Connecting Makes People Real

"Through the Thou a person becomes I." [1]

People need to be seen. This is one of the reasons relationships matter so much. By strangers, by friends, or by family, we want to be seen, we want to be known. Being seen by other people, or even by pets, validates our existence. Much of our life consists of wading through an amorphous and at times chaotic inner world, with little or nothing concrete enough to stand on within it. To have someone greet us raises us out of our shifting inner currents and gives us a chance at substance. In being acknowledged, in being seen, we feel that despite our insubstantial inner life, we could be solid. That chance at reality depends in part on our response to being seen.

One challenge lies in lowering the barriers, the defenses that stand between us and everyone else, to shift from seeing other people as things, as cardboard cutouts, to seeing others as people like ourselves, with an inner life of thoughts and emotions, with awareness like our own, with their hopes and dreams, joy and wonder, fear and suffering, with their unrecognized connection to the Sacred Source, like our own. This is the challenge of simply being and merging with the people around us.

Gurdjieff recommended several methods to help us meet that challenge: bearing the unpleasant manifestations of other people, putting ourselves in the place of another person, and letting go of our negativity, which is so often directed toward others. More succinctly this means acceptance, empathy, and non-identification. When we notice our non-acceptance, our lack of empathy, or our identification with another person, the act of simply seeing that person can break those ego-centered processes and let us just be with them, feel less separate from them.

Yet there is also a prerequisite to connecting with people: availability, and not just the physical availability of placing ourselves in their presence. It takes the availability of our attention, our mind, and our heart. If we are lost in a daydream or in rumination or inwardly criticizing and judging others or ourselves, we have no room for them. If we are inwardly preoccupied, we are reluctant to give our full attention to another person. And full attention is a key element of connecting, along with interest, openness, and recognizing our shared humanity. As they reveal their story to us, they reveal an entire, unique world.

And so, as is usually the case in being real, in living generally, and in the spiritual path, we come back to the central role of presence, in this case interpersonal presence, the presence of equals, the one and the same presence without boundaries, the I and Thou presence. This act of will that is presence is built on openness. We can offer that interpersonal presence without reservation, even to strangers. We connect from simple presence, our common, shared presence. Being present with another person makes us real. Their presence proves and improves our presence, by creating a shared field of presence.

There's also another way to be seen: being seen by the Sacred. Conscious energy surrounds us. To live in that, to be in that, enables us not only to see, but to be seen. The boundless field of consciousness lets us be seen by the One whose consciousness that is. An even deeper way is to allow the higher will to come into and through us, so that It becomes us and makes us real. Inner stillness, or the underlying layer of inner stillness, allows our ego, our separateness, to fade into quiescence, whereupon the higher can find room to enter us. The One Will that is the source of Reality makes us real when we become Its bearer, when we become that One Will, by welcoming and being That, by letting That be us. Simple presence opens that door.

This is why connecting with other people makes us real. In connecting with others, we connect with the sacred that is in them and in us, with the One that is Real. Realization means making real. When we allow ourselves to open to the other, we are allowing ourselves to be made real, we participate in making ourselves and the world real, restoring the world to its sacred roots and creating it anew.

[1] Martin Buber, I and Thou; 1923, Part 1

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