Crawling into the skin of the other (empathy). ‘It must be hard to …’ 176 - Gerry Spence

The gift of self cannot be given to us. It is an incomparable gift that has already been given. We have possessed it from the beginning.

That is why, in the course of human history, truth-telling has been designated as the highest of virtues in every culture, and why the credibility that results therefrom is always so powerful.

"Every living thing feels because feeling is a dimension of the universe. I daresay rocks feel in the way of rocks. I daresay the stars feel in the way of stars. If we can feel stars, feel their beauty, feel their majesty, how could we so arrogantly insist that a star, one that has existed in the universe for billions of years, one that came into being at the time of the "big bang," cannot also feel? Any astrophysicist will tell us stars have lives of their own. How can we of such piddling knowledge, of such puny understanding, of such fleeting existence, how can we who live but who cannot fully explain the life of the simplest of cells — how can such as we proclaim that the universe is bereft of all feeling except our own? Can we not leave room for the possibility that the universe itself is composed of endless feeling?"