Home | Community | Message Board
You are not signed in.
Sign In New Account
Forum Index Search Posts Trusted Vendors Highlights Galleries FAQ User List Chat Store Random Growery


This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.

General Interest > Philosophy, Sociology & Psychology
Threaded Mode Threaded  Previous topic Previous  View all topics Index  Next topic Next 

Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Jump to first unread post Pages: 1
The link between empathy and an individual's creative, imaginative potential
    #5351719 -

Empathy is the recognition and understanding of the states of mind and emotions of others. It is the ability to experience the outlook or emotions of another being internally. In other words, it is a mental simulation.

It is the ability to imagine oneself as another person. This is a process that takes creativity and imagination.

My question is: Does this suggest that empathy cannot truly exist independently of a creative, imaginative mind? Are creative people more likely to empathetic?

Taking this even further, could the crisis of modern apathy be a result societies intellectual sedation, IE. the lack of mental stimulation due to the power of the Image and television, simplistic revolution of popular literature, fast pace of the world, etc?

Edited by The Shroomerite Formerly Known As Spud (03/01/06 12:22 AM)

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Re: The link between empathy and an individuals creative, imaginative potential [Re: spud]
    #5351842 -

I'd have to say yes, that a persons ability to feel empathy is directly linked to their creativity, imagination, and also their ability to understand.

But, heres something to consider about modern apathy...
I often drive myself to Apathy because of my empathy. I just think of every starving child, every poor junkie, every man who has been denied justice, the forest bleeding of sap, modern man laying down concrete on places that once were sites of spiritual shamanism. I just sit and reflect on these things, and I sink, my heart goes out to these people and I feel their hopelessness, and I feel hopeless myself because I can't be there and change everything that very moment to make their lives joyous, to fix the wrongs that they have to face, and after so much hopelessness, I go into a state of apathy, I watch my TV, I drink my soda, and I try and forget about the feeling. Apathy doesn't have to be the absence of empathy, it can be the opposite.

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Re: The link between empathy and an individual's creative, imaginative potential [Re: spud]
    #5351914 -

It derives from a sense of concentration. A distracted mind will not be able to pull all the piece of itself together to focus on a task, let alone concentrating on another.


--------------------
010001100100001001000101!

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Re: The link between empathy and an individual's creative, imaginative potential [Re: spud]
    #5353647 -

Hey spud,

What you are describing "using the imagination to put yourself in someone else's shoes" is what I know to be sympathy. Say someone looses a parent or dream job and we have NO experience to relate what that must be like. We can only imagine it and from there we express our sympathy.

Empathy is a different animal. It actually takes on the emotions of others that people connect themselves too emotionally through open bonds formed.

Empaths have a difficult time forming boundaries between, "my emotions and your emotions". They are often very depressed feeling without knowing why. Many turn to drinking to drown it all out.

For example, my daughter and I have a super open strong bond-connection. When she was 7 mo old, we had gone from Hawaii to Chicago and her sleep schedule was all screwed up. My parents watched her one night when hubby and I went to the movies. It was a comedy and we were having fun and all of a sudden, I felt very heavy and upset and wanted to start crying. I was like "wtf".

Then it dawned on me, "Arielle is tanking before she sleeps for the night. I looked at my watch and it was 10:30 PM. When we got back, I asked my mom when she fell asleep. She said she started fussing around 10:30 and crashed by 11:00.

I felt what she was feeling miles away through an emotional bond. Thats an example of empathy. How it works on the energetic level, I am not clear on yet but see it like energetic cords being attached that transfer emotional information from one emotional body to the next.

In the case of compassion, one extends a cord out to another to feel what they feel as they feel it.

Sympathy to me is when we just use our imagination to relate and keep the emotional boundaries between bodies clearly defined with no openning ourselves to feeling what they feel or forming a connective bond. When people sympathize, they are keeping their ability to relate very intellectualized in the mind only, and are not taking on any fellow feeling. Even if they imagine feelings, its not the same as actually, feeling what the other person is. You know you are imagining it and can stop and make it go away in a second.

Most people I think tend shy away from any sort of emotional vulnerability "openness between themselves and others". You can't blame them. If its another pain you are open to feeling, thats a hard thing to manage. Its sweet when you can share in another's joys through open bonds though.

This has always been a hot topic with spiritual types. The paradox is that through compassion, "feeling for others as ourselves" we can best keep from hurting and causing harm to others. On the other hand, if we take on feeling the suffering of the world, we are just adding to the weight of it.

Many now are opting to be in their own love, peace and joy (good will and well being)and to be a cause of love peace and joy ( good will and well being). Some argue that that may come across as a cold and unfeeling for others place to be, however, it is a warm and self full-feeling place to be that can have a pulling, uplifting effect on those around them.

That may be getting off topic so I'll wrap this up here.

:peace: :heart:


--------------------
Ahuwale ka nane huna.

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Re: The link between empathy and an individual's creative, imaginative potential [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #5353705 -

I don't really doubt the existence of psychic phenomena such as you describe with your daughter. However, I do question the validity of your example. For instance, does she normally 'tank' as you describe it, between 10 and 11? If she does, then couldn't you have merely realized the time and made the recognition that she was probably tanking around then?


--------------------
"What is in us that turns a deaf ear to the cries of human suffering?"

"Belief is a beautiful armor
But makes for the heaviest sword"
- John Mayer

Making the noise "penicillin" is no substitute for actually taking penicillin.

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -Abraham Lincoln

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Re: The link between empathy and an individual's creative, imaginative potential [Re: dblaney]
    #5353751 -

She would normally tank and wail before falling asleep for the night. The thing is, we had just flown in from Hawaii. The HI time she would be tanking Chicago time would be 3:00 PM. It was our second day in Chicago and like I said, her sleep schedule was all jazzed up. I had no way of knowing when she was going to crash that night nor was I even thinking about it while enjoying the movie.

This post isn't about psychic phenomenon to me anyway. That part I shared to describe empathy feeling bonds we create with others and that of a mom and her children are pretty intense in the empathetic department from the norm anyway. Shes 9 now and I have hundreds of those stories.

I shared that one to highlight the experiential difference to me between what we call sympathy, "what spud was describing" and what we call empathy, what I was describing.

:peace: :heart:


--------------------
Ahuwale ka nane huna.

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: 1

General Interest > Philosophy, Sociology & Psychology
Threaded Mode Threaded  Previous topic Previous  View all topics Index  Next topic Next 

Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* Creativity Imagination Inspiration Sole_Worthy 992 16 06/08/03 09:58 PM
by chodamunky
* Animal Empathy? RebelSteve33 888 2 02/12/03 09:37 AM
by adrug
* -=imagine=-
( 1 2 3 all )		 emex 4,476 48 09/04/02 01:02 PM
by tak_old
* the individual Lenore 2,448 12 12/17/01 04:13 PM
by Ulysees
* Confusing creativity with perception.
( 1 2 3 all )		 Phluck 6,060 59 09/30/03 02:02 AM
by fireworks_god
* Pure Empathy.... You_are_God 1,220 9 05/05/03 08:30 AM
by buttonion
* allen ginsberg : curative powers of visionary imagination Malachi 1,172 10 08/14/03 01:20 PM
by fireworks_god
* empathy? niteowl 823 4 06/12/04 08:56 AM
by Kttail

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: Middleman, DividedQuantum
838 topic views. 0 members, 311 guests and 25 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2026 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.03 seconds spending 0.008 seconds on 16 queries.