We have to relate to everyone favorably, i.e. to give a good example to everyone as much as we can in order to break them with love, out of our love for them.
What does “breaking other people with love” mean?
We first need to understand that what we perceive of other people is not them in and of themselves, but an impression that exists within us. We then need to want to invert our negative impression of others to a positive one, so that they will understand how much we really wish for their benefit.
We continue relating to them through such a tendency up to a point where, as it is written, “love will cover all crimes.” That is, over the initial negative impressions—the “crimes”—love will emerge: that we will perceive no flaws in people the way we perceived various flaws in them through our egoistic picture that we previously held.
Also, what does it mean that our initial impression of other people is always negative? It is that we view others through an egoistic filter, where we constantly calculate along the lines of “What can I get out of them?” and “How can I reap some kind of benefit from them?” If we cannot find any self-benefit from other people, then we find no point in relating to them.
You Don’t See People for Who They Are
Undoubtedly, we see people not for who they are. Also, it is not just people, but anything we see, we seemingly bring it to life according to what we want to see in it. People in and of themselves do not exist, but we see people according to what we want to see in them.
What does it mean that we want to see something in someone?
We register various impressions from people the more we encounter them. Therefore, we do not know any people for who they are. We only know these images that we sculpt within us.
So many people in our lives simply pass us by, as if they do not stand out from the background. However, to the extent to which we get to know certain people, then we gain some kind of impression of them. We then relate to them in a certain way. Then, even before we start communicating with them, we already picture their image in us based on our previous impressions that we accumulated.
