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How Do We Evaluate a Person's Character?
How does prejudice develop? By what are we conditioned in our
interpersonal relationships? The answer to all these questions is that
a man's antecedents are what guide us. If we can develop the ability
to look on a person at this instant as a fresh, unknown entity, unconditioned
by any past, then we will develop the capacity to see the real person,
and not merely the external, tortured human being that everybody sees.
Then an objective ability develops, which penetrates beyond the external
veils and sees the truth within. A person's past may have been anything.
What is he now? This is the most important thing. But we, most of us,
rarely ask this question because we are preeminently worried only about
the past antecedents. Thus we miss the real person and see only a tangled
and superficial web of trivialities enclosing the individual like a
fly in a spider's web. This is why all new acquaintances are so glamorous,
so welcome, while old friends are the ones with whom we quarrel and
from whom we often part. Living in the present unites us, while living
in the past can tend to separate person from person and, as history
records for us, even nation from nation.
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