There is no You and Me
There is no You and Me.
Bold statement. Here’s one of my deep level premises: On a certain level of our sub-consciousness there is no separation between you and me, there is only - hmmm - let’s call it ‘I’. With ‘I’ I don’t mean what our conscious mind thinks of when it says ‘I’. Because that I is always separate from you. The ‘I’ I’m referring to here is the observer that does not yet live in the adult world. That level is active in babies who just live as observers and have no concept of ‘different people’. A baby learns to recognize its own person as a seperate entity from everything else over time.Let’s assume for now that this level of thought is still active within us, we have just added some more layers on top, like the one that separates persons.Have you ever wondered why people who exhibit a certain ‘negative’ trait can really become passionate in finding and judging the very same trait in somebody else? You’re about to say, hey, come on, you’re just the same! But of yourse you have tact and wouldn’t be so rude. The point is: what you don’t like in yourself, you don’t like and judge in others. We can only see (and judge) traits of others that we have as well, to some extend. I believe that we can’t see others at all, all we see is us resonating with what others exhibit. This is a concept hard to swallow if you’re new to it.
It’s obvious that everything is filtered by our perception. Nothing gets into us objectively. So every interpretation is made on basis of our own consciousness, and our own ‘I’ experience.
This topic deserves a book, but I want to be short here and rather risk to be cryptic. At the end of the day what we perceive as You is only what we can see through and as another I, our ‘I’ (or is there another one we can use?).
Therefore: If you are always tough on yourself, you cannot be not tough on others at a certain level. And to love others, you have to first love yourself.
Frank