learning to see the invisible
Oct. 2nd, 2011 02:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingsword“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” --Anais Nin
“If you don't love yourself, you cannot love others. You will not be able to love others. If you have no compassion for yourself then you are not capable of developing compassion for others.” -- Dalai Lama
If I look at you and only see the parts of you that reflect myself back at me then I am not seeing you, I am seeing a distorted, incomplete version of myself. If the first things I notice about you are differences I don't understand then I may be tempted to Other you and deny any connection. So even if I'm paying attention to you, the attention that I'm paying is still self-centered, warped by that filter on my perception.
When you are having a conversation on a sticky subject and your friends volunteer information and you don't, that says something: you either have nothing TO share or nothing you are COMFORTABLE with sharing. Do your friends know you well enough to see your silence for what it is? Have you been open and honest enough times with them before that they will be able to tell the difference? The trouble with blind spots is that someone else usually has to point them out to us the first time. And if we are not open enough with friends who can look past themselves to see us and tell us about our blind spots, then we have no independent second-party reality check. If we don't know all of ourselves, how can we love that self? If we can't see our self-contradictions, how can we be honest with ourselves or know when we are being dishonest with others? If we want to love someone else, don't we want that love to be whole-hearted, to come from an authentic place and to be bestowed on all parts of that person? If I can't look my shadow in the face and take her hand, how will I know how to deal with yours? But if I relax and accept the shadows of myself, I can acclimate enough to see in the dark and talk to the parts of me whose pain is unaddressed and are most likely to lash out and hurt you. Once I know how to love me, I can love you better.
Feelings of anger and fear have important messages for you, but they are not what is important. What you get angry about shows you what is important to you and what you are irrationally afraid of shows you what you are really like. Have you noticed how people who are very competitive assume the world is a competitive place and fear being left behind? Well, that's why. Woman-hating conservatives don't fear the Gay Agenda: they fear that their agenda is gay. We often show people we disagree with a very authentic part of ourselves, but until we have the means to decode our actions we can't see each other or communicate past the fear and anger.
We have to trust our friends to be able to love us while we're sorting through painful stuff, knowing that our embarrassment squick is inevitably going to be triggered. We have to have faith in their ability to see the worth in us while we're learning how to see what they see. So think back to the last argument you had *with someone sane whose judgment you trust*. Did they say something negative about you? What reasons have you given that person to think that? Does that speak to your issues or theirs or both? What are the reasons you had for doing that? What were you afraid of? Why did you think that fear would happen? Do you think it's a reasonable fear or do you irrationally feel you deserve for something like that to happen? List the reasons you said you were angry. Now list the other reasons that you DIDN'T say. Why didn't you say them? What were you afraid of? (rinse repeat)
I write this stuff down because it helps me see patterns later in assumptions that I make. And I did a post-mortem just like this on every argument I had for a few years, lovers and friends and family, and sometimes I still do one if something is nagging at me. I had to learn to be gentle with myself. I had to learn to not judge others on the things they couldn't see yet. I had to learn to not jump to negative conclusions about myself and other people based on early readings of available data and sometimes I'm still bad about that. There's no finish line, just the sense of accomplishment when you start to get better results and the sense of peace that less drama brings.
Like any good witch, much of my wisdom comes from crossroads. And since I'm relentlessly cerebral, this part comes from the intersection of two axioms, the two mathematical expressions of human interaction quoted at the top.
After I got a handle on my unacknowledged guilt at being part of a financial system that creates poverty and homelessness, I started noticing more homeless people and vagrants. When I started looking for my own faults it taught me how to see the blind spots in others and stop making bad relationship choices assuming that people were always going to be the unflawed versions of themselves that they presented to me at the beginning. After I got in touch with my rage and channeled it into destroying thoughts and cultural concepts which needed killing, I stopped thinking of myself as broken and wrong and started thinking of myself as not-yet-optimized. All sorts of possibilities suddenly stretched out in front of my mind's eye, and that was a whole other head trip.
To remind you to be compassionate with yourself and with the people whose invisible selves you now know how to see, have a video.
And In thanks for reading all of this, have another to remind you that we are all ridiculous to ourselves and that it's a good thing.
“If you don't love yourself, you cannot love others. You will not be able to love others. If you have no compassion for yourself then you are not capable of developing compassion for others.” -- Dalai Lama
If I look at you and only see the parts of you that reflect myself back at me then I am not seeing you, I am seeing a distorted, incomplete version of myself. If the first things I notice about you are differences I don't understand then I may be tempted to Other you and deny any connection. So even if I'm paying attention to you, the attention that I'm paying is still self-centered, warped by that filter on my perception.
When you are having a conversation on a sticky subject and your friends volunteer information and you don't, that says something: you either have nothing TO share or nothing you are COMFORTABLE with sharing. Do your friends know you well enough to see your silence for what it is? Have you been open and honest enough times with them before that they will be able to tell the difference? The trouble with blind spots is that someone else usually has to point them out to us the first time. And if we are not open enough with friends who can look past themselves to see us and tell us about our blind spots, then we have no independent second-party reality check. If we don't know all of ourselves, how can we love that self? If we can't see our self-contradictions, how can we be honest with ourselves or know when we are being dishonest with others? If we want to love someone else, don't we want that love to be whole-hearted, to come from an authentic place and to be bestowed on all parts of that person? If I can't look my shadow in the face and take her hand, how will I know how to deal with yours? But if I relax and accept the shadows of myself, I can acclimate enough to see in the dark and talk to the parts of me whose pain is unaddressed and are most likely to lash out and hurt you. Once I know how to love me, I can love you better.
Feelings of anger and fear have important messages for you, but they are not what is important. What you get angry about shows you what is important to you and what you are irrationally afraid of shows you what you are really like. Have you noticed how people who are very competitive assume the world is a competitive place and fear being left behind? Well, that's why. Woman-hating conservatives don't fear the Gay Agenda: they fear that their agenda is gay. We often show people we disagree with a very authentic part of ourselves, but until we have the means to decode our actions we can't see each other or communicate past the fear and anger.
We have to trust our friends to be able to love us while we're sorting through painful stuff, knowing that our embarrassment squick is inevitably going to be triggered. We have to have faith in their ability to see the worth in us while we're learning how to see what they see. So think back to the last argument you had *with someone sane whose judgment you trust*. Did they say something negative about you? What reasons have you given that person to think that? Does that speak to your issues or theirs or both? What are the reasons you had for doing that? What were you afraid of? Why did you think that fear would happen? Do you think it's a reasonable fear or do you irrationally feel you deserve for something like that to happen? List the reasons you said you were angry. Now list the other reasons that you DIDN'T say. Why didn't you say them? What were you afraid of? (rinse repeat)
I write this stuff down because it helps me see patterns later in assumptions that I make. And I did a post-mortem just like this on every argument I had for a few years, lovers and friends and family, and sometimes I still do one if something is nagging at me. I had to learn to be gentle with myself. I had to learn to not judge others on the things they couldn't see yet. I had to learn to not jump to negative conclusions about myself and other people based on early readings of available data and sometimes I'm still bad about that. There's no finish line, just the sense of accomplishment when you start to get better results and the sense of peace that less drama brings.
Like any good witch, much of my wisdom comes from crossroads. And since I'm relentlessly cerebral, this part comes from the intersection of two axioms, the two mathematical expressions of human interaction quoted at the top.
After I got a handle on my unacknowledged guilt at being part of a financial system that creates poverty and homelessness, I started noticing more homeless people and vagrants. When I started looking for my own faults it taught me how to see the blind spots in others and stop making bad relationship choices assuming that people were always going to be the unflawed versions of themselves that they presented to me at the beginning. After I got in touch with my rage and channeled it into destroying thoughts and cultural concepts which needed killing, I stopped thinking of myself as broken and wrong and started thinking of myself as not-yet-optimized. All sorts of possibilities suddenly stretched out in front of my mind's eye, and that was a whole other head trip.
To remind you to be compassionate with yourself and with the people whose invisible selves you now know how to see, have a video.
And In thanks for reading all of this, have another to remind you that we are all ridiculous to ourselves and that it's a good thing.