Is Empathy A Learned Behavior?

Photo courtesy of Blake Lasater

I’ve been thinking: If someone has never loved a cat, or a dog, or a horse, or a pig; if someone has never seen the Grand Canyon, or the great sequoias, or stood beside the Niagara Falls; if someone has never been excited by a soccer game. or moved by a work of art, or transported by a Symphony Orchestra – is that person capable of loving and empathizing? What if a person spends their childhood in a vacuum, created by an excess of money and riches? Maybe they view animals, and perhaps people, as playthings for their amusement. Rather than seeing the beauty of a lion or a tiger, they see it as something to be hunted, killed, with its head mounted on their wall, or its body stuffed and placed in their library, a place where they never read. If a person lives this way, do they ever learn to love? Or do they simply lust, and desire, and envy? Can someone learn to enjoy the softer pleasures of this life? Is empathy a learned behavior? More importantly, can self-importance be unlearned! This is one of the reasons I love A Course in Miracles: it’s a process of unlearning the foolishness we’ve thought to be the only way. Happy Independence to Everyone!

“Each worshipper of idols harbors hope his special deities will give him more than other men possess. It must be more. It does not really matter more of what; more beauty, more intelligence, more wealth, or even more affliction and more pain. But more of something is an idol for. And when one fails another takes its place, with hope of finding more of something else. Be not deceived by forms the ‘something’ takes. An idol is a means for getting more. And it is this that is against God’s Will.
—A Course in Miracles T-29.VIII.8:6-13

“Beauty, wealth, or fame is incompetent to meet the demands of the affections, and should never weigh against the better claims of intellect, goodness, and virtue. Happiness is spiritual, born of Truth and Love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.
—MaryBaker Eddy - Science & Health Page 51:15-21