The Others

All that you always wanted to know about the others and nobody ever told you. Instructions on how to handle the others, what are they all about and what are they for.

The others are you.
This article is continuing the reasoning and the train of thoughts started in the January’s issue with my article on “Solitude”. Solitude and others are a most interesting polarity of our lives. They are a most crucial dichotomy, like light and darkness, fear and love, life and death. If there is one, there cannot be the other. No school, no parent or mentor, no teacher or university taught us what is the meaning of the others, what are the others all about and for what reason they are there. Moreover nobody gave us instructions on how to ‘use’ them – to handle them. The others are your reflex in the world and whoever you meet is a flitting image of you captured by a mirror. As matter of fact you can only meet yourself. Anyone you meet is yourself. If you are aware of this, anybody you encounter is an officiant Pythia, the sibyl or priestess of the Oracle at Delphi, capable to telling with pitiless precision who you are, and what your destiny is. In a few minutes you can discover yourself, know yourself, and also know everything about the other. Whomever you encounter, you can know his or her destiny, and the destiny of any other who is like-minded. The more you know yourself, the more the external world and the ‘others’ become an open book for you.

The internal gap
Among the things I have learned from the Dreamer, which I have narrated in my Book “The School for Gods”, one of the most amazing is the unveiling of this: whoever you meet, beyond the surface, beyond the thin layer of what you are discussing, that encounter is measuring, registering an internal distance, the gap existing between you and yourself. This is the real and most profitable outcome of encountering the others. Shortening the gap, bridging this distance in yourself, you will see the multiplicity of the world reduced and the others go down in number till they gradually fade away, disappearing from your life, like tools which are no longer needed, when the work is done. The more you are separated from yourself, the more this space must be filled with others, stuffed with casualness, with a multitude of adversities, with a crowd of events, most of which are unpleasant.  The more you fill the inner gap the less the world intrudes between you and yourself. Without this understanding men meet each other in a somnambulistic state, troubled by worries, clouded by doubts and fears and lost in daily discord. They meet so as to pursue objectives and insignificant, external advantages, instead of taking from the encounter the only real, durable profit: to eliminate one’s mediocrity and lies, and conquer oneself. No matter how much people devote themselves to doing, to discussing business or making apparently important decisions, from an evolved man’s point of view, they appear to be little more than uncivilized individuals busy negotiating and haggling over glass beads, bric-a-brac and trash. It is you who gives significance to events, who creates the people crowding your life. You are responsible for their moral and human quality, their actions and reactions, their understanding. It is in your power to illuminate them or to switch them off, for a second or for a life time. You can speed them up or you can slow them down. You can keep them or let them go. The world is an appendix, a game of lights and shadows where people exist and things happen only because you are. For a real man, meeting others is only a stratagem to know oneself, to discover one’s own incompleteness and heal it.

The others are your being made visible
The others are mirrors reflecting our image. The others are our being made visible, our psychology materialized. In fact, depending on the state of being that you are in, others reflect your doubts, your uncertainties, your sorrow and fears or they reflect your state of independence, wellbeing and certainty. This realization will allow us to encounter a stable, clean and harmonious world if we live corresponding states of being. The others are projections of our states of Being. When certain states disappear from inside, certain events and certain people disappear from our lives. For a humanity that is unprepared to encounter a respectful, balanced, bright world there could only be an entry into a world of negativity and boredom. An incomplete person cannot bear to be by himself, to enjoy his own company. His incompleteness, his guiltiness urges him to always look for others to meet, in a constant state of expectation, perpetually waiting for something to happen. Solitude, a state in which to cultivate elevation of one’s Being, is boring for unready people because it goes towards silence and leads to an absence of events, circumstances and gripping, absorbing emotions… and above all, an absence of others. You need to prepare for perfection or it arrives like a shadow, fear, threat. Unprepared people would suffocate with boredom. They would see unity of being and stillness as idleness and immobility. Realizing himself to be the solely responsible for his own world, an ordinary man would feel strangled and crushed.  He prefers to believe that he is part of the creation, part of the shadows, in a world made by others, rather than to accept the responsibility of being the Maker of his destiny – because the state of being the Dreamer, the Creator is too powerful. The life of a dreamer will not accept even a single atom of uncertainty. Understand this and you will either give yourself up to sleep with its justifying, complaining, and accusing or you will dedicate yourself to your evolution – to your improvement.

Others are time 
Turn to yourself. This must be our discipline. Realize that there nothing out there. There is nobody to ask, nobody who can tell you the way to go. When you realize that there is nothing that the others can do for you, you are free. Free to finally fetch from yourself, from your uniqueness, from your originality. On the contrary, ordinary people long to be with others, they incessantly search for company. A man goes out to a restaurant, to the cinema, to the disco, just for one reason: to encounter others. And each time he returns home with a sense of defeat. The reason is that others are himself in time, others are time. They are the past that haunts him.  The victory is to be one without otherness.  People get married to avoid being alone, in the attempt to overcome their loneliness, and to find happiness in the other.  But two incomplete human beings clinging to one another deceive themselves into thinking that they can complete each other, that together they can form a whole. But the result of the union of two incomplete people is incompleteness squared. Ordinary people, and especially the young, are unaware that happiness is an inner matter. It can only be the intentional choice of this very instant and cannot be in time; it cannot happen with another person.  It is impossible.  Only you, in absence of time, returning to the source, regaining your unity, can be happy. Integrity doesn’t have plurality.  Integrity cannot be achieved in two or three.  Just like one cannot be healthy in two or in three. If you lower your level of integrity, of truth, of happiness, the world fragments, and becomes a kaleidoscope.  Innocence is a return to integrity – a rewinding.  The closer you are to integrity, the less you rely on others, the less you need others, until for your nature, there is no alternative to your solitude; it becomes a blessing state that you can pursue and hold constant in the middle of a crowd, or in the uproar of a bazaar.

The Portable Paradise 
Timelessness makes life tremendously easy. Liberate yourself from time. Liberate yourself from the hypnotic need for others. Train yourself to have a paradise inside – a portable paradise. There is no role, friend, relationship, that can make you live in paradise. Only you, yourself can do it.  No marriage, no music, no drugs, no sex can give you paradise or happiness. No politics, no religion, no priest, no master or guru can do it – no one outside of yourself.