The Others You See Are Actually You
The you that others see isn’t you. The self you see isn’t you. The others you see, that’s actually you.
The flower is still the flower. The world is still the world. What decides how it looks to you has always been the lamp inside you.
It’s easy to defeat the bandits in the mountains. It’s hard to defeat the bandits in the heart.
There’s a story in Wang Yangming’s Instructions for Practical Living that I find interesting.
Wang Yangming had a student named Wang Ruzhi. One day Wang Ruzhi came back from being out and excitedly told him: “Teacher, today I looked at every person on the street and they all seemed like saints to me.”
You’d think Wang Yangming would praise him for finally getting it. He didn’t. Instead, he came back with one line:
“You see everyone on the street as a saint, but everyone on the street is looking back at you and seeing a saint in you.”
In other words, when you see other people as saints, that’s because you’re acting like a saint yourself.
This is deeply counterintuitive. You think you’re looking at other people, but actually that’s just your own projection. You think you’re judging the world, but the world is just a mirror, borrowing you to reveal itself.
Later I came across another line somewhere else:
The you that others see isn’t you. The self you see isn’t you. The others you see, that’s actually you.
The instant I read it, I felt something both clarifying and a little chilling crawl up my back.
I suddenly realized that all the thoughts that had flowed through me when looking at other people over the years, pride, envy, disdain, suspicion, none of them had ever been about anyone else. Every single one was about me.
The flower is still the flower. The world is still the world. What decides how it looks to you has always been the lamp inside you.
So a question comes up. If the people I’m seeing are, at the bottom, all just me, does looking at others still mean anything?
Yes, it means something. And it means more than before.
Because every moment you have a thought, the world is helping you develop a picture of yourself. What you envy tells you what you still want. What you despise tells you what you haven’t let go of. What moves you tells you what you still believe.
Other people become the most honest mirror you have for seeing yourself.
You don’t need to go looking for a teacher outside. The person you ran into today who got under your skin is a projection of you, left out there in the world. If the projection doesn’t look good, go back and adjust the lamp.
The you that others see isn’t you. The self you see isn’t you.
But the world you see, that’s always been you.
Another interesting idea: don’t lie to yourself.
It’s also what Wang Yangming kept circling back to in his later years, eventually compressed into three characters: 致良知, “extending innate knowledge.”
We love dressing up our own behavior with high-sounding reasons. Lying to other people, fine. But don’t lie to yourself.
It’s hard to admit you’re greedy, so you call it ambition. It’s hard to admit you’re lazy, so you call it being chill. It’s hard to admit you’re afraid, so you call it being cautious. It’s hard to admit you hate someone, so you call it taking a stand.
You know in your heart, you’re greedy, you’re lazy, you’re afraid, you hate. Admitting that is much harder than packaging it up as ambition or Zen or caution or principle.
But admitting it is only the start. You also need to act. Change what needs changing, let go of what needs letting go, satisfy what needs satisfying.
If you can’t do it, you don’t actually know it.
You say you understand, but you actually don’t. If you really understood, you couldn’t fail to do it.
Every “I know it all in theory, I just can’t do it” translates to one sentence: you don’t actually understand.
Wang Yangming also mentions a way to train this: be honest with yourself on every small thing.
He doesn’t tell you to sit and meditate. He says that easily slips into a kind of withered emptiness. He tells you to practice in daily life. A colleague takes advantage of you, see if you dare to push back. Your boss asks you to do something against your conscience, see if you dare to refuse. Your partner makes you angry, see if you dare to say it out loud.
Every one of these is a round of training.
Over time, some people end up living as themselves. Others end up living as a character they’re performing for someone else.
It’s easy to defeat the bandits in the mountains. It’s hard to defeat the bandits in the heart.