effects of synthesis, it is beginning to perceive that, parallel with the phenomenon of corpuscular disintegration, the Universe historically displays a second process as generalized and fundamental as the first: I mean that of the gradual concentration of its physic-chemical elements in a nuclei of increasing complexity, each succeeding stage of material concentration and differentiation being accompanied by a more advanced form of spontaneity and spiritual energy. The outflowing flood of Entropy equaled and offset by the rising tide of a Noogenesis!

So what is Noogenesis? Noogenesis is concept expounded by the French paleontologist/Jesuit Priest Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard saw Noogenesis as the psychic counterweight to Entropy; it is the beginning of conscious, reflective thought, something in all of creation which only human beings are capable of. With Noogenesis eventually comes the creation of a new atmosphere of thought, the Noosphere. The continued linking and merger of human thought via human socialization is Noogenesis. For Teilhard, the same attracting force that brought material creation into existence now exerts that force in the psychic network that will ultimately lead to a universal human community bonded by love. This is especially propelled forward by the expanding awareness of the suffering and diminishment of ourselves and others, which can also be seen as the growth and enlargement of empathy. This will be a “second coming” of Christ and for Teilhard it is the goal to which all evolution is leading.

Preston Harold continues…

Again, this study proposes empathy to be the psychic measure which constantly increases, which may be arrested under certain conditions, but which can never decrease or be “undone.” Omar Khayyam, “who stitched the tents of science,” spoke poetically of a psychic parallel to that which is irreversible. Is it empathy which is written? – when:

The moving Finger writes; and having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

There has been a constant increase in human understanding. This cannot be spelled out on paper any more than entropy’s measure can be written out in decimal figures, but empathy must be calculated in dealing with men in society – for example, efforts to abolish racial discrimination bespeak it. The increase in empathy reflects, no doubt, the increase of disorder, psychic and public, born of man’s social striving, but by its very nature empathy is redemptive: it is knowing with the whole being the truth of the whole situation.

Sometimes it seems to me this can’t be true. Has there been an increase in human understanding? What about all the racism, sex trafficking, and other social ills that still overrun our society and are part of the “Domination System” so expertly expounded on by the late Walter Wink? Human beings will continue to be human beings, right? But then it seems to me that with recent major public awarenesses of injustice, especially the past few months in the United States of police overreach, that a light is being shined in dark places. “Deep cleaning” is never a pretty undertaking, and that goes for both sides of the coin. Maybe, just maybe, we are in the beginning throes of starting to “know with the whole being the truth of the whole situation.” May it be so. Until next time, peace.

An End to Sin?

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son… -John 3:16

Through his death on the cross, Jesus saves mankind from their sin. How is this to be understood? If empathy is putting ourselves in another’s place, what might be the ultimate act of empathy? Could it be experiencing the death of the other? Every human being has to die, and in Jesus God enters into this inevitable human fate, experiencing death Himself. Preston Harold says that with total empathy comes an end to sin:

When through experience all mankind has evolved complete empathy, sin will no longer be possible, for man’s empathy will cause him to instinctively withdraw his mind and hand from abuse of another – his understanding will not permit him to err, for he will pay sin’s wage in his own being before he commits it.

Just as Jesus payed sin’s wage in his own being, we are called to do the same. We must experience the sorrow we would bring to another in our own being before we offend against them.

Empathy in man brings its joy or sorrow – enriches or takes its toll of him now, as now flowers into the present and plants the field of the future in reaping the harvest of past planting. Love’s eternal reward and punishment is given before it is grasped – now. Upon that infinitely small point between the past and the future that cannot be captured or measured eternity rests, for both now and eternity are beyond the grasp of consciousness. Eternal punishment of sin rests with empathy, which makes a man recoil with horror at the evil he has done when he comes to an understand it in his being, and thereafter he forever recoils with the pain at the prospect of repeating this evil, recoils now as it arises in the mind to do this evil again.

And here we grasp the meaning of “eternal punishment,” the “now” moment we truly realize and experience through empathy the hell of the horror of realizing the evil that we do to one another. Yet empathy has another face:

Empathy is saving grace to man – it frees his past, frees his future. It is acting now in his midst. Homo sapiens is an empathetic “animal.” He is no mistake on the part of evolution. Jesus’ words say to the belabored man of the twentieth century who has come to doubt nature’s wisdom in evolving his species: there is the living voice of truth, life and love within you, and as you begin to express its power, glory, and empathy, it will say unto you, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

Until next time, peace.

Reversing the Rules

Preston Harold shows us how empathy aligns with religious thought. He says:

The effect of empathy and its meaning to life may be likened to Tao: Tao is obscured when you fix your eye on little segments of existence only…” but when Tao is grasped universally, “Without law or compulsion men [will] dwell in harmony.” In individual terms, empathy is realizing on one’s own being the Golden Rule. Empathy is Jesus’ new commandment as an act in one’s own soul – love one another, love the Lord your God with your whole mind, heart, and soul, and your neighbor as yourself. Only through empathy is it possible to step into another’s shoes without displacing him or foisting oneself upon him or losing one’s own precious identity; empathy not only makes this possible, it makes it mandatory.

Mandatory?! Maybe that’s why Jesus couches empathy’s impetus as a commandment. It seems ridiculous to me to make loving someone a commandment that must be fulfilled, but through genuine non-judgmental empathy a slight crack in the door may open that invites me to walk through.

When empathy exists, one experiences in his own being what is happening to another and understands that another suffers whatever is happening to oneself. Empathy is direct, involuntary. It cannot be vicariously expressed because it is borne from out the boundless deeps of a man and, to borrow words from Alfred Lord Tennyson, rises, “too full for sound or foam, but such a tide as moving seems asleep,” and with certainty “turns again home” whatever one does or witnesses.

And here Harold will explain how empathy is born out of the interplay between good and evil:

Because empathy is begotten only of the wholeness of experiencing good and evil involved in any decision, situation, or act, it exerts an incomprehensible power – which is to say, unconsciously it is expressed and it cannot be called into action. Because it is an unconsciously made automatic response, through it man gains freedom from having to make a choice between what appears to be good and what appears to be evil, for his response is both unconsciously tempered and in accord with the reality of the situation. Huxley says: “The fullest freedom is the expression of an inner compulsion of our being, of a choice, which we have come to feel as inevitably necessary…In general, once we manage to ‘see things steadily and see them whole,’ the choice is made for us.”

And with this one can understand Jesus’ breaking of the religious “rules” in order to meet people where they are, with their immediate hopes and needs. Empathy can be summed up in one phrase of Jesus that echoes the Tao quote above and bears along with it huge implications.  Jesus grasped the Tao and stated: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

Until next time, peace.

Enter Empathy

“For every step in spiritual development, three steps are to be taken in moral development.” – Rudolf Steiner 

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

In man’s struggle with good and evil, enjoining them in his every battle, he has reaped the reward of finding the key to all but unlimited power in the material realm. But this will be of no profit to him unless he also achieves self-dominion and self-control such as will prohibit his doing evil, or himself reaping its destructive force – and he must achieve this in such a way that he, himself, does not become mere “vegetable,” living a life that has lost its spice, satisfactions, and meaning.

So how is this to be done? How will mankind as a species find self-dominion, self-control; how will we find our way? In what way is our moral sense developed? Preston Harold continues with an answer:

Does controlled fusion of nuclei cast a clue – which is to say, is there a word to describe a psychological reaction in which passion is both loosened and controlled? Consider the word empathy. Ludwig Binswanger sees that it depends upon the possibility or impossibility of understanding – that it costs more, means more, than sympathy – that it is as yet beyond definition:

In the case of “empathy”…we would have to examine to what degree it is a phenomenon of warmth…or a vocal or sound phenomenon, as when the poet Hoelderlin writes to his mother that there could not be a sound alive in her soul with which his soul would not chime in; or a phenomenon of touch, as when we say, “your sorrow, your joy touches me”: or a phenomenon of sharing, as expressed by Diotima in Hoelderlin’s Hyperion – “He who understands you must share your greatness and your desperation”: or a phenomenon of participation, as in the saying, “I partake of your grief”: or lastly, a phenomenon of “identification,” as when we say, “I would have done the same in your place”….All these modes of expression refer to certain phenomenal, intentional, and preintentional modes of being-together…and co-being…which would have first to be analyzed before the total phenomenon of empathy could be made comprehensive and clarifiable.

Empathy; that ability to put ourselves in another’s place, to “walk a mile in their shoes.” In our next post we will begin to analyze the meaning of empathy and how it is the fulcrum on which turns the proper, intentional development our species. Until then, peace.

Empathy’s Impetus

Harold follows up his questions that ended our last post by explaining how Jesus’ teachings must become yeast for the future of humankind:

Jesus, giving voice to man’s Authority-Ego when the time had come that man must take an unprecedented turn, gave the commands that point the way, the only way, to bring about the transformation of man and of society that humankind seeks.  The first and greatest command, “Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,” turns man’s vision inward to grasp God-being within himself, as individual, and points him toward individualism and individual effort – the second command, He said to be like unto the first, “That ye love one another” and “thy neighbor as thyself,” poses the concept that cooperation, good will, decency, and the high ethic of love at work in human affairs is in the highest possible interest of individual, nation, and species.  Slowly but surely realization of this fact, as the command is handed from generation to generation via the word, is creating a higher type society in which the “new command” will eventually take over from the permanent hostility animals exhibit towards territorial neighbors, their hostility reborn in each year’s offspring; and in time these two commands must produce a new type man fully conscious of himself and empathetic enough to create a satisfying society.

“A new type man fully conscious of himself and empathetic enough to create a satisfying society.”  Here Harold equates empathy with being fully aware of oneself.  In other words, the more self-conscious we become, the more we grow in empathy, and from this empathy will be birthed a more satisfying society.  But what about those who are satisfied with the way society is today; largely UNemapthetic?  Why shake things up if NOT considering others is rewarded?  Why does our society seem to reward ruthlessness and egocentrism in an exponentially lopsided way?  Only each individual can answer this perplexing question for him/herself.  Society will improve overall when individuals become transformed and expectations are raised one person at a time.  This is commonly known as “maturing.”  Fortunately we do see people standing up publicly and working behind the scenes for righteous change all the time.  Yes, humanity is growing and struggling towards something better…

Jesus said this generation of man is child.  Thus, he projects that Homo sapiens must and will change in body, mind, consciousness, awareness, and capacity to experience. Today, men tend to believe that Homo sapiens is man in very nearly finished form – that biological evolution has all but ceased – forgetting that “ a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday….”  When they view life everlasting in terms of life’s being forever vested in Homo sapiens’ garment, they come in the end to find the prospect of it appalling. If man is child, he will outgrow his present garment, his mental and physical vesture.

What might this vesture look like? We’ll explore that in our next post. Until then, peace.