You. Yes, what would you do if by some strange magical quirk of fate you bumped into yourself in person. Don’t be too surprised if you develop an instant dislike to yourself. It is quite possible that you may find yourself arrogant, irritating, abrasive and quite proud. This may come as a shock to you but it is quite likely that your personality has a lot of surprises to the person to whom it should not come as surprise – that is you.
The reason for the perception disconnect is the fact that most of the times we are not aware of our actions, our reactions to incidents etc. We just react in a mechanical way. When we are filled with anger, jealousy or greed most of the times we do not know what we are doing. These emotions dominate us so completely that we are held captive to their pettiness and behave in a semi-hypnotized way. While it is easy to understand that we should stay away from vices we lose control when they take control. When the five evils of desire (kama) , anger (krodha) , greed (lobha) , delusion (moha) and ego (ahamkara) take control of us we are held captive and behave like automatons. We are completely unaware of our own behavior.
Hence if we by chance meet ourselves we may find that are quite contemptible in many respects. We may find ourselves too proud are just too petty in our acts.
While this hypothetical situation may never occur we will learn a lot about ourselves if it should happen. Fortunately we can come close to such an encounter if only we are more aware of ourselves and are more conscious of our acts.
If we are aware of how the five evils try to take complete control over us, which we know to be wrong, then we can consciously control our reactions to these petty emotions. We need to watch the thoughts that these evils create in us and make sure that we retain the upper hand from these emotions.
If we do this then it is quite likely that we will find ourselves fairly charming if we do bump into ourselves!
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