Now, obviously the first step is the decision to want to see yourself as who you are, which comes from the realization that thinking and believing you are one way, while living another way in actuality, leads to unfortunate consequences in your world and relationships. Really, it shouldn't sit right with you that you've got one version of yourself that you see in your mind while there is the real version of you walking around in reality, interacting with your world/others, and you don't even have a clue of the consequence you are creating, because you can't even see what you're really doing, what effect you're having on your world and those around you, what the truth behind your actions is, and most importantly, the example that you're living for others to see.
I mean, this didn't sit right with me to be stuck in a delusion of who I am when the truth of me is here always, and the only way you can seem to avoid it, is by lying to yourself and coming up with all sorts of excuses and justifications of why you're apparently excused from the expectations you would hold others to, why you're apparently allowed to do and say things that you don't find acceptable for others to do.
So since we are blinded by our own excuses and justifications, our own behaviors have become so accepted to a point that we don't see clearly and directly who and what we're being, and therefore, why the fact that we can at least see these things in others, becomes so important and ultimately useful. Because, we can use what we see in others, to get to see things in ourself. How does that work?
Since we can see another's behavior without all the justifications and excuses, we can see it for what it is and the consequence it creates. This can help us to identify certain behaviors, so that we can then look for that behavior in ourself, and then even identify the excuses and justifications we used/use in order to justify/give permission to ourself to participate in the behavior.
This like any skill one is developing will not be so easy at first but would get easier with time and application as you develop the ability to see various points within yourself, and then it actually becomes quite a fun and fascinating journey of developing self awareness, and 'unlocking the puzzle' in a way, of what we have become, as this riddle of self justifications and beliefs in contradiction to reality. It becomes quite fun to when you identify a point within another, to then investigate to find out where/how the same point exists in you.
So a practical example of this would be for example where you see someone who is distracted in a moment and therefore not being very considerate of what they are doing or where they are going, and then trip right into some object that they hadn't noticed was in their path, or maybe they even ran into you because they weren't looking where they were going, and you think or say something like 'why don't they watch where they are going??'. So the point here to investigate within oneself would be where are you in moments distracted and not aware of everything in your environment and you create some sort of consequence from not being aware and paying attention?
So what is the point of doing this? What do we do with this information? Once I have identified a point within another, and then found it also within myself in some aspect/area of my living? That we will get into in the next post, where we'll look at how this tool of seeing ourselves in others, is one of the most effective tools in the process of Self Change, which can be one of the most difficult things to do, and how this is of the utmost benefit to oneself. How the key to our true potential has been here all along, we just haven't been able to see it yet because we haven't been able to see ourselves.
