People

Recognizing you in them. 

People have been people-ing since the beginning of time itself. People behave, act, move, muse, do, and reach for things and outcomes in life based on categories and motives which drive the action.

Good people, bad people, smart people, sad people, happy people. The definitions and categories change, but the human animal generally does not.

What does it really mean to be a person in the world, or "one of the people"?

The Actions of Others

Most people live their incarnations through agendas, desires, goals, pain, suffering, opinions, and beliefs that can be traced back to the actions we see manifest in the world. People, for the most part, believe they are in the right based on their actions. They justify these actions using words like "deserve," "earned," "it's time", they should have, they should change something, solve something, fix something, take something, influence something.

Underneath almost all of it is the same motive or engine driving the action: personal gain or safety. People want to thrive, and thriving is usually fear just wearing a nicer outfit. If I am thriving, "killing it in life," I have less to fear. Every reach for something, some outcome, is usually a flinch away from something else.

Sorting the Wheat From the Chaff

People sort each other. Family, friends, strangers, coworkers, loving partners, the opposition, the same team. And once someone is sorted, we act toward them the way the category demands, filtered through our own gain and our own safety.

It works, in a way. In the sense that it's efficient. But, it also means we've stopped looking at the person and started looking at the label.

You've already experienced this throughout your existence. The family member you've quietly filed under "difficult." The coworker you've decided is "the problem." The ex who is no longer a person to you at all, just a category with a grudge or pain attached. You didn't choose those labels in a cold moment of reflection. You reached for them in the middle of gain or fear, and then stopped looking any further, because the label did the looking for you.

The Indignity

You've been on the other end of it too. Someone somewhere has labeled you the same way: "the difficult one," "the one who left," "the problem." You know exactly how thin and wrong that felt, because of how much of you it left out. If it was false when it was done to you, then it is false when you label someone else.

Herein lies the problem with labeling people: none of the labeling is accurate.

No one fits a single one of those categories, or held still long enough for it to be completely true. The coworker is also someone's father. The opposition is also terrified. The stranger is running the exact same program you are, just pointed in a different direction. And you don't fit your own categories either. You are not simply "the loving partner" or "the responsible one" or "the good person." You are a person, moving through fear and reaching for outcomes like everyone else in the world.

Good and Bad People

There are only people. Not good, not bad. People. The judgment of good and bad is based on a moving line of what you believe to be good and bad. The difference between the good and bad labels is really just spiritual understanding, or lack thereof, within the individual.

The next time you feel yourself sorting someone, stop and ask what you are not understanding yet. Because that's really what judgment is. Judgment is just the edge of your own understanding, mistaken for a fact about someone else.

Their behavior isn't random and it isn't personal. It's a direct manifestation of how much of this reality they've come to understand. Someone grasping, someone lashing out, someone hoarding, someone controlling. That's not who they are, that's where they are. Reactivity is a display based on comprehension. So is peace.

Not Wheat Either

It's easier to release judgment and to extend this to other people. It's harder to extend it to yourself.

You have grasped. You have lashed out, hoarded, controlled, protected something that didn't need protecting. You have reacted from fear and called it being right. If reactivity is a display of spiritual comprehension, then your own reactivity is a display too. It isn't a verdict of your worth, just an honest reading of where you were standing at the time.

The same mercy that says nobody is chaff has to reach all the way back to you as truth. You are not wheat, sorted out and superior. You are not chaff, sorted out and lesser. You are a person, still experiencing, still awakening, exactly like everyone you've ever been tempted to write off.

Loving Isn't Condoning

Somewhere in you, there is something probably objecting. "But they really did hurt me." That objection is fair, and it deserves more than a quick answer. When you're standing in the middle of that hurt, "they're just where they are on the path" can sound like you're being asked to hand over your own pain as a courtesy. You're not. The understanding isn't a requirement to feel nothing. It's just the truth about what happened, running alongside whatever you still feel.

None of this means condoning what people do. Understanding someone's fear doesn't obligate you to stand still while they harm you. You can see clearly and still hold a boundary. Compassion was never the same thing as compliance.

But it does mean something has to change in how you see. Every category is a wall. Every wall keeps you from the one thing that's actually true here - that everybody in this reality is one family, still learning the same thing at different speeds, including you.

Recognizing You in Them

There is a mirror underneath all of it: the person in front of you, the difficult one, the opposition, the one who hurt you, is not running a different program than you are. Same desire for outcome, same fear, same reach for safety, same conviction that they're right. Different face, same mechanisms. When you see them clearly, you are looking at yourself in a mirror from a different angle.

That's the whole choice, every time: reach for the category, or reach for the person. Judgment, or love. It's never been a harder decision than that.

You'll know the moment when it comes. It's the half-second right after someone does something that lands wrong. The half-second where your mind reaches for the label before your eyes have even finished looking at them. Catch it there. That's the only place this choice is ever actually made.