Interconnected: Embracing Life in Our Global Society

by Ogyen Trinley Dorje

Empathy enables us to reach across differences and connect as equals. It does so by cutting straight through the walls that we build up around us and allowing us to touch the core of our equality: the ability to experience pain and joy. More than just our own personal happiness and wisdom is at stake. In order to sustain the long-term action needed to cure the social inequities we have created in the world today, we need to be able to root ourselves firmly in the common ground of our equality as sentient beings. Empathy takes us along a direct route to that ground. It lets us actually feel what equality has told us to be true: that we are all equal in terms of our search for happiness and to avoid suffering, even as the particulars of our experience vary at any given moment.