#664 Awareness & Love

     "How few understand what love really is, and how it arises in the human heart. It is so frequently equated with good feelings toward others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service. But these things in themselves are not love.
     Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now, and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection, that you can truly love them, otherwise it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire not as he or she is in themselves.
    The first act of love is to see this person or this object, this reality as it truly is. And this involves the enormous discipline of dropping your desires, your prejudices, your memories, your projections, your selective way of looking ...a discipline so great that most people would rather plunge headlong into good actions and service than submit to the burning fire of this asceticism.
     When you set out to serve someone whom you have not taken the trouble to see, are you meeting that person's need or your own?"                                                          Father Anthony de Mello

#517 First Self-acceptance Then Self-knowledge

     What we find unacceptable in others, we naturally find unacceptable in ourselves. Rejecting others is relatively easy. When it comes to aspects of ourselves that we judge unacceptable, it's easier for us to suppress these, becoming consciously unaware or "blind" to our own "faults".
     When we deeply deny our own unacceptable aspects, we see or "project" these imperfections onto others and in them we find these all the more reprehensible. We judge others very harshly for having ( our ) qualities that disgust us. An extreme example is narcissistic personality disorder (below). The sickest example is scapegoating - ethnic, religious & other forms of "cleansing".
     Obviously, healthy maturation involves progressively greater degrees of self-awareness, self-acceptance, and empathy for self & others as we slowly become truly civilized & gradually earn our title: homo sapiens sapiens.

     “Narcissistic personality disorder is named after Narcissus, the youth from Greek and Roman mythology who falls in love with his own reflection in a pool. While the term narcissistic is commonly used to describe people who believe they are better than everybody else, in psychiatric terms, it refers to patients who unconsciously believe they are defective & deeply flawed. In order to mask their self-hatred, they develop a veneer of false confidence and superiority over others. Often, this takes the form of being highly critical and setting up impossibly high standards for people in their lives. But this only serves to alienate others, leading to rejection, loneliness, and sometimes suicidal depression.”
     Carlat D. Unhinged. The trouble with psychiatry – A doctor’s revelations about a profession in crisis. Free Press, NY, 2010. 

#506 How Accurate is "Self-talk" - the Stuff We Keep Telling Ourselves?

     Many of us, by default, take our self-talk, opinions & perceptions as objective truth - a direct readout on reality. Furthermore, we assume these are stable, unchanging. Interestingly & paradoxically, we also recognize that "who we are" has a major impact on all of these. In other words, we know very well that different people have differing takes on the same experience. We also know very well that we see things very differently now than when we were 2 or 12 or even 22 years old. So the more closely we investigate phenomena, the less puzzling the statement:

     “We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”                 Anais Nin

     In other words, we project our constantly changing inner state of being onto the outer world. When we're down, the world looks like a miserable place, when we're up, the world miraculously transforms into a joyous place.
     So the tone or quality of our self-talk might be more accurately interpreted, not as caused by what's out there right now, but rather as our current mood, which is brought about by many factors (internal, external, past, present and or future).
     Can we simply observe our mood as a transient energy and nothing more? Can we hold it lightly instead of merging with it (cognitive fusion)? What happens to transient states?

Steve McCurry   stevemccurry.com