In any case, when you hold negative feelings, you have your work cut out before you. Your work is to find out how the other person sees the situation. First, you have to be open to finding out instead of resenting or blustering. When you understand where the seeming other is coming from, when you grasp his perception, then, amazingly, you are seizing upon a great lesson in life.
The lesson is: How to let go of resistance and your hard feelings. This is what you want, isn’t it? To be rid of your own negative resistance to a particular situation and be done with it. Isn’t the crux of the situation your own hard feelings and your sense of being wronged, maligned perhaps? And this is exactly how the seeming other is feeling. You can bet on it. He is feeling just as you do. You both are feeling put out, and you are both feeling undermined. In this sense, you are both seeing just alike.
This may well apply to difficulties with people close to you, your husband or wife, or child, or parent. It is not a one-time thing. As always, it is truly your issue that you are confronting. Otherwise, beloveds, you would not be reacting with the wealth of negativity that churns within you. You would be impartial. You would not hold any judgment against the seeming other. You would desire to understand, not as a big event, but simply as a next step. Now yearn to know how the seeming other perceives. You are open to seeing beyond your rightness. Therefore, you are not judging. You are listening not for proof that you are right, for rightness is not the issue. Your listening is the issue.
First seek the answers within yourself. You start from the point of view that the other means no offense to you. The seeming other simply sees as he sees, and you want to know how he sees.
You may not find the answers on your own.
Then seek to sit down with the seeming other who may be a close family member at a time good for him and ask him to help you understand what he is feeling. You are not confronting, why would you? You are listening. You are not interrupting. You are keeping your focus. Your job now is to hear and listen with your heart as well as your mind. You are not appraising. You are intent on grasping that which you haven’t yet grasped.
May the other, who is really yourself, be forthright with you so you can listen and hear and understand that there is no break in Oneness.
When you grasp the answers, you will be disarmed. Suddenly, the embers of reproach you felt within are gone. Why? Because a seeming antagonist disappeared and in his place a friend just like you appears. Where is the struggle now?
Not seeing a foe -- this is maturity, beloveds. Always what you are really seeing is yourself. Friction and disappointment give you a great opportunity for you who is sitting in two chairs to be much more open to yourself as you appear in the form of another. This must be so. You desire to really come to see another’s point of view, who, after all, is yourself.
The Great Ones did not see anyone as an enemy, not even those who may have judged them falsely. All judging is false, beloveds. In the deepest Truth, enemies are a made-up thing. Enemy is a label you cast upon yourself. Once upon a time, you believed a seeming other responsible for your discomfort. Now you see you are responsible for your own discomfort.
Now you are your Self. And We Are One.