“We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”— Carl Jung
Different people view different thing around them differently. And this fact remains unchanged when we try to find out their views about a person of their common acquaintance. All of them are likely to present a different perspective of that person. While one might perceive them as friendly and cordial another may consider them as unintelligent, immature and irresponsible. This makes us wonder which perception is correct.
The way every individual perceives the person in question, tells us about these individuals rather than about the person they are expressing their views on.
This means the way we perceive others has nothing to do with them, it has everything to do with us. We create perception about others depending on the type of relationship we have with ourselves and the characteristics of our personality. Our ego prevents us from finding faults in ourselves and tries to look outside to find an object to thrust the blame. By doing so they are only identifying their own traits in others.
This can be understood from a situation when a person feels that another person is jealous of them.
But unless they haven’t felt the pangs of jealousy themselves, they cannot identify it in others. So, when we recognize certain traits in others, we are able to do so because we possess those traits or have possessed them in the past. By blaming others we just want to ignore our own negative traits, but doing so will be of little help to us. When we are able to accept the fact, that our opinions and judgments are nothing but the reflection of our ego and the person we perceive negatively has nothing to do with it, we are offered with the opportunity to use every reaction to get rid of our own demons.
“What angers us in another person is more often than not an unhealed aspect of ourselves. If we had already resolved that particular issue, we would not be irritated by its reflection back to us.”- Simon Peter Fuller, author.
The way we feel about others is the key that can open the secret world which has the answer to what we are and why we are. When we know these basic answers, we are able to form a true relationship with our inner self. If we can focus on who, or what makes us react in a strong emotional manner, we can use the knowledge to heal ourselves. Negative reactions have only two meanings.
One of the meaning is we want others to behave in a particular manner or we are attached to certain ideas or beliefs about how things should be.
This tells that we want to thrust our thinking on others when no one is forced to behave as per our wish. The moment we stop accepting people as they are and judge them in the light of our expectations, we are ignoring the reality of the present moment.
The other truth relates to our ego which stops us from pointing our own faults, so we continuously attempt to find those in others. This reaction is nothing but a clue that we need to correct the negative things because they lie within us and not in others. As Carl Jung puts it, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate. Carl Jung.”
We like to console ourselves by blaming our circumstances for the way we react.
Since, we don’t want to introspect; the hidden things in our mind try to expose their presence through external circumstances and people. When we realize that the problem actually lies within us, the light of awareness illuminates those parts of our being, that our ego doesn’t allow us and others to see which will help us to overcome these traits.
Those parts that we are so used to hide should be cured and that is possible when we promise to be 100% honest to ourselves. If anger storms your mind, let yourself feel the anger, if fear approaches you, accept it. The point is to be aware of these feelings without judging ourselves as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because those emotions have invaded our mind. When we do this, only then we will be able to accept and love those parts of our self that we want to hide so badly.
