A Mason's Work

This week we're going to go through a series of episodes related to dealing with essentially

what is other people.

And today I want to talk about what are other people, which sounds weird, right?

Because you're used to interacting with other people on an everyday basis.

But what you're really interacting with is a proxy.

You really don't meaningfully interact with other people in that 90% of the time where

you're thinking about someone else or even reacting to something that someone else has

said, you're filtering that interaction through the idea of that person, not through the

person themselves.

So what does this really mean and what does it turn into if you're not sort of careful?

Because we interact with the idea of other people, it's very clear that we are angry with

the idea of other people.

We are in love with the idea of other people.

Any of the emotional kind of expressions or attachments when they become relative to

others are effectively interactions between your idea of that person and yourself.

And so what this turns out to be, as you move forward, is depending on how accurate your

idea of someone else is determines essentially how often you get upset when reality actually

occurs.

So for example, if I think the person I'm dealing with or talking with on a regular

basis is the kind of person who would never do X or Y or Z, maybe they would never, for

example, go several days without a shower or makeup or the other end or whatever.

And then you are confronted with the reality that they do, in fact, go several days without

makeup or the other end or what have you.

You're going to have a cognitive problem with that mapping of who they are in your head

versus their actual behavior.

The same thing is true when you expect them to do things based on your perception of what

they may have said.

And all of this boils down to you interacting with other people, not in, again, in reality

or in the present moment.

It often means that you are forming these ideas about this person, oftentimes without the

consent of any sort of reality whatsoever.

And in the privacy of your own mind.

And then you'll find that if you don't sort of get control of this, you will get irrationally

upset when confronted by those realities, whatever they might be.

They're irrationally surprised and pleasantly surprised or irrationally frustrated and angry

when the behavior that you have described others doesn't match their actual behavior.

So how do we get around this?

How do we get around the fact that you're constantly forming this sort of wax, mental

doll of the people in your life?

First things first is we learn, we must learn how to live in the present moment.

And we've talked about this in a couple of episodes in the past by not essentially living

in the present moment and listening and seeing and observing things in the moment as they

are, you are constantly sort of processing on a delay as the input from a conversation

or from an observed behavior goes through the sort of internal processes that your mind

undertakes to reconcile what's actually happening versus your idea of that person.

If you can shorten that process to essentially eliminate it so that you're just taking

raw input and dealing with it as it is, you'll move out of the process of projecting your

idea of that person onto that person.

And you'll allow them the agency on the autonomy to do whatever it is they want to do or they

are going to do without you having to evaluate that in any meaningful way.

Now that doesn't mean when we give up this sort of wax doll of other people that we can't

also take and provide feedback and valuable input on the way people behave, it doesn't

mean that you can't have meaningful relationships.

It means that that predisposition that we have of interacting with ideas is one that

oftentimes gets in the way and will prevent us from developing really a truly genuine

and meaningful relationship based on shared present moments.

When you get out of this habit and when you can move past that sort of wax doll persona,

you will find that your relationship matures in a way that will advance your understanding

and depth and strengthen the relationship over time.