If you are not yet able to love everyone as you would like to, then can you be without a sense of having to get back at a seeming other or showing him what’s what or teaching him a lesson or sticking up for yourself or asserting your rights in some way?
What you can really give up is your sense of being wronged. When you can give up your sense of having been wronged, attacked, or defied in some way, much tension leaves. Then you no longer see the seeming other as an opponent, and you can then come to a certain relaxation that can even be called peace. I think you can come to this. Truly, in the depth of your heart, with this simple thought that the seeming other is not out to get you, even your thoughts of negativity toward him go away. Rather than fight another, even internally, really and truly, you can let go of your resentment and be a friendly bystander or even friend, who wishes seeming others well. I know you would rather life be like this.
You don’t manufacture this greater awareness, you understand, you come to it.
If you would like seeming others to release any animosity they may feel toward you, cannot you release your build-up of animosity toward them?
I come back to reminding you that your resistance to another comes not from the other, but from within you. No matter how the other person looks at you or what he says to you, you are looking at yourself and you are hearing yourself. It appears to you that the seeming other on some level does not think much of you. This may or may not be true. Nevertheless, it is you who doesn’t think enough of yourself and so deep down you deem him responsible for your discomfort. Perhaps you blame the seeming other for not fulfilling something within you, or the seeming other may remind you of someone from your long ago past. Even as you do not remember anyone from the past that the seeming other reminds you of, you are reacting to something in the other that you project upon him. The one before you is not responsible for your reactions.
We can even put this in another way. There is something for you to learn from this seeming other. No matter how incorrect, inadequate or defiant to you the seeming other may appear or perhaps be, you have an issue within yourself. You are making something of this that it is not. There is a breach between Oneness, and you are making this breach. You are responsible. Otherwise, I tell you frankly that your feathers would not be ruffled. You would not be upset. If the person happens to be your employer or your employee, and a situation or perception has to be resolved, as much as another may have to widen his point of view, so do you also. The seeming other sees differently from you, and you see differently from the seeming other as well. That’s obvious, yet you and the other do not see something that is there for you to see.
And so what you have to do is to start listening. If a seeming other is antagonistic to you, there is something for you to see that you do not presently see. When you begin to understand another’s seeming opposition to you, it will sink in to you that you have been as un-understanding as the seeming other, and, therefore, beloved, if I may say so, you may be the person difficult to deal with.
The main thing you have to know is that the other is not your foe. He is simply as un-understanding as you. With the realization that the seeming other has no malice to you, your resistance to the other leaves, and you find yourself already feeling more friendly, more that you and the seeming other are, after all, friends rather than opponents. Wouldn’t you rather?
Then, suddenly, it’s spring.