Are Our Experiences Really Our Own?

A small question that can lead to a great answer

On empathy

I believe that there is nothing more genuine than the ability to feel empathy for another being. I believe this because I don’t consider empathy to be something exclusively human.

Because we feel it in animals, because they seem to be able to feel the emotions of each other and also of humans. And this makes me believe that, hidden in the confines of the mysteries of the universe that we will never come to understand, empathy has a place all its own, and properly its own.

But, like everything else in life, as we realize as we go along, empathy also has its pros and cons.

At the same time that it unites us, connects us, offers us the ability to feel what another being feels, it also makes us run the risk of losing our identity in this process of identification outside ourselves.

I am sensitive to the desire, particularly human desire, to be part of something. Be it a team, a group, an association, or even a simple group of friends. Being part and feeling part is a mechanism that comforts the loneliness that I believe we all feel as human beings.

The loneliness of our mind, of our thoughts. The loneliness that comes from a sense of incompleteness that never seems to heal. And in the process, we end up picking up pieces of ourselves where… we feel.

Because I believe that the mind and the heart, or the soul, or the place where feelings come from, have a direct connection.

I believe that when we feel, we are pulled towards what actually makes us feel.

And that’s where the danger of empathy comes in. The danger of getting lost in so much of what we feel. The danger of feeling connected to the emotion of someone we care about and getting stuck there. The danger that in the midst of so many identifications we lose our own identification.

Don’t live a life thought up by others

There is a risk about living a life thought up by others, because it will cease to be ours. The truth is that, as a last resort, we may have to protect ourselves from empathy.

To create defense mechanisms against its dangers, knowing always that having the ability to create empathy with the other is one of the best characteristics that we can have.

And I think that one of the best defense mechanisms is to distinguish the various “feelings”. Their intensities, their ways of moving us.

I can feel empathy for an abandoned animal on the street. But I will only dedicate my life to saving all street animals if what I feel, if the call that this empathy gives me, is so great that I can’t think of anything else. But if I don’t dedicate my life to saving all animals, I am no worse a person. That is simply not my purpose.

And in the same way that we talk about street animals, we talk about a little bit of everything, and we can apply this reasoning to any other situation.

I believe that feeling is the truest part of us. I believe that when we are alone, our mind runs away to where we should be. And perhaps that is our process in life, to let the mind tell us where we should be, where we feel we should be, and go there.

Unfortunately, life has no instruction manual. And there will accumulate and accumulate situations where we are lost, not knowing what to do. I think we should turn to feeling. Where we are happy. Where we are sure that we are happy.

And that path of aligning ourselves with our mind, the one that has a direct connection to where feelings and emotions come from, is our experience.

Ours.

Protecting us from the dangers of identifications that can cause us to diverge from our path. Because if we keep accumulating experiences and experiences, linked to empathy, linked to a huge set of identifications, without being true to what we feel in a purer way, we run the risk that in the end, when life passes us by on film tape, we will realize that our experiences… were not ours.

What is the meaning of life?

Who knows, maybe that’s the meaning of life. To know how to go against our thoughts. To go where our mind takes us when we stop, take a deep breath, and think, feeling.

What we take from life is what lasts. It is not what we feel, temporarily, about that animal on the street. It is what we feel all the time, permanently. It is what we think. It is what makes us happy, what endures. Then, yes, we can answer the question of this text. When we go towards what lasts, our experiences… are our own.

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