Reader

“Understand: we can never really experience what other people are experiencing. We always remain on the outside looking in, and this is the cause of so many misunderstandings and conflicts. But the primal source of human intelligence comes from the development of mirror neurons (see here), which gives us the ability to place ourselves in the skin of another and imagine their experience. Through continual exposure to people and by attempting to think inside them we can gain an increasing sense of their perspective, but this requires effort on our part. Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own beliefs and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware. When it comes to studying another culture, it is only through the use of our empathic powers and by participating in their lives that we can begin to overcome these natural projections and arrive at the reality of their experience. To do so we must overcome our great fear of the Other and the unfamiliarity of their ways. We must enter their belief and value systems, their guiding myths, their way of seeing the world. Slowly, the distorted lens through which we first viewed them starts to clear up.
Going deeper into their Otherness, feeling what they feel, we can discover what makes them different and learn about human nature. This applies to cultures, individuals, and even writers of books. As Nietzsche once wrote, “As soon as you feel yourself against me you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“Can this be happiness, this terrifying freedom?”
― Albert Camus

“Maturity is choosing empathy over anger. It's the ability to see beyond the hurt and understand the storm brewing within the other person.”
― Monika Ajay Kaul

“The action is wrong. But the person committing it is a breathing, thinking, living, feeling human being. And I can tell you that most of the time where there's violence, there's fear- and it's not only being felt by the victim.”
― Mindy McGinnis, A Long Stretch of Bad Days