I’ve talked about the insufficiency of “walking in someone else’s shoes” before. Why would the resins and scents from a remote pair of feet come in through your toes and contribute to understanding another person’s experience of the world?
Umwelt is a term that refers to an organism’s total experience of being, sensory, cognitive, emotional, and everything else. What one must do to understand another creature or person or plant’s life is temporarily ditch one’s own Umwelt and attempt to enter another’s. It’s method acting for the imagination, a complete giving up of the self to travel to an alternate dimension (with a guaranteed right of return).
This is a practicable thing. And it happens in a starburst of understanding or slowly, as a result of long and careful attention. A duck dives into ice cold water and you feel the comfort of feathers and the necessity of the food on the bottom. You watch the neighborhood crow get its needs met for years. A confounding person’s behavior suddenly become comprehensible.
Practice will make Umwelts more available to the seeker. Much like the path to lucid dreaming, take regular notes from interactions with other creatures. Reflection brings you into sensory and experiential contact. And while you may not be able to confirm your intuitive grasps on these other dimensions (except in the case of other people, where you might ask), the unverified attempt is sure to induce sympathy and compassion for those you observe and “inhabit”.