In this life, we interact with other people, unless, of course, we become hermits and go to a cave somewhere. This interaction is limited. There are billions of people in the world, and how many do we actually interact with? How many people do we know that when we see their face we recognize them; we’ve seen them before, we’ve actually made a connection with them before? If there are two or three hundred that you can recognize from before, I would say that’s probably a lot of people for most people.
How many people do you talk to on a regular basis? How many of these people that you recognize do you actually communicate with? I would say that that’s probably even less. I think if we communicate with fifty people, that’s probably a lot. If you go back through the last week and you think about, “How many people did I talk to during the past week?” unless you have a job where you’re on a phone I don’t think it would be that many. So the question is, our interactions are limited, how do we make our interactions kind? How do we have empathy with the people we know? How do we get ourselves to the point where we feel what they feel?
We’re not asked to feel the entire world because we’re not within reach of the entire world. But we are within reach of a small group of people. So can we make our experience with this small group of people positive and worthwhile? There are personalities who can’t do this; they can’t have a decent relationship with anybody because that’s not who they are. Their purpose is not to have decent relationships; their purpose is to somehow one-up everybody that they run into, and everybody around them. Their purpose is somehow to create discord and dissent.
Think about that, and think about the people who do that, and I’m sure everybody knows somebody who does that. What is the driving force that makes them do that, and how can we bring ourselves to not be influenced by the force that brings that about?
We have to see things as positive that are helpful, not that are harmful. But many people see things as positive that are harmful, that don’t help the situation. There are people who are racist, and they somehow think that it’s positive to be racist, and they’ve come up with an entire agenda, an entire set of reasoning, of why it’s okay, and why you should do it, and how it protects you.
In my years I have found that people can rationalize anything. People can look at their own point of view and somehow make it into something worthwhile. People are very reluctant to take blame, or to blame themselves, for anything…
