Man-management is essentially an extension of self-management. What we see in others is a projection of our own selves.
A story is told about four people who viewed a tree standing in darkness differently depending on their own mental states. The epic poem Ramayana narrates with poetic beauty the feelings and reactions of Janaka’s courtiers when young Rama entered the bow-contest. The city folk pitied Sita who would lose her match just because Rama was tender, otherwise he was befitting her in every way. The strong and valiant in court felt a greater strength. The weak felt protected, while the demon king felt his own destruction and death draw near. Janaka saw in him a perfect manhood, while the sages felt the Incarnate’s tread. So each sees the world as an extension of his own fears and hopes.
The external universe, it is said, is an objectivisation of our internal universe. Does it mean that all persons are alike and the same, and we see the difference because of our state at the time? No. Rather, differentiation is the rule in Nature; variation is her method. True, there is a fundamental unity within, a oneness that cannot be seized by the mind, not felt by our surface emotions. The oneness is real and experiential, but perceived by another consciousness than the mind’s. It is a spiritual oneness and it would be rash to apply it at once in the field of mind, life and body. Such an attempt could end up in a mechanical regimentation and dull monotone.
So man on the surface is a complexity. We try to over-simplify and reduce things to a moral right and wrong, good and bad, but in reality and in the experience of practical psychology, it is not so. Each of us holds inside diverse elements of all shades, the dark as much as the bright. Often when endowed with a great possibility, we also possess the very negation of that possibility. However, we are carried away by frontal appearances seeing only what we are accustomed to habitually encounter in ourselves. Only we do not call it by that name. What we call in ourselves self-respect is seen as arrogance in another; our need is the other’s desire; our love is another person’s lust; our humility is another man’s weakness and submission; our forgiveness is another’s cowardice; our perfection is another’s rigidity; the list is endless. But in truth, others are simply a mirror in which we see our image. This means that we see only one side of life in human beings. We fail to see another, perhaps the more luminous and brighter side, simply because we have not yet seen that in ourselves. It is said, and rightly so, that one who has met his soul can see it in others too. Naturally, since the large part, and incidentally the best part of our nature, is sealed from our eyes, we ourselves live and work as limited entities.
