Alienation

Alan Watts once said, "knowledge of self is knowledge of other, and knowledge of other is knowledge of self." Since I came across these words, I have held them to be true, on some level. In working with my shadow recently, I have come to a deeper understanding of this statement.

One method (described in Integral Life Practice, reprinted here) that I use to work with the shadow is by recognizing people and characteristics of people that I come across every day that irk me, annoy me, anger me--affect me in a negatively emotional way. The principle is that other people are mirrors for the self. And by recognizing that the things I don't like in other people are simply reflections of things I don't like in myself, I begin to see a certain truth of Watts' statement. Parts of my self that I have alienated, cut off, repressed, ignored, do not disappear, but instead make their presence known in the mirror of other people. The process of reclaiming these parts of the shadow is painful initially, but it leads to a greater, more total, more integrated sense of self. And, somewhat paradoxically, it leads, at least in my experience, to a greater feeling of unity with other people.

Putney and Putney (in The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society (1964)) comment:

To become autonomous, it is necessary to move beyond hatred. Yet, when a person first senses that what he despises in others is a mirrored image of latent potential in himself, he is fearful. It seems that if he looked closely he would discover that he was the antithesis of all that he hoped to be. A hitherto unconcealed aspect of the self does loom large at the moment of recognition, but once it becomes familiar it slips into place in the totality of the self. Only the man who can honestly admit that "nothing human is alien to me" is capable of self-acceptance.

It is the last sentence of that paragraph, with the quote from Terence, that really links up to what I'm saying. When I notice something in someone else that I don't like, I am pushing that part of them away, under the impression that I don't possess that quality, but they do. It can be something as trivial as a woman at the cobbler who, in my eyes, was being obnoxiously nitpicky and holding up the line. I lead myself to believe that the nitpickiness I notice is clearly something she possesses, not me. But in this appraisal of things, I am alienating not only her, but the part of myself that is nitpicky. So when Terence says, "nothing human is alien to me," his words can be interpreted as referring to a state of affairs where any sense of alienation I feel from other other people is a direct result of alienating the parts of those people that I recognize in myself (whether it is nitpickiness or the desire to murder). And when I take the qualities that annoy me about other people and recognize them in myself, I simultaneously feel less alienated from the person and less alienated from myself.