Do higher levels of awareness bring deeper sensitivity to suffering?

It is remarkable and puzzling to think that, say, for hundreds of years a hydrothermal vent is hosting a deep sea concentrated lifeforce, bursting with specially adapted organisms that have found a way to thrive in the harshest of environments, while miles above ground wars are fought and won, kings raised and defeated, millions of human lives ebbed and flowed, all having experienced profound suffering in one way or another, all having sparked in and out of life with the greatest of severity, as if each one was the primary purpose of life and was tragic to be lost to history. It is a stone’s throw from the experience of knowing immense suffering happening in a far away place, or even nearby without touching you personally, and continuing to go about your daily routines, spending joyful moments with friends and family. But how could you not? This is the knife’s edge between humankinds’ emotional awareness that seeks to alleviate suffering in others, and our evolutionary, biological instinct to keep oneself and one’s closest family alive at all costs. We are not far from the pipeworm thriving on the hydrothermal vent in the latter side of the knife. But on the former side, we are startling in our proclivity to look beyond ourselves and our closest ties to a greater lifeforce blanketed across the world. To even restructure or slow our own progress and technological advancements to preserve a unique characteristic of our natural world. This could be viewed as pure practicality in some ways – such as reducing carbon emissions to preserve the ecosystem that humans have adapted to and can thus thrive best in.

But it often goes beyond practicality. Some choose vegan diets, for example, as a boycott against capitalizing on the suffering of animals. Somehow the awareness and consciousness we can achieve gives us a connection to the entire universe, and an awareness of the suffering that the universe can experience. It could all be a great spiraling trick leading straight back to survival instinct – feeling sympathy and discomfort at the suffering of other lifeforms because destroying other lifeforms actually does harm the ecosystem of the earth, so this sensation could be a creative evolutionary development to keep life intact.

But what is the link, after all? What is the thread that ties my awareness to the awareness of another being? How am I capable of feeling sorrow for another being’s suffering. I suppose one could counter that it is a projection, not based in reality but on presuming my own reality for others. Higher awareness could be viewed as a trick and a sham, something to toss aside in favor of expanding one’s own interests as far as possible. It isn’t enough to say that I just want to believe this isn’t the case. But I may be getting somewhere if I inspect the desire to disbelieve this and instead believe that awareness and care for others hints at a deeper universal instinct than mere survival. I may not find the fact that I want to eliminate the suffering of life compelling enough to believe it should be eliminated, but the fact that I want it to be true is of interest. What am I trying to deny by wanting this to be the truth? Why do I find safety in meaning?