I was struck in New Zealand by the fact that the children are so kind to each other. I hadn’t seen that in a long, long time. We were certainly kind to each other. We were never willfully unkind because it’s painful to us. When we were 10 and 11 years old we would discuss things like that, that these things were painful to us. That’s empathy but today we have what is called children without conscious.

Do we understand what empathy means anymore? It’s an empty word. The ability to perceive the emotional state of another and the capacity of it to suffer. That certainly is eroding. The willingness of children to inflict pain on each other. I was so struck in New Zealand by the fact that the children are so kind to each other. I hadn’t seen that in a long, long time. They were certainly kind to each other. There was very little battering among us. We were not willfully, fights would break out when I was a child back in the thirties but we were never willfully unkind to each other, or even to a child from the other side of the tracts or anything else. We were never willfully unkind to them because it’s painful to us. And I remember discussing that very thing among my little friends. When we were 10 and 11 years old we would discuss things like that you know, that these things were painful to us and that’s empathy but that’s a natural part of our system. That is the human nature and how quickly that erodes. We think of Alastair Cook again in his experience of coming through America’s great Hobo Camps and scenes of extraordinary poverty, as a very wealthy young man, and never feeling the slightest, slightest fear for his own well-being back in those terrible times of the depression in the thirties because we still had that connection, that connection with the heart. We had not been completely broken at that point.

The fascinating thing is the dual role of the emotional system or the affective system of the brain in one of its parallel processes the quality of its relationship you see and when that is coupled with the basic structure that presents us with our world, what we would think of as the physical sensory motor system, that affective system, then enhances it, it broadens, it opens up the dimensions of that lower system and that same affective system can couple with the intellectual system or what you refer to as the metaphoric symbolic structures.

And then with that you have a whole other ballgame that opens up which is the emotional aspects of learning, state specific learning, the fact that the quality of the emotional state at the time of learning and as an integral part of the learning itself, permanently apparently. Now then we have the, in this dual role of this affective emotional system, that it can then in the same integrate all three levels into an incredibly open-ended system so that perceptually we’re open on a whole universal level. Conceptually, from the highest level, we’re opening on a whole universal level and emotionally we’re opening on a universal level. That’s of course moving toward the real fulfillment of our humanness in early life, certainly in the first 15 or 20 years. 

And then you find again that critical emotional response which means the affective system, the evaluative system of the limbic structure which connects together into a functional unit, all three areas of the brain, if at birth it undergoes a radical separation and breakdown of its environmental process which is the mother, then you have a complete different form of perceiving of how the world is. The world is going to shape accordingly. You’re going to filter the world through the needs to maintain the integrity of a highly, highly threatened system. If the whole society is in that then suddenly you’re dealing with a totally different reality structure itself.

We look at the Australian Aborigine who moves in a world quite radically different than ours. It embraces all sorts of states and potentials and possibilities that are literally inconceivable to us.  We can’t conceive of it at all because if we could conceive of it at all that would open up the possibilities of perceptionality. So there again we keep getting back to if there’s closure in the beginning then you’re dealing with a closed world from then on.