This morning in meditation class, we discussed the importance of empathy. I also posted about this on my other blog but decided it belonged here as well because what is the willingness to torture another but the complete failure of empathy in the torturer or the one who orders torture?

with that in mind I'd like to share with you an excerpt from The Power of Empathy : A Practical Guide to Creating Intimacy, Self-Understanding and Lasting Love by Arthur P. Ciaramicoli and Katherine Ketcham:

Empathy allows us to see the connections between us, making strangers less strange, foreigners less foreign. When we adopt other people's perspectives, we do more than step into their shoes — we use their eyes, we borrow their skin, we feel their hearts beating within us, we lose ourselves and enter into their world, as if we were them. I emphasize those words once again because they are so critically important and so often misunderstood. With empathy, we do not step into others' experience to see it with our eyes — empathy demands that we see it with their eyes. Through that experience we are fundamentally changed, for we see with a sudden, startling clarity that we are the other. All the good and the bad that we see in them we can also recognize in ourselves. The hurt, the shame, the fear of humiliation, the desire for revenge — these are as much parts of our own souls as the quest for honesty, the humble spirit, the forgiving heart.

President Bush has pronounced that those whom he wishes to conquer are "evildoers". He has couched the conflicts in which we find ourselves in dualistic terms - as the struggle between good and evil. We, of course, to his mind are "good". Therefore whatever we do is good. Therefore torture is good and the "evildoers" deserve to be tortured. He is unable to have enough empathy for others to realize that we are all mixtures; we are all capable of wrongdoing and guilty of it, too. He is also apparently unable (or unwilling) to feel pain when another feels pain.

Each of us has a moral duty to cultivate empathy and to let go of the narcissism that prevents it. I know it's painful at times. But the alternative is at best complacency and at worst cruelty. And it is the prevalence of complacency that allows cruelty to flourish unchecked.