Another Way To Look At Othering
“To love is to recognize yourself in another. The others “otherness” then stands revealed as an illusion pertaining to the purely human realm, the realm of form.”
~ Eckhart Tolle
I started today's topic a while back and abandoned it because of its wobbly nature in my mind and body. As I revisit the idea, I trust that I will find a thread that will give you a glimpse of what this mind and spirit have to say about “othering.” A somewhat newer term (1980’s) that has become quite useful in today’s world landscape, and whilst I understand the concept and the definition;
OTHERING:
…the process of perceiving or portraying someone or something as essentially alien or different.
I am not sure we are focusing on the othering that truly has us in turmoil and regret. Perhaps othering is a symptom and not the dis-ease. You see, I don’t feel there is anything inherently wrong in perceiving differences, yet I do feel it becomes a systematic and cancerous growth when we feel threatened by those differences.
“To annihilate the world by the anhialation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.”
~Sylvia Plath
In other words, like 99.9% of what I write about, I believe the rub happens when we are not sure-footed, not…
