Seeing the World through Other People’s Eyes

            Much of the appeal of babies and young children derives from our inclination to project ourselves into their situation, and thereby to experience the world again for the first time through their eyes. 

We are inclined to project ourselves onto everyone and everything that seems in any way like us—anyone and anything to which we can relate in some way.  Thus, we anthropomorphize animals, attributing human qualities and thoughts and feelings to them.  We do this because we see something about them to which we can relate—the way they are acting, or even merely the fact that they have two large eyes—and so we figure that we can relate to them in other, more internal and experiential, ways also.  Since other human beings seem so much more like us externally, we are even more inclined to project our own, individual thoughts and feelings and motivations onto them.

            It is difficult to imagine that someone could watch as someone else is tortured and killed when it is possible to save that person—difficult, that is, if you would be someone who would jump to save that person.  And it is difficult to imagine that someone could just brush off being yelled at when you would be furious and yelling back if you were in that person’s situation.

            Notice that so many (in fact, all) of our judgments ultimately arise from our inability to relate to someone else’s behavior.  Even when it comes to ourselves, our judgments arise from our inability to relate to what we have thought or felt or done, because now we would think or feel or act differently if presented with the same external physical situation.

            Empathy is tremendously important if we ever expect to truly communicate and interact with others.  But there are degrees of empathy.  In lower forms of it, we merely project ourselves into other people’s actual shoes—into their physical, external situations.  This is where much miscommunication and misunderstanding and judgment arise, because we expect of others what we would expect of ourselves in some particular situation.  We project our internal experiences of thought and feeling and motivation, and we fail to recognize the extent to which other people actually have different thoughts and feelings and motivations driving their behavior than we have driving ours.

            We see ourselves in everyone else, but we do not see everyone else.  And so our communication is hindered, because we are really talking with ourselves, and those other people are just receiving our self-talk—along with all of our own expectations and judgments of ourselves.

            In higher forms of empathy, we recognize the differences that exist between us and others, and so we begin to recognize where similarities actually lie.  We learn to place ourselves not only in the external situation of another, but also in that person’s internal situation.  So we can come to understand and relate even to people who are very different from us in such a way that when we are talking with them, we are actually talking with them, and not with ourselves projected onto them. 

            As human beings—and as beings in this world—we all have the same motivations driving us ultimately, but these are all prioritized differently in each and every one of us.  As we come to see other people as other people, truly distinct and separate from us, we learn to extrapolate from different aspects of our own experience what it is actually like to be each individual other person we encounter.  It is only then that we truly come to experience the world through other people’s eyes.

Being You

            If you could be anyone in the world, who would you be?  Why?  Would you be you?  Why?

            Everyone has obstacles.  Yet it is easy to view another’s obstacles as easier to overcome than your own.  That’s why they are that person’s obstacles and not your own.  When viewed from the internal perspective, with all of the emotions and so on that exist there, everything seems large.  Yet those same things, when viewed from outside, can seem quite insignificant and small.

            If you have difficulty trusting people, then every time a person does the slightest thing that suggests a betrayal of trust or a justification for your not trusting him or her, this action looms large in your eyes and mind and heart, lingering there and further shaping your experience through your reaction to it.  If you have difficulty empathizing with people, every time someone does something that you wouldn’t do yourself, this can potentially be magnified into a reason to cut that person off from your life.  If you have difficulty getting close to people and opening up to them, every time you open up at all and the person doesn’t react the way you’d like, you might shrink back again into yourself, ever more determined not to open up to anyone again.

            Notice that, in every case, if this issue is not your issue, it can seem almost a non-issue.  But this, in itself, is a failure to recognize the other perspectives in the world outside of your own.  We are all dealing with things, and whatever we are dealing with, we find difficult—we find it to be an issue.

            You can learn a lot about someone’s experience of the world by taking note of the themes of issues in that person’s life.  We almost define ourselves by our obstacles, by the things we struggle with, by the things we need to learn to overcome.  But defining ourselves by these things, focusing much of our energy upon them, will not help us to overcome them.  When you define yourself by your obstacles, you tie yourself to them like an anchor, and you prevent yourself from sailing away from them, from freeing yourself from them.

            Our obstacles are the things that we must learn from and learn to let go of.  For they highlight the things that we are inclined to hold onto, to repeat, to replay, to give our energy to.  A large part of our mission in this life—the reason that we came here—is to overcome these obstacles, to learn from them whatever lessons exist in them to be learned so that we can grow and change and move on.

            Notice that when you do something that you find challenging but that you need to do to reach some desirable goal, you feel a sense of accomplishment, of joy, upon your completion of it.  If you do something that you find easy and that you don’t need to do to reach any goal that you have set for yourself, you will not experience that same feeling of accomplishment upon your completion of it.  The things that you most struggle with are the boulders in the path toward your true goals.  Traveling someone else’s path will not lead you where you truly want to be—where you will find the fulfillment that you truly seek.

            So, if you could be anyone in the world, who would you be?  Your obstacles may seem large to you, but you can know that in overcoming them you will find the true fulfillment that you seek.  There is no other way to gain that fulfillment of reaching your greatest goals—no way other than to learn to overcome your own obstacles, no way other than by being you.

Do Over

            If you were given the opportunity to live this life all over again, would you do it?  Why?  Is it because of your experience and your state of mind right now?  Is it because of your experiences in life that led you to now?  Is it because of the experiences that you believe now is leading you to in the near or distant future?

            If you could change your life as it is right now, would you do it?  If you would, what would you change?

            If you could change your past, would you do it?  If you would, what would you change?  Would you be a different person now if that had happened differently?  How would you be different?

            If you could change the future from what you envision happening for yourself, would you do it?  If you would, what is stopping you?

            You are the person you are now because of how you have dealt with obstacles in your past—because of the choices that you’ve made in reacting to, or in proactively responding to, everything that has come into your life.  And the choices that you are making now—with the thoughts that you are thinking, and the feelings that you are giving rise to with those thoughts, and the inclinations that you are giving rise to with those feelings, and the words and actions that you are giving rise to with those inclinations—are determining the shape of your future.

            If you don’t like where you’ve been or where you are, learn through contrast from it where you’d like to be, and focus your attention and your energy on that—on making that your reality.  In this way, you can bring yourself to a point where you are able to realize that you could only be where you are now because of where you’ve been, and you will be grateful for where you’ve been because of this.

            This moment is one step on the path toward where you will be.  Do you like where you are headed?  Do you like the future you envision for yourself?  You are shaping it with those thoughts and feelings that regard it.  You are in control of the form that it ultimately takes.  The next present moment will contain what it does because you have given the energy of your attention to those things in this moment.  And your life will only seem out of your hands if you give rise to this reality with your beliefs—or merely with your doubts in your own awesome power.

            Make this life something that you’d love to live all over again if given the opportunity.  And live it now fully—with your attention focused here—so that you can take it all in, and so that if you aren’t given the opportunity to live it again, you will know that you lived it well.