In the how to learn to be empathic ... "Do you cognize or simply know?"

Hello there!

I have not been able to write as I wish, but today, escaping from my everyday duties, I found between my notes something I read from Maslow a while ago, and I think now is the right moment to post it.

Maslow describes a self-actualizing person as more astute in his/her perception of other people, in his/her penetration of the core and essence of another person. In other words, a self-actualizing person is much more empathic (among other many attributes that I am going to talk about later on -hopefully-).

But how to perceive the core essence of another person? How to be empathic? Why some persons are more astute than others in matters of perceiving the essence of others?

Well, Let's see, according to Maslow, we "know" when we place our experiences in a system of concepts or words or relations, and "knowing" cuts ourselves off from "cognizing", from perceiving the World as it actually is. I will try to explain further.

Since most of our experiences are filtrated trough our individual system of categories (our own lenses), we tend to abstract things and persons, making them "what we wish them to be"; we abstract things and make categories of these things according to our inner world.

I was trying to find a better example, but let me try with this one: What do you see in this picture?



Two buses? well it is only one, the small one is painted on the large one :) [link]


The same happens to us when we categorize people, we sometimes can be wrong.

Maslow tells us that abstracting limit us of seeing another person as a WHOLE UNIQUE BEING.

In short, knowing, abstracting cuts off the possibility of cognizing, of perceiving an object/person intrinsic uniqueness, of empathizing.

In the looking for empathizing, after some thinking, I devised an experiment which might sound a bit strange, but I think it brought some very nice results. The experiment consists in that, whenever I meet new people or even people I know and I do not like much, I put myself out of my mind, out of my own set of categories, and simply I put myself as an observer with beauty-search lenses ;-). Then, I discovered that almost all people, I have met, have some beauty in, their smile, their eye brightness, their eagerness, their shyness, the way they express tiredness ... I saw beauty in all of them ... and I loved it, every time I saw beauty, I smiled and I was feeling happy. Believe me it works, it worked for me, just you need to try hard enough, but do not try when you are tired, pissed, hungry or suffering some sort of deficiency, as Maslow would say. This exercise, from my own experience, requires you to be fine and willing to find beauty in the other. If you try, can you please let me know your experience?

Best wishes,

Erika.