“You try too hard because you have this idea you’re a warm, loving person, a special person. You are loving and warm but there’s a real difference between the times when you just are that way and when you get caught up trying to be that way. You forget to BE there when you’re trying so hard. When you’re really loving, you aren’t thinking about yourself or trying to be who you think you are. Do you see what I mean?”
I did see, but it took awhile. It’s so hard to get beyond your own perceptions about yourself, or another person, or anything.
When my perceptions truly coincide with what’s happening, it’s because I’m willing to lose myself in the other person or experience. It’s feelings of specialness I have about myself that keep me from doing that.
A good example is when I’m with somebody I imagine thinks I’m a jerk. If I’m not paying attention, I automatically slide into a polarizing position in which I reinforce his model about me: when he thinks I’m a jerk, I find myself becoming one (because I don’t think I’m a jerk, I’m more special than a jerk). In my idea of specialness I become a jerk who thinks she’s special, and thinks the other guy is a jerk for not thinking so. I close myself to that person.
Feeling singularly special (not to be confused with honest self-love), you are only truly open to the response in others that your specialness dictates they give. You try to manipulate others in subtle ways by expressing disappointments, expectations, and desires that they be a certain way. Or you try to manipulate their image of you by trying to be loving, warm, open, whatever, when you are not feeling that way.
It’s an over-simplification to say that we constantly either 1) alienate or increase our separation from others with beliefs in separative specialness, or 2) open to others as perfect expressions of free-will, but it’s helpful in thinking about guidance and its value.
If your attraction to a psychic reading, or group scene of spiritual channelling or teaching, is that it makes you feel more special and everyone outside your group or orientation seems “less evolved,” less enlightened, less privileged, less knowing, less special, then a process may have begun in which you only open yourself to those beliefs that reinforce your present “special” beliefs, and close out everyone else.
“Specialness” is a powerful seductress, reflecting our desires to be singled out as unique, clothed as something more than the rest of us. According to the strength of its mystique, it demands a reaction: you recognize my truth as the truth; get on your knees and accept Jesus Christ as your saviour; come to group meditations if you are a true server of the Light; come to church if you want eternal life; read this book if you are a serious spiritual student; do you read the Bible?
Absolute judgements of trust or skepticism imply an inability to see beyond personality concepts, “special” concepts. Seeing beyond the specialness of any guidance, psychics, psychiatrists, or yourself, is a measure of how much it helps you love other people and their realities as they are, despite how “especially wrong” they might appear to be from the prejudiced eye of the singular self and Time.
