Empath's Elegy

Antipathy is as easy as sympathy, though less enjoyable.
All it requires is projection of self-knowledge.

It is less enjoyable because of the nature of the beast - attraction is empowering whereas repulsion is disempowering - participation in a unity compensates for any personal weakness, whereas non-participation drains you and then leaves you recuperate for the loss on your own. Inclusion attracts the feeble who want to become powerful through association, whereas exclusion attracts those confident in their own strengths, whether these be true or not.

What is a step outside this easy binary is empathy - attempting to imitate the divine in its indifferent coldness.

What the mind finds incomprehensible it reduces down to a level of comprehensibility, which is no more than what it knows and understands of itself.
If, and when, the incomprehensible challenges this "understanding" it cannot accuse itself of an error but must accuse it of contradicting itself, because the unknown is more terrifying than the known, even if the known is a projection of all the negative aspects of oneself, imagined as an external evil.
This unknown "evil" is now even more antipathetic, for fear triggers defensive anger, and passion floods the brain with intoxicating relief.
It is why sympathy is the prefers state - a perspectivism based on a hypothetical uniformity of self, each living in a world surrounded by itself.
A self-referential womb.
Such a delusion requires multiplicity - a contradictory singularity of multiplicity, reduced down to a abstraction where the contradictions can be concealed.
The Golden Rule.

Consciously subjective sympathy/antipathy is the only way a natural empath can hope to endure his/her spontaneous objectivity.

Self-deceiving confusion – and/or an inherited mental deficiency – between empathy (objectivity) and sympathy/antipathy (subjectivity) only serves the motives of the latter.

The possibility that empathy lies outside the sympathy/antipathy dichotomy - binary logic - is so incomprehensible to a mediocre mind - lacking the third-person imagination, and/or the courage/integrity - that the very idea of objectivity becomes mythological.
One would expect that, if we could communicate with lesser beings - such as dogs or apes - the idea of human biological categories - such as sex/gender and breeds (races), or species - would be no less incomprehensible to them.

Nihilism – defined as a defensive reaction to emerging human objectivity - finds the very probability of objectivity, so alien that it must ascribe it to divinity, or deny it as mythological.
What causes anxiety/fear must be negated and reduced to what is more comprehensible, such as sympathy/antipathy.
They associate true empathy (objectivity) with 'evil', so as to deny it and negate it, because to accept it would expose them to a far worse set of probabilities – like not only being known more than one knows oneself, but to the probability of being exploited and manipulated.
Know Thyself is far more than a simple command to investigate and know oneself objectively.
Nihilism is born out of this need to protect oneself – to shelter oneself – from some incomprehensible/unknowable external agency – imagined as a god – but that is no more than a higher state of human.
It achieves this by reducing it to what is comprehensible/knowable, i.e., sympathy/antipathy, and it uses binary logic as its validation because objectivity can never be perfect, and what cannot be perfect can be imagined as any degree of imperfection. But the mediocre mind cannot think is nuanced degrees, but in either/or absolutes, so it denies/negates it completely.

Most people are not complex. What is complex is the bullshyte they come up with, or adopt as a methodology, to conceal how simple they truly are.
As a general rule, those who claim complexity are the simplest of all, while those who claim simplicity are not.

Fear is more reliable than love that enthusiastically intoxicates and gradually dissipates, swept away by waves of time, returning man back to sobering uncertainties from where anxiety springs and grows.

Man need not feel shame imposed upon him from an external authority, if he feels it when considering himself, and the choices that brought him to where he is, from the vantage point of his dead ancestors. He feels them speaking to him in his mind, encouraging, condemning, praising and judging.
They are his court and he is their silent voice. Towards them he holds himself accountable, as but a fresh link in their ancient chain, biding him with their choices, urging him to not divert from their spirit.

Conscience is your ancestry speaking to your conscious mind through your unconscious body, making it your judge and jury, holding your consciousness accountable to the past and to its own values and principles, exposing its self-deceit in the form of pangs of guilt, and shame expressed as a loss of self-esteem.

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The entire body is a sense organ, plant-like, it locally evaluates and chooses, before transmitting its judgement to the brain.

Schopenhauer, Arthur wrote:

The works of really capable minds differ from the rest in their character of decisiveness and definiteness, together with the distinctness and clearness springing there from, since they at all times clearly and definitely knew what they wanted to express; it may have been in prose, verse, or tones. The rest lack this decisiveness and clearness; and in this respect they can be at once recognized. The characteristic sign of all first-rate minds is the directness of all their judgments and opinions. All that they express and assert is the result of their own original thinking and everywhere proclaims itself as such even by the style of delivery... Therefore every genuine and original thinker is to this extent like a monarch; he is immediate and perceives no one who is his superior. Like the decrees of a monarch, his judgments spring from his own supreme power and come directly from himself.

Schopenhauer, Arthur wrote:

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Schopenhauer, Arthur wrote:

Those who have spent their lives reading and have drawn their wisdom from books resemble men who have acquired precise information about a country from many descriptions of travel. They are able to give much information about things, but at bottom they have really no coherent, clear, and thorough knowledge of the nature of the country.

Empathy is essential to understanding other, through an honest, courageous, objective knowledge and understanding of oneself, only it does not stop there, for it is easy to project oneself in the circumstances of another living being - what is most similar to what one identifies as oneself - and then imagine how one would feel if they were in this alien other's circumstances.
This is the simplest and so the first phase of empathy - it remains trapped in sympathy/antipathy, depending on how one feels about oneself.
This projection may act as an unburdening of oneself of what is least appealing about oneself, relative to an ideal, or it may be an idealization of this alien other to enhance one's self-hatred and self-nullificaion, e.g., Abrahamic nihilism.
This projection of oneself in the place of another is also the beginning of objectivity, as one can now perceive oneself as he imagines this alien other perceives him, and by observing this other's actions and listening to his words evaluate the accuracy of this imagined perspective - using multiple others to constantly evaluate his objective assessment of how he is perceived.
this, I claim, is the foundation of nihilism and its various spiritual and ideological manifestations, each offering relief, a defence, against this judgement.
There are, of course those - usually males - who are unable to even reach this level, e.g., autists, and so for them the other remains a mystery they cannot relate to.

But that is not the last phase.
The next phase detaches oneself from the projection, adjusting it so as to eliminate oneself as much as possible, leaving only this alien other, and how they perceive oneself, which is now nothing but another alien agency.
This phase eliminates or transcends, sympathy, and its lass likely antipathy, allowing a more rational, i.e., cold, assessment of all the agencies involved.
Most females are born with an innate ability to reach this level, because their reproductive role depends on it - usually it is intuitive - a feeling - they cannot fully justify nor rationalize.
So, they can reach this level by sacrificing understanding for the sake of knowing, and the knowing is vague, obscure, uncertain - this is also why they can easily be swept away by these intuitions and be tricked/seduced.
The masculine need to understand what is known - as well as his expendability and sexual role - makes him an ideal empath.
No females are famous psychologists, nor philosophers of any note.

Real empathy is not about sympathy nor antipathy, but a pure third-person perspective, liberated by personal needs/desires.
These gifted males are a mix of masculine/feminine traits but must possess a dominant masculine energy for them to become pure objective thinkers and empaths.
_____________
I've repeated all this to say what I meant to say.
Some lacks who lack this perfect masculine/feminine mix, with the masculine being dominant, cannot read others as true empaths, so they must rely on secondary sources - the writings of real empaths - to make sense of other.
Those dominated by the feminine turn to astrology or those with slightly more pronounced masculinity that do not quite manage to make it dominant, turn to famous psychologists or philosophers with a psychological bent, e.g., Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, or some psychological formula, like the ones created by Weininger or Jung.
They compensate for their lack of empathy by the use of a proxy.
So, while a true empath may lack the words to explain his/her insights, the false empath always has the words because they are given to him, along with the reasoning.


see if this exchange were done in person I would not have said nearly as much but only offered a trite monosyllabic explanation.
To disclose more about myself....my mother and son complain that I speak in short sentences they cannot decipher - in my mind I expect them to understand my references without saying more than I need to....but they don't.
With friends I tend to not say much or I drink and say too much....so my friends are very tolerant, or of my kind, because only they can endure me, when I am fully and openly myself.
Nobody would endure my entirelty.....there's a dark abyss in there that nothing can brighten.
If I were to show it, I would be put in jail, or considered mad and placed in a sanitorium.

Ergo Satyr is my mask....or is it my real face, as a metaphor?

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As I said....the first stage of self-awarness leads to sympathy/antipathy - still remaining within conventional subjectivity - intersubjectivity.
the next step is a movement towards objectivity, reducing the subjective to the background, against which the other stands forth as distinct and clear.

Satyr wrote:

…there’s a dark abyss in there that nothing can brighten.

What fuels your darkness?

Rage.

I surmised that from your Postcards from Purgatory although a direct confirmation is always wisest.

Mediocre minds turn to icons/idols, or writers of recipes and methods, to understand what they cannot understand on their own.
They need a method... a formula.
In the area of human psychology this has an interesting consequence.
These inept, dependent ones, usually pretend to be apt and independent... and when forced to rely on their own judgements – without the icon/idol, recipe, formula – they revert to simple projections.
It is the easiest and most primitive method of empathizing – sympathy/antipathy, viz., projecting what one knows of himself/herself into the circumstances of an unknown other, and then imagining how it would feel, or what they would do, or what their motives would be. As such, and as I've said before, Christians – Abrahamics in general – tend to distrust atheists, because they know that without the authoritarian biblical god of threats, vengeance, and rewards, they would be terrible people.
Projection is the easiest and the first to evolve method of empathizing, greatly affected by the individual's self-awareness – Know Thyself – which in mediocre minds is often an overestimation of oneself, and, less often, an underestimation of oneself. This means that mediocre minds, left to their own devices, will always expose more about how they perceive themselves when they attempt to understand and expose another.
Most will turn for aid to external sources, such as famous psychologists, or philosophers known for their psychological insights, e.g., Nietzsche, and many females and emasculated males will turn to superstitions that offer similar compensating formulas like astrology, tarot car reading, runes... and a variety of mystical practices.
The icon/idol, formula, compensates for a sense of powerlessness by giving them an empowering source and method they can apply independently, finding validation in whatever consequences ensue.
So, someone who feels powerless may be attracted to Nietzsche's 'Will to Power' because of the promise of power it implies, and when this fails to provide a dependable formula they can easily apply they may abandon it and turn to the far less demanding and more easily applicable formulas of astrology, or to a charlatan mentor that promises them extraordinary power if they adopt his world-view.
Desperate for what they lack they will succumb to desire and will submit to temptation – gradually disappointed and disillusioned they may then rebel against all earthly authorities since none managed to lived-up to their extraordinary, often supernatural, claims. Having lost confidence in all earthly authorities such desperate individuals will eventually return to the original source of mystical empowerment in the west: Old & New Testaments, or some such similar scripture offering a magical method and a mystical formula of empowerment; scripture whose claims can never be validated nor falsified, remaining obscure enough to be subjectively reinterpreted ad infinitum...

Obsessiveness is related to addictiveness.

How did I put it?
Addiction is to the body what obsession is to the mind.
Must be genetic.
Some individuals are inclined towards addictions....and becoming obsessed with things or people.
Obsession compensating for addiction, since body precedes mind....just as the act precedes the word.

Addiction/Obsession have something to do with need/desire (pleasure, gratification, satisfaction), habituation, and lack of options.
Pleasure is the momentary relief from stress associated with need (lack) and/or excess (desire) - more the latter than the former.

The level of unsatisfied desire - excess energies requiring expunging - lacking options causes the mind to become fixated with what has or promises to provide the level of relief required to rid the mind of the stress and anxiety associated with it.

Their words, their words try to convey the sense of self-love, or self-esteem, of power...but their deeds, their choices, their acts, speak of a deeper sense of self-hatred, insecurity, unrequited love and appreciation.

Their every insult carries with it this secret pain, wanting to unload it upon another.

They try to imitate what is beyond them.
Like bad actor's their performance does not only remain unconvincing but it reveals something the actor did not intend to reveal.

Admission:
(making it easier for the needy)
If you were to ever come across Satyr, in real life, you wouldn't even know it was he, given the average reaction to his on-line character.
You would find him amiable, easy going, perhaps charming, perhaps inappropriately funny, compassionate, friendly, decent...

All based on a lifetime of human interactions.
Can't name the number of work mates that believed they were of my kind, wanting to go out for a drink....
I'm having an old work friend coming over, in a week or two, that contacted me after she retired, wanting to know how I was.
I retired before her, and we lost contact.
She's a typical modern Canadian.
Has no clue what I truly believe.

I keep friends separated from acquaintances.
Friends know not to bring up certain topics when acquittances are present, or to not be surprised when I say nothing when stupid shit - the collective holds to be indubitably true - are uttered by these acquittances.
My reaction is usually to turn to humour, ridiculing the underlying logic, rather than the specific expression of modern/postmodern American mythology.
I, then, change the topic to what they love talking about, themselves, their adventures, problems, loves, hates, preferences....and on and on...

Surviving in an Americanised world necessitates wearing sheepls fluffy garments, braying in their usual ways, and remaining strategically silent when you need not say a thing - leaving them to presume whatever they wish; projection is the rule with this kind, viz., if they like you, they will project themselves into you; if they dislike you, they will project what they fear, what they wish to conceal about themselves, what they detest about themselves.
Unless you want to become a martyr.

The herd has the numbers - not the qualities. They can become dangerous when they gang up on you.
Collectivity is their strength and their weakness.
Most are unable to understand what is above them - except females who intuitively sense what they cannot clearly identify, unless another tells them. Males need clarity, so males usually offer female intuitions understanding.
Females can know, without understanding, and then act based on this knowledge - usually finding icons, idols, authorities, that explain what they know - offering them understanding, e.g., Freud, astrology, Jesus, Scripture....movie stars, famous authors, poets etc.
This is also true of inferior and/or emasculated "males" - retarded in development or of poor genetic inheritance, i.e. men-children.
For this reason they always parrot the usual conventional beliefs, and defensive reactions to whatever contradicts and threatens these collective, conventional beliefs.
Freudian sexual insights, astrological maps, Jungian personality tests, Nietzsche's aphorisms, Biblical Verses, Hindu Vedas ... etc.
The usual culprits.
As such, they associate concepts like 'ego, 'power', 'subconscious' with these authority icons where they first encountered them - imprinting.

Compartmentalized, schizoid, psychotics, require a compartmentalized approach.
Identify and then feed the need/desire that produced the compartmentalization - a requirement restricted by inherited talent and ego.

A lie is to affirm and repeat, not to remain silent and let the liar unchallenged.
Best way to exploit inferior minds is to remain silent with their delusions - whether they be deceptions or self-decpetinos- neither affirming nor repudiating.
Grifters shape the grift around a target's convictions.

The art of seduction....if you've got the physical, mental, material bait, then you allow the other to shape their self-hypnotic love/lust on their own, offering minimal resistance; delicately nudging self-deceit, if and when possible.
A real time talent requiring subtlety.

Know thyself begins with self-consciuosness - subjectively projecting itself into the "shoes of another" to understand what is not itself.
The adjustment form subjective projections to objective empathy, proceeds to an assessment of one's qualities and their degree of participation in one's own psyche - personae.
As I've said psyche is not only the arrangement and proportionality of organs, within an organism, but also their strength relative to them - symmetry, proportionality, position relative to the other organs and to the world - space/time displacement/encompassing of spatial possibilities in time (movement/momentum - thrownness as Heidegger called it).
Know Thyself is the gradual evaluation of organ strengths - across space/time - within your own organization - continuously moving in spatial possibilities, in time, affected by environmental conditions.

An approximation is possible, not a fixed certainty.
This approximation can now be used as a template to study and evaluate another - adjusting the fluctuating organic hierarchies to the approximate ranges of another, under a variety of circumstances and environmental conditions.
Inconspicuous organic hierarchies are made conspicuous via behaviour, choices, expressed judgements, language use, word choices, gestures, scents, facial expressions, vocal tones etc. Even an attempt to control these is made evident.
No simple projection of self, and then imagining what I would do or feel or think in his/her place. This is the easy method of empathy, leading to the error of sympathy or antipathy.
Objectivity allows as little sympathy and antipathy to corrupt an assessment.
Subjective projection exposes more about oneself than it reveals about another.

The effect someone, or something, has on us is mistaken for a motive.