“Sometimes the ‘fault’ that you perceive in another isn’t even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.
The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself.
In that sense, you have much to learn from your enemies. What is it in them that you find most upsetting, most disturbing? Their selfishness? Their greed? Their need for power and control? Their insincerity, dishonesty, their propensity to violence, or whatever it may be?
Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you. But it is no more than a form of ego, and such, it is completely impersonal. It has nothing to do with who that person is, nor has it anything to do with who you are. Only if you mistake it for who you are … can observing it within you be threatening to your sense of self.
When you realize that it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned.
Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is ego. Nonreaction is not weakness but strength.
Another word for non-reaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.”
A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle, p. 62-63, 74.
