I learned back in 2005, in Salt Lake City whilst studying buddhism with Genpo Roshi that compassion has 2 aspects - masculine and feminine or yin and yang. This was and is helpful when looking at a challenging emotional situation in detail. Often we can get caught up in IDIOT compassion ( a term that Trungpa Rinpoche coined) and this isn't helpful for our boundaries or our safety. Robert Wright ( a buddhist scholar in the US) talks about this in another way; emotional empathy and cognitive empathy
He writes:Emotional empathy is the kind of empathy that can be warm and mushy. It’s the “feel their pain” kind of empathy—identifying with the feelings of other people, even identifying so closely that you in a sense share some of their emotional experience.
Cognitive empathy—sometimes called “perspective taking”—is a colder kind of empathy. It does involve awareness of other people’s feelings; you can’t fully understand how people are processing the world unless you understand how they react to it emotionally. But cognitive empathy doesn’t entail identifying with their feelings, or sympathizing with these people. You don’t have to wish them well, or care about their welfare at all. This is an especially important fact when you’re applying cognitive empathy to enemies or rivals, which I recommend.
The bottom line of cognitive empathy is heightened predictive power. If you skillfully exercise cognitive empathy—do a good job of understanding how things look from the vantage point of someone—this will make you better at anticipating what that person will do under various circumstances. It won’t make you perfect at prediction; people are really complicated and hard-to-predict organisms. But it will make you better, and in the long run that will pay off for you and the world.
There are things in life that are simple but not easy. Like meditation. (Just pay attention to your breath!) Or getting rich in the stock market. (Buy low, sell high!) Cognitive empathy is one of those things; it’s easy in principle (Just put yourself in their shoes!) but can be very hard in practice. If it were easy in practice, the world would already by a super-great place (according to us cognitive empathy evangelists, at least).
I think it’s possible to lay out a clear road map to improvement—and, in a sense, a new kind of road map. We now know enough about the human mind to say why cognitive empathy is often hard—and why it’s sometimes so easy. ...
we can use this in self study - svadhya - both with our own internal struggles and with others.
Some internal voices have way too much of our attention and we could apply a cognitive empathetic approach and just detach/avoid/let go; do you really need the last biscuit etc.
It can also be helpful when facing an intractable situation especially with people that you love to apply some cognitive empathy.
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