I have this habit of putting people on pedestals by projecting the - TopicsExpress



          

I have this habit of putting people on pedestals by projecting the patterns of my own perceptions on those I love. I get attached to this lovely hologram of them in my head, and its this image I tend to nurture and adore; then when the actual person does or says something not in alignment with my vision of who I want or need them to be, I become irrationally angry, hurt and lonely. Rather than trying to see another perspective as clearly as possible--in other words, cultivating true empathy, the most active state of love--I dance around a graven image of them in my head, worshipping the way they make me feel, the contrast they provide to my personality, the example they offer me of how I myself can be a better person--doing anything but listening to them, or trying to identify with them, with their sadness and their joy, celebrating these as unique experiences in our shared humanity. If you are so busy worshipping a person, you cant really love them, can you? Because even when you worship, you are putting all the emphasis on your separateness. You seem, outwardly, to be honestly appreciating them, but on the inside you are only using them to appreciate the bittersweetness of your own special flavor of otherness. In trying to dissolve ourselves entirely in other human beings, all we have done is distance ourselves from the possibility of truly being able to envision their reality. What seems outwardly selfless about love is so often selfishness in its cleverest disguise! In attachment to other people we think we will have escaped this prison that is the loneliness of ordinary consciousness. But all attachment can do is tie a tiny, fragile string around us and our loved ones, an illusion of inseparability. The deep, strong currents of true understanding, it seems to me, can only start flowing when we stop trying to worship or demote the people around us, when we stop comparing them to ourselves, when we cease to see them as questions that need our answering or answers to our own questions, when we recognize them as the supreme reality in the center of their own micro-universes, just as we are in ours. When we extinguish the precious image of a beloved person in our head and stop using it as an emotional crutch, then maybe we will learn to look into their eyes and really see them--so deeply that maybe, if we open our minds to it, the eyes that look back at us will also be our own.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 22:14:28 +0000

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