Prelude: The Territory We Are Entering
The commentary on the common knowledge game, and the lemming effect, should have given the reader a substantial window through which to view humanity’s extraordinary potential for both corruption and healing within our social connections. Another facet of the most fundamental truths of our existence is the extraordinary depth of our capacity for connection to one another—and how powerfully that connection influences all of us, for good and for ill. If we learn to collectively embrace this universal fact, we will have a crucial clue as to how to reduce the incidences of disease and distress in our world without simply tattooing more medical technology upon our bodies, minds, and souls.
We are not separate beings navigating a neutral universe. We are nodes in a living, breathing network of consciousness—porous, permeable, and profoundly interdependent. Every thought we think, every emotion we carry unexamined, every wound we refuse to acknowledge, radiates outward into the field of shared human experience. And every act of genuine connection, every moment of true understanding between one soul and another, sends a healing frequency through that same field.
This chapter is a meditation. It is also a diagnosis, a cartography, and, ultimately, an invitation. It is an attempt to map the mysterious territory that exists between you and me—between any two souls who dare to meet one another honestly across the chasm of their individual histories and the accumulated wounds of civilization. It asks what empathy truly is, what it costs, what it heals, and what it demands of those courageous enough to practice it in its fullest and most dangerous forms.
It is also a chapter about the path that extends beyond the human—beyond the personal, beyond the social, and into something that the mystics have always pointed toward, but that language has always struggled to contain: the path between the individual and the cosmos itself. Between the finite and the infinite. Between the suffering self and the vast, unconditional intelligence that some call God, some call the Universe, and some have no name for at all.
Let us begin where we must always begin—in the middle of the mess.
“No mud, no lotus.”—Thich Nhat Hanh
Part One: The Pandemics of Disconnection — America’s Open Wounds and the Failure of Mere Medicine
America is facing multiple pandemics at once, and not all are biological. There’s the pandemic of collective uncritical thinking, fueled by Christian nationalist propagandists spreading harmful lies through influential political channels. There’s the pandemic of cultural division, turning neighbors into rivals and pressuring us to choose sides before choosing our shared humanity. And there are the pandemics of loneliness, isolation, depression, addiction, obesity, cancer, and other traumatic forces—including what some call MAD, or mutually assured death, a grim nod to the gun lobby, Second Amendment extremists, and the unchecked spread of firearms used in tragic murders and suicides of the most innocent.
These pandemics are not separate phenomena occurring in parallel. They are interconnected manifestations of a singular underlying disease: the disease of disconnection. They create more opportunities for eruptions of drama and anxiety, which interbreeds with any potentially unhealed pain and suffering already inherent within our lives. They amplify loneliness. They mutate trauma. They make it harder for any of us to find the thread that connects us to one another and to the larger body of life of which we are all a part.
We must become more conscious of how the unconscious actions of others—and our own unfulfilled healing response—introduce more traumatic influences into our lives. Those on the healing path will attempt to be spiritually present for others while recognizing and transforming, both individually and collectively, all internalized trauma dramas. The first step is to acknowledge what we are dealing with. The second is to understand the tools available to us.
And the most profound of those tools—the one least understood, least valued, and most urgently needed—is empathy.
But before we can understand empathy, we must understand the three fundamental qualities of energy exchange that govern all human relationships. We must understand love, hatred, and indifference.
Part Two: The Trinity of Energy Exchange — Love, Hatred, and the Dangerous Seduction of Indifference
Love, hate, and indifference are three terms we use to describe the quality of our relationships with each other. In various proportions, all of us employ these three qualities of energy exchange in our lives, depending on the person and the situation involved. As human beings, we experience love and hatred as powerful forces that guide all subsequent feelings and perceptions in predefined directions.
Love is an open system of friction-free energy exchange. It binds us to each other in easily identifiable ways. Love is the open channel through which compassion flows freely. It is the condition in which the self expands—where the boundaries of the individual ego become permeable and the wellbeing of another becomes as real and as urgent as one’s own. To love another is to be enlarged by them.
Hatred is its opposite in structure, if not in intensity. It is a closed, attenuated system of energy exchange that also binds us to its object—but in a very different manner. Hatred blocks positive energy exchange and seals the channel between the hater and the hated. It unfairly and illogically separates the hater from its object, traumatizing both the receiver and the giver of that dark energy. What is less commonly understood is the physiological reality of this dynamic: extreme emotions trigger the release of stress hormones in the brain, and over time, these hormones lead to increased inflammation throughout the body, resulting in significant health consequences. To hate another is, quite literally, to poison oneself. The one who drinks the poison of hatred and hopes the other person will suffer through it is often operating under a profound self-destructive delusion.
Indifference is the most deceptive of the three. It is a quality of attention that attempts to keep everybody and everything separate from the observer. The emotionally detached individual is choosing to live in a closed system—a spiritual vacuum. Those practicing total indifference live in an isolated world, with little real emotional connection with anybody or anything other than their own thoughts and feelings. Indifference is often the residue of traumatic experience, and it results in the emotional and spiritual oppression of others, as well as the repression of the personal spirit. For most people, indifference is applied only in specific situations rather than as a complete life orientation. Yet even in its partial applications, it gives the practitioner the illusory sense of having no personal accountability to that which is being witnessed. Personal responsibility for a collectively shared error of the heart is denied, and the potential for a shared healing experience is negated.
Fred Rogers, one of the more genuinely spiritual beings to have graced American public life in the last century, said it plainly:
“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say, ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.”
The person who practices indifference does not consider themselves a villain. They consider themselves rational, protected, safe. They have learned, often through repeated disappointments and betrayals, that caring is dangerous—that love exposes you, that empathy is a wound waiting to happen. And so they seal themselves away behind the transparent wall of emotional neutrality and call it wisdom.
But it is not wisdom. It is a survival strategy that has outlived its usefulness and become its own form of imprisonment.
To choose indifference is to choose a kind of living death. And the world, which so desperately needs our conscious engagement, cannot afford for any more of us to make that choice.
Part Three: The Architecture of Empathy — Decoding the Path Hidden Within the Word
The word empathy has a secret message built into it, revealed through creative interpretation. Let us take the word apart into three components: em—path—y(ou). Empathy is now seen to be the healing path between the mirror image of me (em) and y(ou). When the concepts of “you” and the “mirror image of me” are realized to be identically ONE, me and y(ou) disappear—and our empathy becomes simply the path.
This is not a mere linguistic trick. It is a structural truth about what empathy actually does at its deepest level. Empathy, in both its positive and negative expressions, is the mechanism for transporting emotional energy to create a form of resonance or attunement between sentient beings. It is always in play in both love and hate relationships.
In positive empathy, energy flows freely in both directions, between the “giver” and the “receiver.” There is a shared sense of the expansion of the self—a feeling of becoming larger, more real, more alive, precisely because you have allowed someone else’s reality to become real to you. In its most radical expression, positive empathy can produce shared mental images—what some traditions call telepathy—and genuine spiritual healing. But those are subjects for a deeper exploration than we can fully undertake here.
In negative empathy, energy flow is uneven and dominated by one party, potentially resulting in the oppression of the other and the repression of aspects of the self in both. There is a strong sense of the contraction of the self by at least one party in this exchange. One person’s unhealed darkness seeps into the field of another’s consciousness, and what was meant to be a connection becomes a contamination.
Contemporary research in neuroscience tells us that our brains, like those of other primates, contain mirror neurons. These neurons are triggered in our brains when someone else is sad, angry, or happy, and they—in coordination with other pre-cognitive and cognitive functions—help us feel what that other person is feeling. They help us inhabit, however briefly, the experiential reality of another. When our experiences are similar enough, we can empathize in a way that is genuinely soothing to the other person.
The effort to understand someone else, when made in good faith, can go a long way toward helping them feel better and, sometimes, even toward shifting their behaviors. This can be considered a collaboration between the spirits of the individuals in communication. Though the changing of another’s behavior is not the conscious intention of empathy, most find that through the empathetic connection, each participant is taken beyond the former boundaries of their understanding of self and others.
Anaïs Nin, who understood human connection with rare and luminous precision, wrote:
“Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.”
This is the nature of genuine empathetic exchange. It is not commonplace. It is not the cursory acknowledgment we offer one another across the surface of our busy lives. It is a rare and precious phenomenon—a moment when two souls actually meet, when the usual defenses drop and something real passes between them. These moments are the jewels of human existence. They are also the primary vectors through which healing propagates through the collective field of human consciousness.
Part Four: The Neurological Foundations of Our Interconnection — Science Confirms What the Mystics Always Knew
Human beings are, by nature, profoundly empathetic. Studies consistently show that all animals—especially those mammalian in nature—share in this often sublime characteristic. It is genuinely difficult to harm another person when we can sense the suffering they are experiencing or that we may be causing. The exceptions arise when one is in an extremely hateful state, or when indifference arises from sociopathic or psychopathic natures—conditions in which the mirror neuron system has been fundamentally disrupted or never properly formed.
A conscious person would never abuse any person or animal of any species—including consuming it, unless there were no other choices available for food—after recognizing the unity of sentience that exists in our natural world. Of course, much of humanity is unconscious, and we struggle to even refrain from harming each other, let alone protecting the whole of the animal kingdom. Humankind has systematically “dehumanized” and “de-sentienced” both humans and animals to justify cruel and destructive relationships, as well as its devastatingly extractive relationship with the natural world that sustains us all.
The Judeo-Christian Western religious tradition—and its profound misunderstanding of the wholeness and unity of life—along with its subsequent influence on thinkers throughout the ages, has been at the forefront of this travesty for millennia. The notion that the human being stands apart from and above the natural world, charged to “subdue” and “have dominion over” every living creature, has licensed incalculable violence against the web of life upon which we utterly depend. This is not a theological argument. It is an ecological emergency. And it begins, as all such emergencies begin, in the architecture of perception—in how we see ourselves in relation to everything that is not us.
Neuroscience, quantum theory, and indigenous wisdom are now converging on a single, startling conclusion: the self is not what we think it is. The bounded, isolated, autonomous self of the Western philosophical tradition is a construction—a useful fiction that the brain assembles to navigate the practical demands of physical existence. Beneath this construction, at the level of field physics and neural resonance, the boundaries between organisms are far more porous and permeable than our everyday experience suggests.
This has been verified by mystics, sages, and now quantum theorists. It should not be passed over lightly, like an unpopular dish at dinner. The human race has historically become addicted to the religious and philosophical junk food continuously processed from the limitations of our distant past, rather than feasting at the table of the infinite Spirit of the Now.
Research is also converging on another uncomfortable truth: indifference and hatred have been normalized in modern society, and this normalization carries a profound impact on our collective mental and physical health. Mental health professionals consistently emphasize that unresolved personal traumas hinder our capacity for empathy, leading to a cycle of apathy and detachment. To break free, we must look within ourselves and address these wounds. Therapeutic approaches—including cognitive behavioral therapy, somatic experiencing, mindfulness practices, and the kind of deep, radical self-examination that this book has been attempting to model—are effective instruments in this healing process.
The challenge lies in fostering empathy and compassion in environments that prioritize individual success over collective flourishing. But change is possible. And it begins, as all transformations begin, in the consciousness of the individual.
Part Five: The Dangerous Practice — Radical Empathy and the Technology of the Soul
There is empathy, as we commonly understand it—the capacity to feel for another, to acknowledge their suffering without being destroyed by it, to stand on the shore and throw a rope to someone who is drowning. This is valuable. This is necessary. For most of us, this is the appropriate and sustainable form of empathetic engagement.
And then there is what might be called Radical Empathy.
Radical Empathy is not standing on the shore. Radical Empathy is jumping into the water. It is the dissolution of the egoic boundary. It is the mechanism by which Jesus is reported to have healed. When he touched the leper, in the metaphysical sense, he did not merely transmit divine energy from a safe distance. He became the leprosy. He opened his own energetic field so completely that he resonated with the suffering of the other, took it into his own vast consciousness, and transmuted it through the power of unconditional love.
This is one of the true meanings of the Cross—not as a transaction with an angry deity, but as a somatic reality.
“He took up our pain and bore our suffering.”
This is Radical Empathy. It is the willingness to let the suffering of the world vibrate within your own bones. To let the tumor of another manifest within your own proprioception. To let the grief of a stranger tear at your own heart with the same ferocity with which it tears at theirs.
I speak of this not as a theologian theorizing from a safe distance, but as a witness. I intend to speak to three specific relationships in which I have inadvertently or intentionally been a practitioner of Radical Empathy—and to what that practice cost, and what it ultimately revealed.
Part Six: Donelle Mae Flick Paullin — My First Experience of Radical Empathy and Its Consequences
After wedding beer keggar at my parent’s home. Donelle, me, and her father, 1979
My first experience of a relationship that eventually blossomed into Radical Empathy revolved around my first wife, Donelle Mae Flick Paullin, who died on the date of my birth—November 20, 2022—at the age of 67. I first met Donelle in 1971, when my friend Randy Olson introduced me to his girlfriend’s stepsister. She was a sensitive, caring, beautiful, and extraordinarily intelligent young woman, beloved by all of her classmates. I, by contrast, was an immature and often insecure young man—a high IQ paired with a low emotional one—chasing dreams of the Air Force and, eventually, NASA. Eight years later, Donelle would become my wife. But between that first meeting and our wedding, and in all the years that followed, there is a vast story to tell: a story of suffering, of the hope for healing, of disillusionment, and, ultimately, of the slow and arduous growth into Radical Empathy.
To love Donelle was to be confronted, again and again, with the limits of my own capacity to understand. She had been wounded long before I knew her. Born into a family where her mother Marlene’s narcissism and neglect created the conditions for unspeakable harm, Donelle was sexually abused by a predator named Bud Barr when she was only six years old. The damage was rooted deep within the very fabric of her being, its tendrils inexorably entwining with every aspect of the path that followed. By the end of her senior year in high school, the disease that professionals would label paranoid schizophrenia had broken through. I did not yet have the eyes to see how a child’s terror could echo across a lifetime, how the secrets a family demands its children keep can become the very illness those children carry.
“We are only as sick as our secrets,”
I would later come to understand—and Donelle bore not only her own secrets, but the secrets of everyone who had failed to protect her.
In those early years, my empathy was conditional, transactional, and easily exhausted. When we married in September of 1979, Donelle was stable, studying to become a sous chef, managed by the latest “miracle” antipsychotics. I had delayed our marriage for six years precisely because I needed her to be well enough for me to feel safe. That, I now see, was the empathy of a frightened young man—love that required the beloved to first become manageable. When she suffered the most devastating breakdown of her life that following winter, crying out
“I am controlled! I am controlled!”
into the night, I moved across the street rather than remain beside her. I told myself it was for my own sanity. And perhaps it was. But bravado is easily worn threadbare by the caustic winds of reality, and the pain of her suffering remained a constant presence, an echo reverberating through the hollow chambers of my heart. We divorced in 1983, and Donelle drifted into homelessness on the streets of Portland, where she became the victim of atrocities I can scarcely bring myself to name.
I believed, in ending our marriage, that I was establishing a boundary that would protect me and grant her the space to heal. Instead, the mental healthcare system—or the absence of one—swallowed her whole. She was failed in every way imaginable: medicated into a stranger’s body, ostracized, marginalized, even subjected to a two-day “exorcism” by well-meaning fundamentalists who chained her to a wall and understood nothing of her plight. Watching this unfold, I began to grasp something I had been too immature to perceive before. Donelle, and the mentally ill in general, are society’s canaries in the mine. We will all eventually die of spiritual asphyxiation if we neglect to listen to the stories told by our most vulnerable and most damaged family members. My helplessness was teaching me, slowly and painfully, that to love someone I could not fix required a different kind of presence altogether—a willingness to bear witness rather than to repair.
The turning point came in 1987. I had recently gotten sober, and as part of working the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, I went to visit Donelle at her apartment near Camas, Washington, to make amends. We had been divorced for three years, but I still kept in touch out of concern for her. When I arrived, candles flickered throughout the apartment, casting an eerie, otherworldly glow, and Donelle was in the depths of a complete dissociative breakdown. As I sat down to speak with her, I was struck by the transformation in her appearance and countenance—she looked impossibly young and innocent. As she spoke, I felt with absolute certainty that I was witnessing a six- or seven-year-old girl, a persona that had taken residence within her and was now speaking through her.
Something inspired me to give voice to what I was seeing. I told the frightened child before me that she was not responsible for the abuse she had suffered at the hands of Bud, and perhaps others, during Marlene’s drunken soirees. I tried to extend all the forgiveness and compassion my heart could hold to that naive, innocent child making her presentation before me. We wept together, and my heart broke open in a way it never had before. I hurt as I had never hurt as a human being—and yet within that hurt, something essential was being born: the capacity to meet another’s suffering without flinching, without fixing, without fleeing.
Later in that same visit, a different persona emerged: calm, composed, mature. When I asked who I was speaking with, the voice answered, “God,” and offered me the wisest, most loving counsel I had ever received.
“I have many faces, but you have recognized mine, and you have reached the point of being able to accept beauty in your life. You have made peace with your past, but peace does not last forever. You have much work to do, but your work will have love guiding it, and protecting you.”
That a damaged human being could become the vessel for such grace remains, to me, a miracle. That is how God works sometimes.
In the years that followed, I came to see that Radical Empathy is not a destination one arrives at but a road one is broken open upon. Over the long arc of knowing Donelle, I tried to be the best support I could, but I was damaged goods myself—hobbled by my own selfishness, addiction, and sense of powerlessness. I failed her in countless ways, and she deserved far better than I was able to give. With mental illness, we tend to fail together—as families, as a culture, as a human race. The great gift we can offer is not a cure but a non-judgmental listening ear, a heart kept open to the stories that are told. Had Donelle been lovingly nurtured from birth through adulthood, I can only hope the disease might never have erupted at all. Traumatization of the innocent cannot lead to happy outcomes.
When she died on my birthday in 2022, the irony felt almost unbearable—a cruel jest from the fates, or perhaps God’s enigmatic humor. Her departure was at once a relief and a despair: relief that she was finally free from the agony that had defined so much of her adult life, and despair at all that the world had been denied by her suffering. In the end, Donelle taught me that love is not about possessing, but about bearing witness and extending grace. It is about loving through the chaos, the illness, and the loss. May her memory live on—not as a reminder of the sorrow that mental illness can sow, but as a beacon illuminating the path toward Radical Empathy: the hard-won understanding that to truly see another soul, especially the most broken among us, is the closest we may ever come to the divine.
Part Seven: Marty — Another Journey Into the Depths of Radical Empathy and Its Consequences
Marty and wife Eddy
In 2017, I walked a friend named Marty to the threshold of death. We embarked on a journey that transcended the sterile confines of hospital rooms and clinical protocols. I committed to being a vessel for his transition. I stripped away the armor of self-protection and engaged in Radical Empathy with full knowledge of what that might cost.
The results were terrifyingly real.
For most of my life prior to the age of thirty-one, I preferred intoxication over speaking my truth. Trauma—both personal and intergenerational—had relegated my self-expression to the lower realms of consciousness, leaving me disconnected from any creative potential within. But a series of profound experiences convinced me that I must speak up and honor the calling of my own spirit. The story of how I discovered my creative voice is inseparable from the story of how I discovered, and was nearly destroyed by, Radical Empathy.
It began on an ordinary evening in November 2016 when our book club hosted Sheila Hamilton, an author and five-time Emmy-winning journalist who had written a memoir about her late husband’s struggle with bipolar disorder and his tragic suicide. As she spoke, her words struck chords deep in my soul. Her husband’s pain surfaced the submerged fragments of my own story. By the end of the night, I felt an urgent compulsion to write—to give voice to the unseen chains of oppression and repression that strangle human potential. I started a blog, posting unpolished reflections into a digital void. Most posts received no attention. Yet I pressed on.
Amid the silence, my friend of twenty years, Marty, emerged as a reader. He resonated with my posts on toxic masculinity and its insidious ripple effects on society. Our friendship, once casual, began to deepen. I had always observed an unspoken restraint in Marty—a quiet shadow who retreated in the presence of his more dominant wife, Eddy. I recognized this dynamic intimately. It mirrored how society often silences voices that challenge its rhythm, filling any void with its own loud narrative. But Marty heard me. Our dialogues became a safe harbor in a world that seemed increasingly disinterested in honest communication.
Through this process, I began to understand that oppression is not merely a social system inflicted by one group upon another. It is an infiltration of the spirit—a reinforced silence that dims our creative light. I saw this oppression not only in Marty but also in myself, where a lifetime of unacknowledged trauma had manifested as disease. Healing, I realized, requires taking radical responsibility for how we unconsciously perpetuate these systems. We are all simultaneously victim and perpetrator. Acknowledging this duality is essential for meaningful change.
My journey took an unexpected turn on January 11, 2017. I awoke at 2:45 in the morning with an inexplicable urgency. Sitting in my office, my body suddenly betrayed me. I lost all motor control, yet my awareness remained painfully sharp. Frozen, I became a silent witness to my own body’s rebellion. Within this state, I perceived a dark presence in the left hemisphere of my inner awareness—a black mass, the size of a golf ball. Fear took root, but I kept this unsettling discovery to myself.
Weeks later, on March 5th, my dear friend Marty—a survivor of malignant melanoma—suffered a major seizure and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Golf ball-sized. In the left hemisphere of his brain.
I could not dismiss the parallels. Death had made itself known to me in a palpable, visceral form, and now it seemed our struggles were mirroring each other in a way that defied rational explanation. As Marty was prepped for surgery, I was pummeled by waves of anxiety. Lying on my couch, it felt as though my consciousness was slipping away. My wife, Sharon, found me pale and broken. I believed then—and believe now—that this was not a physical illness but a spiritual unraveling: an event unfolding within the soul.
For years, I had allowed myself to be silenced by judgmental voices and my own fear. Now, with my sense of identity dissolving at its edges, I begged Sharon to carry my message to the world for me. With steadfast love, she refused.
“Your message is your own to deliver,” she said.
“It must be spoken through you.”
Her refusal was an act of ultimate empowerment. In that pivotal moment, I turned inward and prayed. Compelled by an unseen force, I began to write.
Words poured through me—unfiltered and raw. For two days, I channeled fifteen pages of my story in a state of what I can only describe as divine flow. This was not merely writing. It was a resurrection of my creative spirit, long buried under the weight of oppression and fear and unacknowledged grief. And miraculously, the moment I completed my narrative—which coincided almost precisely with Marty’s successful tumor removal—the dark mass of energy that had lingered within me vanished entirely.
It was then I understood: to heed the counsel of so-called authorities can never replace the authority of one’s own spirit. For those of us blessed with the power of expression, silence is Death’s closest ally.
I speak of this not merely as a theologian, but as a witness. Two months before Marty physically experienced his tumor, I had felt it within myself. My interoceptive sense—the internal mapping of my own being—had screamed that the mass was in me. I could feel its weight, its pressure, its dark gravity. It was a proprioceptive illusion, yet it was ontologically true. I was carrying his burden. I was Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross—not metaphorically, but energetically.
This connection was no accident of imagination. Contemporary neuroscience tells us that our brains, like those of other primates, contain mirror neurons. These neurons are triggered when someone else is sad, angry, or happy, helping us to feel what that other person is feeling. What they help us feel is what we would experience if we were in that person’s place. In the case of my connection with Marty, this mechanism was not merely activated—it was amplified to its furthest extreme. The Radical Empathy created a genuine transmission of suffering from one field of consciousness to another, escalating into what mystics have called the stigmata syndrome. It is a profound state where the empath takes on so much of the suffering energy of a treasured person that they manifest in their own body the wounds and symptoms of the one they love.
This level of connection is so foreign to our modern, individualized sensibilities that it is often misinterpreted. Marty’s wife, witnessing the profound, wordless intimacy between us, suspected a romantic affair. She could not conceive of a love that transcends the romantic or the familial—a love that is purely, terrifyingly existential. She saw two men merging souls to facilitate a departure and could only categorize it through the lens of earthly attachment. But what was occurring between us was something older and stranger and more fundamental than romance. It was the soul’s recognition of itself in another.
Marty’s recovery was followed by setbacks. New treatments left him wheelchair-bound. His energy was now devoted entirely to navigating the chaos of his unraveling physical state. He confided in me how inarticulate he felt—unable to capture in words the disorienting transition from the vital man he had been to the person he was becoming. I shared a metaphor with him: his struggle was like a forest fire, consuming the layers of identity he had cultivated over decades, burning away illusions and attachments, leaving behind only the eternal, basic truth of who he essentially was. His pain was not a punishment. It was an invitation—the most severe and undeniable invitation of his life—to uncover the unshakable strength beneath all the constructed identities.
Slowly, Marty began to exist within the fire, allowing its searing heat to shape him into something freer. He was tormented by the thought of the cancer’s inevitable return and by the waking dreams that blurred his reality. He sought distance, even from his wife, whose constant presence—though loving—felt oppressive. He was waiting for a creative story to form in his mind: a container for his intention to move beyond all his knowns and into a new life, free from the fear of death.
On September 10, 2017, Marty exercised his right to Oregon’s Death with Dignity option. He chose to shield me and most others from this knowledge until it was accomplished. A party celebrating his life and marriage, held the night before, became a surreal, liminal space straddling joy and finality. My own spirit had sensed a healing in him—a renewed coherence and vitality—and I grappled with disbelief for weeks.
His primary fear had been that the cancer would steal his identity. He chose instead to meet death on his own terms. His final creative writing piece described watching a coyote—the timeless trickster—loping confidently through a cemetery. In that creature, Marty saw a part of himself: a spirit unafraid to walk the line between worlds.
Marty’s death shattered parts of me I thought were unbreakable. Yet in those broken places, something profound and resilient grew. His passing was not just an end but a transformation. His spirit persists—not in some otherworldly place, but in the transformational energy he inspired, and in the pages of this book, and in whoever these words reach and awaken.
Part Eight: The Stigmata Syndrome — When Empathy Becomes Perilous
The experience with Marty illuminated something that must be examined with great care: the perilous shadow side of empathy. Empathy has been found to carry not just a positive or “good” aspect. Empathy can also drag an unsuspecting and spiritually unprepared empath into the ditch alongside someone who may be of low consciousness.
This might be termed negative empathy—a state of being so sensitive to other people’s experiences that we become overwhelmed by their suffering, to the point where we begin to suffer ourselves. This has the opposite effect of the healing collaboration that occurs through positive empathy. Instead of expanding both parties, it becomes an alliance of shared mutual pain, which eventually results in new forms of emotional isolation for both.
The extreme form of this empathic vulnerability might be called the Stigmata Syndrome: a state in which the empath takes on so much of the suffering energy and experience of another person—whether loved or despised—that they begin to manifest in their own bodies and minds the wounds and symptoms of the person they have become attached to. Those who have read any of my earlier works will be well aware of my profound and terrifying experience with Marty, and of the extraordinary spiritual growth potential hidden within such dangerous territory.
Radical Empathy is not a hobby. It is rigorous, life-consuming, and inherently dangerous. When you open the door of your being fully to another’s suffering, you cannot filter what enters. The practitioner risks somatic transference. The disease being witnessed, the darkness being held, seeks a home. If the practitioner’s own vessel is not immaculately clear—if there is ego, fear, attachment, or unresolved trauma—the suffering can lodge itself within them and begin to grow.
This is why I have since resolved to exercise severe discernment about when and with whom I engage in Radical Empathy. There are those who are called to this practice—it is, essentially, the vocation of a healer, a shaman, a true spiritual director. But it is not a path to be wandered down casually. The aspiration to heal must be matched by an equal commitment to one’s own ongoing purification. You cannot transmit what you do not embody. And you cannot safely absorb what your own field cannot process and release.
The alternative—the path that most of us are called to most of the time—is what might be called the way of the Compassionate Witness. To practice Compassionate Witnessing is to offer the infinite listening ear: to hold space without merging. To say to another human being, with your entire presence:
I see your pain. I am not afraid of it. I will not run away, and I will not pretend it is not there. But I will also not climb into it with you and drown alongside you, because that helps no one.
This is not a failure of love. It is love’s intelligence—love mature enough to understand its own limits and wise enough to respect them.
Part Nine: The Architecture of Hatred — Institutionalized Darkness and Its Costs
Perhaps our knee-jerk reaction to certain people in our shared cultural life—people like Donald Trump, who represents a particular and particularly visible form of spiritual darkness—has been to hate and despise them. Much has been written by conscious, caring people about the necessity of not hating such figures, but of instead perceiving them as ill people, as poor people, as suffering people. This change of perception may open our personal doors to compassion, sympathy, and even love. It is permissible to be angry at abuses of power, past and present, as long as that anger does not become institutionalized within us—as long as it does not harden into something permanent, something that outlives its usefulness and becomes a prison.
By clinging to anger and resentment over a long period, we enhance our susceptibility to having those emotions transformed into hate-filled memories—into what might be called personally institutionalized hatred. We witness daily the collectively institutionalized hatred within our world culture, manifesting as religious persecution, patriarchy, xenophobia, misogyny, racism, bullying, homophobia, nationalism, ecological destruction, and other self-destroying energy exchanges. We do not wish to add to the suffering of others—or of ourselves—by creating new pathways of institutionalized hatred in our own consciousness.
The distinction between constructive anger and corrosive hatred is critical, and it is one that our culture rarely makes clearly enough.
Constructive anger is spontaneous. It arises from being an active, present witness to injustice in the moment. It is always relevant and productive. It wakes up the oppressed and repressed spirit. It generates extra motivational energy for constructive engagement with a world that needs to change. Constructive anger gives all parties involved an opportunity to share in the perception of a wrong or injustice and to share in a plan to right it.
Hatred, by contrast, carries much deliberation within it. It arises from the historical deposits of unresolved anger—from the sediment of repressed pain and suffering within our memories—and it looks to punishment and the destruction of others as its primary objective. Hatred develops from the collective deposits of darkness that our culture has handed down across generations, as well as from our own personal painful memories. Once established, hatred becomes entrenched as a mostly unconscious dark power broker within our minds, keeping us pilloried to the past and emotionally chained to the objects of our fixation. We are no longer free to respond to each new moment as it unfolds. Instead, we substitute old patterns of self-defeating and oppressive responses, while simultaneously repressing the desire within us to connect with peace and love.
What can be most difficult to consider is the truth that people who habitually hate others also hate themselves. Some attempt to hide from self-loathing through false narratives of their own greatness, while deriding and demeaning all who are unlike themselves. The multitude of lies, the compulsive need to manipulate others’ perceptions, and the relentless deceptive behavior reveal an absolute need to hide from the truth of a diminished and damaged sense of self. This is manifested through continuous projection—accusing the innocent and the guilty alike of one’s own personal shortcomings, deceptions, and criminality. This communication style is madness-inducing for any rational, intelligent human being. The witness to such expression can feel as though the very fabric of sanity is being ripped apart before their eyes.
For those not under a hypnotic trance, this spiritual depravity is easily perceived and felt. And the unwary watcher—in an involuntary and forced relationship with this disfigured being—can, through negative empathy, inadvertently share in the self-hatred being projected. This is another manifestation of the Stigmata Syndrome: the entrained observer inadvertently takes on the negative energy of the person under observation, and through the mirror neuron phenomenon—through negative empathy—shares in the disfigured spirit that this darkness continues to manifest.
This is a normal and natural response to proximity to darkness. Yet as we become more conscious, it becomes clear that we need no longer climb into the pigpen of another person’s self-hatred and unconsciously support them in it. We can observe without absorbing. We can witness without merging. We can remain in right relationship to the darkness of others without being captured by it.
The role of leadership in this dynamic deserves particular attention. Leadership is most profoundly tested during crises. A leader’s ability to respond with understanding, to connect with those who are suffering, and to make decisions informed by compassion defines their legacy in ways that nothing else can. When a leader demonstrates genuine empathy, they signal that the struggles of their people matter deeply. This creates trust, motivates collaboration, and strengthens communities. Conversely, the absence of empathy in positions of power can have devastating consequences—fostering division, neglect, and a corrosive alienation that eventually poisons the entire social body.
History offers instructive examples. Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the economic devastation of the Great Depression with urgency and compassion, spearheading programs that directly addressed the struggles of ordinary Americans. New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern demonstrated empathy in the face of terror; her response to the Christchurch mosque attacks empowered grieving communities and reinforced national unity. And Captain G.M. Gilbert, the psychologist who observed the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, noted that the defining characteristic of many of history’s most catastrophic leaders was their utter inability to empathize—a quality he equated with evil itself.
The question of how we respond to the empathy deficit in our leadership, and in our collective life, is not merely political. It is spiritual. It is a question about what kind of world we are choosing to create with every thought we think, every conversation we have, every vote we cast, and every moment of genuine connection—or tragic disconnection—we enact with another human being.
Part Ten: The Perils of the Savior — Empathy Without Boundaries and the Crucifixion of the Rescuer
The desire to rescue others frequently originates from a background of trauma or guilt. Individuals who have experienced significant emotional distress or traumatic events often develop a heightened sense of empathy and responsibility toward others. This can manifest as an almost compulsive need to “fix” the lives of those around them—a belief, deeply embedded and often entirely unconscious, that their worth is tied to the wellbeing of others.
While this drive can lead to genuine acts of kindness and support, it also sets the stage for potential heartache and betrayal. The savior complex—or what might be called the Rescuer’s Wound—is a condition in which the individual’s empathy has become distorted by ego needs and unhealed trauma into something that ultimately serves the helper more than the helped.
History provides a poignant and extreme example of the perils of this dynamic: the crucifixion of Jesus. Despite his efforts to bring truth and healing to his people, Jesus was ultimately betrayed by those he sought to help. This principle remains operative today. Those who feel compelled to intervene in the lives of others often find that their efforts are met with resistance, misunderstanding, or outright hostility. The very individuals they aim to support may reject their help—and those who project the most darkness require the most careful handling—leading to feelings of betrayal and what might be called an emotional crucifixion.
Recognizing this principle is crucial for anyone engaged in mental health advocacy, empathy practices, or social activism. Understanding that one’s efforts to help may not always be welcomed—may, in fact, be violently opposed—can prevent the disillusionment and emotional burnout that destroys so many sincere healers and helpers.
This does not mean withdrawal from service. It means service offered from a place of deep personal wholeness rather than from the anxious, hungry place of an unhealed wound that needs to be validated. It means respecting the autonomy and agency of those we seek to support. It involves listening without judgment, offering assistance without imposing, and understanding that our role is not to save but to empower. It means, in the end, trusting the other person’s own capacity for healing—because genuine empathy recognizes the divine potential in the other, even when—perhaps especially when—that other cannot yet recognize it in themselves.
True and sustainable help must stem from genuine empathy and understanding rather than a compulsion to validate one’s self-worth. By shifting our focus from being saviors to being empathetic allies, we can create a more realistic and sustainable approach to supporting others. This transition requires us to confront our own motivations, heal our past wounds, and develop a deeper sense of self-worth that is independent of the outcomes of our efforts.
Part Eleven: The Brain as Dreamer — Predictive Coding and the Mirrors of Our Perception
According to the latest research on the human brain and its capacity to form perceptions, the brain operates through a process called predictive coding. It integrates new information based on the beliefs provided by old information. A typical human being moving through the world is not passively perceiving sensory inputs and then assembling a picture of reality from them. Instead, the brain actively generates a model—a sophisticated, internally constructed prediction of what is likely to be present—and then checks this model against incoming sensory data to see what matches and what doesn’t.
This means we are all, at every moment, living primarily in a world of our own making. We see what we expect to see. We hear what we expect to hear. We encounter in others what we have already, at some level, decided is there. The brain has been found to have the capacity to over-predict—to expect something to be present that is not actually there. That expectation can create a self-hypnotic suggestion, and a non-existent thing can be perceived as though it were real and present.
Anaïs Nin, who understood the paradoxical architecture of perception far better than most professional psychologists, put it simply:
“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.”
This is not a comforting truth. It is a deeply challenging one, because it places the full weight of responsibility for our experience of reality upon our own shoulders. It means that the world we inhabit—the world of our daily emotional experience, of our relationships, of our sense of what is possible and what is not—is, to a degree far larger than we typically acknowledge, a projection of our own internal state.
There is a difficult eternal truth that must be embraced:
All that we will ever see, unto eternity, is the extension of our consciousness. How we see ourselves determines the quality of our life experience and the integrity of our connection with our higher power.
This fact has been verified by mystics, sages, and now quantum theorists. It is not a poetic embellishment. It is a description of a functional reality. Our minds do not simply receive the world. They generate it. And what they generate is shaped, at every level, by the sum of our experiences, our beliefs, our wounds, and our healing—or the lack thereof.
This understanding is both humbling and empowering. Humbling, because it requires us to relinquish the comfortable illusion that the darkness we perceive “out there” is entirely separate from what is unresolved “in here.” Empowering, because it suggests that as we heal our inner sight—as we clear the fogged lenses of our own unprocessed trauma and unexamined belief—the world we perceive genuinely changes. Not just metaphorically, but functionally. The field of our experience expands. New possibilities become visible. New connections become possible.
“Remove that log stuck in your eye, so that you may more accurately see the sliver stuck in another’s eye.” — Jesus of Nazareth
The only way to permanently remove spiritual eyesores from our vision is to heal our inner sight. Profound changes in our own consciousness eventually and inevitably impact our world—because our minds are inextricably intertwined with the collective consciousness of the world. We are not separate radio stations broadcasting at each other across an empty void. We are nodes in a living network, and the frequency of our own signal affects the entire network.
Part Twelve: The Healer Within and the Alchemy of the Terminal Hour
We have traveled far together. We have stood at the edge of disconnection’s pandemics, mapped the trinity of love, hatred, and indifference, decoded the secret architecture hidden within the word empathy, and walked beside Donelle and Marty into the most dangerous waters a soul can enter. We have named the savior’s wound and gazed into the mirror of our own perception. Now, as this meditation draws toward its close, we must ask the question that has hovered beneath every word: What does all of this mean for the one who is dying? And since each of us is, in the slow arithmetic of biology, always dying—what does it mean for you?
There is a place where every theory of empathy meets its final examination, and that place is the bedside of the terminally ill. Here the mundane veils are stripped away. Here love, hatred, and indifference are no longer abstractions but the very substance of how we choose to spend our final exchanges of energy. It is here, at the precipice, that we discover whether the path between you and me was ever real at all.
Consider the case of Jim, a companion of three decades, who has spent the last fourteen months wrestling with the hydra of multiple myeloma. The medical narrative is one of statistical failure. He traversed four of the five available treatment regimens—a “gold standard” of pharmacological intervention designed to eliminate the cancer before it eliminates the host. Yet for Jim, the cure became a second disease. The toxicity was so profound that it necessitated hospitalization after every cycle. His oncologist, a skilled technician of the body, deemed him a non-responder.
When the fifth option presented itself—a final, desperate volley known for its devastating impact on immediate quality of life—the decision was made to stop. The machinery of modern medicine had reached its limit. But this is precisely where the materialist narrative ends and the human narrative begins.
In the cessation of treatment, Jim found something he had not possessed for over a year: life. On palliative care, his narcotic needs subsided. His spinal fractures began to knit together—not because of a pharmaceutical agent, but perhaps because the body was at last permitted to rest from the assault of its own supposed cure. He abandoned the restrictive regimen that had banned dark chocolate in favor of the simple, hedonistic pleasure of milk chocolate. He chose the flavor of now over the probability of tomorrow. He reclaimed his sexuality—a vital life-force energy the disease had stolen—restoring a tender connection with his wife. He is planning to play golf with me in the Arizona desert.
He is dying, yes. But for the first time in months, he is genuinely living.
There is a lesson here that gathers up everything this chapter has tried to say. The choices we make about how to spend our dwindling time, about what brings us genuine joy, about where and with whom we direct our fading life-force energy, are not medically irrelevant. They are the primary architecture of our remaining days. And they are, at their root, choices about connection. To eat the chocolate is to say yes to the present. To reclaim intimacy is to reopen the channel of love that disease had sealed. Jim’s dying has become a teaching in the very thing we have been exploring: that the quality of our energy exchange determines the quality of our existence, even—perhaps especially—at the end.
Part Thirteen: The Temple and the Cathedral — Honoring the Body Without Worshiping It
While we have spoken at length of the spirit, we must not commit the opposite error of neglecting the temple. The body, though temporary, is the instrument through which all of this reality is experienced. The empathy we have praised, the love we have championed, the witnessing we have called sacred—all of it requires a vessel. And the vessel deserves care.
My own mother lived eight years beyond a sentence that should have claimed her swiftly, before MERSA finally took her. Her life in those years was not defined by her diagnosis but by her defiance of it. She volunteered. She traveled. She engaged the world with the open channel of love that this chapter has named as the highest form of energy exchange. Her resilience was not accidental, and it was often supported through medical technology.
Yet these supports are buttresses, not the cathedral itself. They keep the walls standing so that the real work—the spiritual work, the work of connection and healing—can take place within. We must use the science. We must take the herbs. But we must always remember that they are the servants, never the masters. To confuse the buttress with the cathedral is to mistake the scaffolding for the sacred edifice it protects—and it is a confusion our entire civilization has made, lavishing its faith upon the external while starving the inner healer who alone can make us whole.
For humanity remains obsessed with the external savior. We hunt the magic bullet, the perfect chemotherapy, the miracle worker in some distant jungle. And while phenomena such as remote healing and energy work have demonstrated genuine efficacy, they often distract us from a more terrifying truth: the true healer is within. The external healers are catalysts—hypnotists of the soul, skilled at coaxing the conscious mind to step aside so that the fragment of the Divine Spark within us may unleash its disregarded potential. We are the placebo and the cure. We are the disease and the remedy. Every external healer is finally a mirror, reflecting our own capacity for wholeness back at us.
This strips away the comfort of dependency. It demands that we stop outsourcing our salvation. The therapist, the guru, the prophet—each can construct a bridge to our innate healing possibilities. But the bridge must eventually be discarded, lest we carry the teacher in place of the teaching and erect one more idol within our already divided consciousness. To internalize the messenger rather than the message is to fracture ourselves further.
The light that healing reveals is not the healer’s light.
It is our own.
Part Fourteen: Why I Will Not Merge With Jim — The Final Discipline of the Witness
I have told you of Donelle, whom I loved across decades of illness and could not save. I have told you of Marty, into whose dying I poured myself so completely that his tumor took root in my own proprioception, that the dark mass lodged in my consciousness two months before it announced itself in his brain. I have shown you what Radical Empathy costs. And so you will understand why, with Jim, I have made a different choice.
I told Jim plainly that I would not engage in Radical Empathy with him. I have chosen, instead, the path of the Compassionate Witness. I will offer the infinite listening ear. I will hold space. I will see him without flinching. But I will not merge.
This is not a failure of love. It is love’s intelligence—love mature enough to recognize that the destruction of the vessel serves no one when another way remains. To practice Radical Empathy is to emulate the Christ, and to emulate the Christ in that ultimate sense is to accept the crucifixion. It is to accept that transmuting another’s suffering may require the dissolution of one’s own form. I have resolved that I may yet answer that call once or twice more in this life, when it becomes undeniable. But I prefer to die of my own biology, not the displaced biology of another.
And yet I must confess a humility here, for I have learned that Love is a trickster. Love sometimes obeys needs the ego cannot anticipate. We may resolve to stay on the shore, and then the wave arrives, and we discover we are already swimming. I once dreamed of a map bearing two kinds of paths—a single dark, solid line representing the well-worn ruts of family and society, and a complex web of intersecting dotted lines with no clear beginning or end, symbolizing the spirit-led journeys into the unknown. I was being called to integrate them both. The spiritual life is forever like that dotted-line pathway, and it is the quality of our connections with one another that fills in the space between the dots.
So my discipline with Jim is not a wall. It is a permeable boundary, held consciously, ready to yield if Love commands it. This, perhaps, is the highest skill the empath can cultivate: not the reckless merging of the wounded rescuer, nor the sealed indifference of the frightened heart, but the discerning openness that knows when to throw the rope and when, only when truly called, to jump.
Part Fifteen: The Final Mirror — Hatred, Forgiveness, and the Stranger We Despise
We cannot close this meditation without returning, one last time, to the darkest of the three energies—for indifference can be thawed and love can be cultivated, but hatred is the force that will follow us to the very bedside and poison even our dying if we let it.
We have already seen that hatred is a closed system that traumatizes the hater as surely as the hated, that it floods the body with the stress hormones of inflammation, that the one who drinks the poison and waits for another to suffer is operating under a fatal delusion. We have seen that those who habitually hate also hate themselves, hiding from their own diminishment behind false narratives of greatness and the ceaseless projection of their shortcomings onto the innocent and the guilty alike.
But here, at the chapter’s threshold, we must understand the deepest consequence of this dynamic, the one that joins it inseparably to everything we have learned about perception. When we direct our mental blows at the figures we despise, those blows land predominantly upon ourselves. For we are fighting the creations within our own minds rather than exchanging energy with the actual objects of our objection—and the actual object is the only place where any real change might occur. The “you” we hate can never be ultimately real. It exists as a conceptual image, assembled by a brain that, as predictive coding reveals, sees not what is but what it already expects. We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are. The hated other is a projection of a newly formed and disowned aspect of our own collectively shared negative self-image.
This is why forgiveness is not sentiment but survival. Forgiveness does not forget the offense. It does not excuse the abuser while he continues his abhorrent behavior. We must still speak truth to power. We must still act, consciously and decisively, against every force that imperils life. Forgiveness, rather, releases the practitioner from the corrosion of carrying negative perceptions of others—it unchains us from the past so that we may meet the unknown present with an open heart.
“Remove that log stuck in your eye,” said Jesus of Nazareth,
“so that you may more accurately see the sliver stuck in another’s eye.”
The only way to permanently remove spiritual eyesores from our vision is to heal our inner sight—and as we heal it, the world we perceive genuinely changes, because our minds are inextricably woven into the collective consciousness of the world.
Part Sixteen: What This Leaves for You
So where does this leave us? Where does it leave you?
We are not all called to be martyrs. We are not all equipped to be high-voltage conduits for the transmutation of another’s cancer. But every one of us is called to recognize the healing that lives in connection. The journey you are on—whether you stand at your own precipice or beside a beloved who stands at theirs—is a microcosm of the universal struggle: the decay of the form and the endurance of the essence.
Recognize the healer within. Stop searching for the magic pill. The magic is in the will to live, in the decision to eat the chocolate, in the choice to love the spouse, in the resolve to nourish the blood and the spirit at once. The external healer is only ever a mirror; the light is your own.
Embrace the power of witnessing. You need not take another’s suffering into your own body to be of profound service. To truly see another soul—without flinching, without fixing, without fleeing—is itself a healing act. To be a Compassionate Witness is to say, with your whole presence: I see your pain. I am not afraid of it. I will not run away.
Honor the biological support. Do not neglect the temple. Use the science. Honor the practitioners of the healing arts. Take the herbs. But never forget that they are buttresses, not the cathedral they protect.
Cultivate spiritual bravery. Understand that death is not a failure of medicine. It is a transition of energy. My mother’s death from MERSA was not a defeat; her eight years of living were the victory. And refuse, above all, to let hatred or indifference seal the channels through which love and witnessing flow. The contracted heart dies long before the body does.
Empathy is the great vehicle by which consciousness transcends our apparent separateness, allowing each of us to connect the dots in a mutually affirming manner. It is only through one another that we ever come to see who we are. I am you, and you are me, and together we are everything; apart, we are still chained together by whatever separates us. Love unifies. Hatred fragments and traumatizes. Indifference entombs.
Our world is in desperate need of hearts expanding through mutual positive empathy rather than contracting through negative empathy or indifference. We did not create the world as it now is. We cannot control it, nor can we cure it. But we can evolve. And collectively, we can begin to address the disease of the spirit that dominates our civilization—not with more technology tattooed upon our bodies, but with the ancient, dangerous, radical technology of the open heart.
My heart is with you. We are all walking each other home, stumbling in the dark, occasionally lighting a candle that flares up with the brightness of a miracle. Whether through the perilous unity of Radical Empathy or the steady hand of the Compassionate Witness, we are the architects of our own healing, and of each other’s.
Each day brings its unique confrontation with entropy. Yet with the support of your communities—medical, spiritual, and the unseen—you are entitled to a quality of life that defies the diagnosis. You are entitled to the miraculous.
Walk bravely.
The healer is already there.
The path was always between us.
