We Are All Reflections Of Each Other

– By Dr Nav Ropra.

Don’t like your nurse or associate?

Principal giving you a hard time?

Fed up with your partner?

There will be times in our lives when everything runs smoothly and we are on top of the world.  Then we meet someone, or something happens in our dental practice, and our ‘house of cards’ comes crashing down.  We can become involved in bitter disputes about something, no matter how trivial.  It can occupy a lot of time and space in our minds and distract us from our chief aim in life. 

Trying to prove ourselves right, or disprove the other as wrong can be sometimes futile and if we do win, then the cost of the victory can sometime far outweigh the prize.  So what happens when we get caught up in tense battles with our nursing staff or the associate/principal conflicts?  

Socrates has said:

‘The seer, the seeing and the seen are the same.’

What we see in others is the same as what we see in ourselves, but we are sometimes too proud, or too humble to admit it to ourselves.  What Socrates was talking about was the principle of reflective consciousness, that we are all reflections of each other. 

We have all those characteristic traits that the other person is displaying in our own form, but we don’t like to own them or accept that we are just as much nice or mean, cruel or kind etc as the person we are labelling or judging.  We do this in our own way. When we cannot own those characteristic traits in ourselves we attract people, places, situations and events that press our emotional buttons to wake us up to the actuality of life.  For example nursing staff may press our buttons, the tense associate/principle dynamic occurs in order to show us and remind us what we have yet to learn to love and integrate in ourselves.  If we cannot integrate in ourselves, that part which we see in the other person, then we have what Plato called disowned parts of ourselves.  We have defective consciousness rather than reflective consciousness.

The Master practitioner is the one who is able to integrate everything that happens to him or her in practice life or their personal life, and see it as another example of reflective consciousness.  That we are in fact all mirrors of each other.  Another opportunity for them to grow as a human being in their own awareness and influence.  The more they are able to do this and act to situations, instead of reacting, the more their leadership abilities and levels of influence and awareness will expand. 

Owning the characteristic traits that you see in other people so that you level the playing field and put people in your heart is wise, rather than putting them on an emotional pedestal or throwing them into an emotional pit.  Your authentic nature comes out and people get to see you for who you really are instead of just seeing your reactions to things.  You then can act to the actuality of life instead of reacting to the reality of your perceptions.