Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible for Helping - Akira the Don

I read this piece of work by Jung a long while back

It was a meditation on

The injunction to treat your neighbor as

As you would like to be treated (echo)

And what Jung pointed out which I really liked

Was that, that wasn’t an injunction to be nice to other people

It was an invitation to reciprocity

It was something like this

It’s like

You should figure out how you would like to be treated

Like you were taking care of yourself

Not how you would like people to respond to you

It’s more important than that

It’s like imagine you had a child

That you really cared for

And someone said

«Well, people will treat this child exactly like you want them to»

«But you have to figure out what that is.»

And so, then you’d have to sit down for like a month and you think

Okay well, how do you want your child to be treated?

You don’t want everyone to just be nice to ‘em, you know?

You want people to challenge ‘em

And

You want people to discipline him

And

You want people to tell ‘em when he’s wrong

It’s like

You don’t just want everyone to be nice

That’s pathetic

It’s pathetic

There’s no — There’s no challenge in that

Challenge in that (echo)

There’s no — There’s no challenge in that

Challenge in that (echo)

Human beings are self-conscious

And

We know about our limitations

And we know about our weaknesses

And so, we can have contempt for human beings in general

Because

You know

We’re just

Flawed and breakable and all of that

But we know ourselves better than we know everyone else

And so

You have a very acute sense of

How you’re not up to scratch

And so that leads

Naturally to a sort of self-contentious attitude

People are more likely to give prescription medication to their pets than

To take them themselves

Take them themselves (echo)

Imagine someone that you treat well

That you love

And try to treat yourself that way

You go to detach from yourself for a bit

You got to think;

okay well

I’m a person among other people

And I deserve at least as much respect

As

A person among other people

I should be trying to help myself across time

And instead of being self-contemptuous and self-destructive

I need to

Take care of myself

As if I’m potentially valuable

And to lay out my life that way

It’s hard for people

They don’t take care of themselves as well as they should

As well as the should (echo)

Take care of your room

Take care of your things

Like

Have some respect for yourself as a

Miraculous being because that is actually what you are

There is a lot of potential within you

You’re necessary

More than you think to the unfolding of things

That’s the thing about being an individual

It’s the thing that

Western civilization has always recognized

That as an individual

You have a light

That you have to bring into the world

And that if you don’t bring it into the world

The world is a dimmer place

And that’s a bad thing because when the world is a dim place it can get

very-very-very dark