It’s amazing where our blessings and teachings come from. We have to keep our eyes, ears and heart open or we can easily miss them and mistake them for something that is just the opposite.
Perhaps you have been blessed by an encounter with a mentally disturbed person who, while talking to himself, targets you with abusive language. This may feel disturbing. But it is the perfect lesson that everything people say about you comes entirely from them. It has little or nothing to do with you at all. In the case of someone like this it is far more obvious and not subtle at all. You can’t miss it. That is why it is a blessing.
Most of us are concerned about what people think of us. We want them to think we are good people and to like us. If we are particularly insecure we may ignore the hundred people that think we are wonderful and put all our attention on the one person who thinks we are an idiot. This is not as uncommon as it may sound.
The realization that whatever anyone thinks about us is a reflection of them, not us, is not only very freeing but true. This is far more obvious in the case of a severely mentally disturbed person. But it is actually just as true for all people. We may not want to admit this because we kind of like the positive attention we get from people. It strokes our ego. To admit this, we have to throw out the positive with the negative. They are both just the reflection of the one who thinks this, not of us.
If we care to look just a little deeper, we can’t even find this “us” who people are saying positive or negative things about. That is also simply a reflection of our own conditioned thoughts. It’s not really here. So the person who says something negative about us and the “I” that reacts to this criticism are both seeing something that is not really here. We are both only talking about a dream. Although this is a far more subtle illusion than the one the mentally disturbed person muttering to himself is suffering under, it actually has far more in common than we want to admit. Perhaps the only real difference is that one illusion is accepted as reality by the majority of the population and the other one is not.
The real point of my story is that we have much to learn from everything that occurs in our lives. Lessons are constantly occurring in great abundance every moment. When we stop resisting life, it becomes much easier to see just how incredibly generous it is.
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