Seeing Good in Others

By default the orientation of our mental lens forbids us to find any goodness around. We become distasteful of other’s choices, hate their honed habits, and disapprove of their physical and behavioral attributes. Our mental health deteriorates rapidly owing to strong reactions and aversions resulting in irritation, stress, and depression. Incorporating mindfulness practices in life can help us correct our vision of seeing good in others and getting liberated from the unnecessary burdens of the mind. Living a compassionate life with acceptance for others is the key to happiness and satisfaction.

The Mental Torture of being around people

For countless people, life has become a living hell because they have to encounter every day the humans whom he/she despises. The sheer dislikeness of being surrounded by such an environment filled with morons takes a severe toll on your mental health. In extreme cases, it ends up with depression and suicidal tendencies.

You want to escape and get away from all this nonsense. You want to avoid every person and circumstance that causes you to react. You desperately try to break free from that, but you can’t, or if you can, you don’t have the courage. You feel that you don’t belong anywhere.

So you try to adapt by withstanding the pressure. By simple logic, if something is created it can’t vanish. It transforms from one form into another. Your anger issues and different kinds of physical/ mental diseases are the manifestation of that.

You bond with the few close ones because you can vent anger, criticize, and release some pressure. Unfortunately, this method of temporary release is not a true release but a mere suppression of those emotions due to hormones. There is no transformation in your mind to deal with this pressure permanently.

The Growing Flaws

As you grow materially and intellectually, you begin to detect more flaws in people around you. Ironically, as your moral intellect grows, intolerance also heightens rapidly. Most people who evolve into a vegan lifestyle become hypersensitive and unsympathetic to non-vegans in the beginning. But progressively they mature to incorporate the real principle behind it i.e. compassion. 

The more you spend time with them the more dislikeness emerges. Distastefulness seemingly increases for your partner, parents, and office colleagues with whom you spend a considerable time. Irrespective of its origin, the radar of your dislikeness extends to your neighbor, security guard, cab driver, the whole city, the nation, and ultimately humanity. 

Apart from a handful of people who you consider close and like you, no one matters, and everyone else loses the eligibility to be good enough for your kindness.

Why Can’t You find any Good people around

The Mind, being the primary instrument of cognition functions according to its internal makeup like other sense organs. For example, If your eyes’ internal structure is such that the colors of the objective world can’t be supported, you see everything in black and white. 

The experience of the objective world is subject to the internal makeup of the mind. Just like a projector with a red lens acts as a filter to portray the movie accordingly, all your experiences including the invoked emotions are due to the internal lens of your mind.

Usually, this lens is oriented in such a way that it polarizes your cognition from the perspective of flaws in others. A very high weightage is given to flaws as compared to goodness. Someone might have done a thousand good things but just one mistake is enough to create aversion toward that person. Your mind keeps grudges.

If you deeply introspect about these flaws in others, you will find that they are the opposite of how you should have acted. Anyone deviating from your approved ways of actions/thoughts is a bad person. It’s relative to your mindset and not absolute. As long as you were enjoying alcohol, others drinking was not a problem for you. But when you become sober, then your mind treats other drinkers as immoral people.

Seeing Good in Others Liberates You

Imagine a day when you wake up and do not feel dragged to face your colleagues in the office. Think of a situation where you are not mentally irritated at your neighbor’s barking dog, or a miraculous day when you walk through the noisy traffic without losing your calmness.

Your mind has the capability to shut down its habitual reactions and be rested. This not only saves you from being thrown away by the tantrum of your emotions due to the unnecessary outpour of hormones but also allows you to experience the beauty of the world as it is. You are released from the unwarranted burdens of judging others and losing calmness.

The stress and depression created in your mind due to holding grudges towards people not abiding by your preferred ways binds you to suffering. When you know how to rectify the lens in your mind to throw away the grudges and see the good in others, you experience a whole new world filled with goodness, beauty, and compassion.

By seeing good in others you restore your belongingness to the same world. A sense of growth that has abandoned you begins to become your integral part. All your mental problems be it stress, anxiety, or depression gradually release you from their grasp to enable you to march towards a life of blissfulness. 

How to See Good in Others

The external situation changes on its own accord and most likely not the way you expect. Therefore, transformation has to be internal. Adjusting the internal makeup of your mind changes how you see things around you. Your mind can be transformed with consistent practice and continuous infusion of the right knowledge.

Mindfulness practices water the hidden seed of compassion within you. With the due course, you become mindful of your mental reactions and become capable of observing them as a witness. You develop a habit of getting rid of grudges immediately and seeing others from a selfless perspective.

Mindful breathing, mindful walking, or body scanning makes you aware of your body, breath, and sensations. Your awareness slowly gets refined to detect the subtle aspects of your body and mind. As it gradually becomes more and more subtle, you can find out about the inner workings of your mind. 

Regular injection of the right knowledge in the form of Dharma talks or books by experienced teachers is also necessary to achieve this feat. Through contemplation of those ideas, you get the insight of what needs to be changed and how. This aids significantly in the rectification process aimed to be achieved through the practices.