Vachon Imagined

When someone does not like you, when they avoid you or turn away, they are often walking within a consciousness shaped by what they experience in your presence. You reveal something to them — something they may embrace, resist, or struggle to understand.

But if we listen to what we invoke in another person, we too are transformed.

This is the nature of sharing. Not denial. Not control. Not the attempt to change another person into something more comfortable for us. It is recognition.

“I recognize that this is how you experience me. I recognize what you see, and I will look within myself. I will learn. I will work to create differently.”

“I recognize that this hurts you. I recognize the suffering that exists between us, and I do not want to add to it. I want to create something different.”

Yet from a spiritual standpoint, where everything is rooted in love, life, and mystery, we are not commanded to like one another. We are not commanded to remain in every relationship or to stay where there is no longer harmony.

We are commanded to love.

Because love is not the same as approval. Love is not possession. Love is not the demand that another person become what we need them to be.

The one who sees, loves.

The one who recognizes the humanity and consciousness within another, even when separation is necessary, moves beyond blame and into peace.

But the one who refuses to see — the one who denies, controls, and dismisses — remains within the boundaries of their own consciousness, their own interpretations, and their own ways.

The ego wants to blame, possess, defend, and separate. It wants to make another person the problem so it does not have to look within itself.

But there is another way.

Those who humble themselves before the image of consciousness — the image created between two beings and reflected back through each other — discover something beyond blame.

They discover the kingdom of peace, the kingdom of life itself.