Synchronizing feelings and thoughts
“Creativity is distinguished by moral religious, existential, and transcendental elements. In consequence it deals with the problem of lasting, unchangeable, and unique emotions essential to deep relationships of love and friendship.”
My eyes rest for a while on these sentences. Please, can you guide me a bit here? As if I am looking for a mentoring session with the author of the paper in which these reflections can be found (“Multilevelness of emotional and instinctive functions”).
How do heartfelt relationships play a role in or inspire your artistic or otherwise creative endeavours?
I sense there is a deep, thirsty need for honesty, trust and openness in those relationships informing my love for life, amongst others manifested in creative works. For clarity of judgement and attunement of the heart, for a real, shared research into the question 'how to live together?'. But as a lot of inner conditionings are crumbling away and emotional dams break, allowing some floods to fill the emptiness in which I learn to rest in between the upheavals, I feel intensely touchable. Images and writings illustrating human and animal suffering around the world come in unfiltered. There is a deepening sensitivity towards moments of conflict with loved ones. At times, I tend to feel hurt so intensely – maybe I should say ‘precisely’ or ‘intensely subtle’ - that panic might break through. It doesn’t though, at least it remains a purely physiological event with - almost - no stories attached. I frequently and happily 'fall back into' awareness and notice that at times, my ability to cognitively share what I find to be true is awkwardly sharp. And then, suddenly, or so it appears, I feel myself shaking again, losing words and direction.
As if there is somewhere to go. There is not. That's the feedback. Sensitivity of feelings is synchronizing with my thought patterns.
Every time my attachment to my close social circle deepens, I allow myself to feel deeper into the sensitivity and suffering of those measurably, socially and 'biologically' far away. I know this may sound unbelievable. Empathy is nowadays often understood as an emotional and cognitive process that comes with a previously unmentioned and conflictuous side note. Our empathy comes with a tendency to identify with an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ and to act upon these identifications with potential violence, or at least ignorance. Here, I appreciate Dabrowski’s writings again, highlighting how multilevel emotional development comes with a deepening of empathy towards the other and a stronger identification with the ‘I’. A new ‘I’, in the process of development. An ‘I’ that, ideally, takes on more depth, breadth, and height of felt through, thought upon and experimented with ‘otherness’, the way I come to understand it. Would this lead to a different kind of empathy? One that does not per se discriminate automatically (but it does in an embodied and reflected sense) between what is ‘mine’ and what is ‘foreign’?
Maybe the felt safety and richness of my direct social environment free up emotional and intellectual space to experiment with new stretches of empathy.
But I am sure it is important to stay cautious here. On paper this may sound good, but in practice it is at times frightening difficult. When it comes to those most close to us, including any particular, symbolized ‘I’ we entertain mentally and socially, to anything we emotionally identify with within a split second, our empathy is intensely conditioned. Only practice can reflect what our deepest, or, if you will, highest motivations are; those that perhaps also require disidentification (Dabrowski might say inhibition or a strong “third factor” as a dynamism involved in rejecting lower-level behavioral tendencies).
Real-life situations show us what the process we call life has taught us so far, consciously, and unconsciously. In my own process, a critical reflection rises. There is a lot that I can still become aware of when it comes to the suffering of sentient beings quite near to me, but still foreign to the maps of the world ‘I’ believe to live in. Critically reflecting on this blogpost, I could say that it appears easier to empathize with those far away towards who’s destiny I feel essentially quite powerless, than to act upon empathy for those (who are not in my direct social circle, yet) whose everyday lot could actually be changed quite directly through my actions.
Hmm, there is a lot to say here, because complexity does not guarantee any simple and linear answers; it appears to me that every object here in my living room reflects some kind of power struggle, some kind of unwanted impact and ecological disharmony. How challenging can decision making become? I am going to chew on this a little bit more, invite my judgment abilities to stretch as far as my current ‘tenderized’ emotions allow me to, and vice versa.