Disillusionment with People

By Namaste Publishing Staff

Have you ever been really disillusioned by someone you imagined to be an incredible person?

We live in a culture of “stars.” In the movie business, in the music industry, on the speaking circuit, in sports, in politics—everywhere you look, society promotes stardom.

And everywhere you look, you also see “fallen stars.”

Of course, the promoters like to create stars because it’s lucrative. Turn someone into an idol and you make a lot of money off them.

The danger for us is that we can borrow an identity from stars. This happens because what we haven’t discovered in ourselves, we seek from others. But we are borrowing from a dream world, for the lives of the stars are not what we imagine them to be.

No one is the “star” we dream she or he is!

Spirituality is about ending our need for stars in our lives and finding our own wonderful “star” within. When this happens, we are able to appreciate the “star” in everyone—including those in the movies, politics, or on the sports field. Only now, we appreciate people for their humanity and their talents, which we enjoy, and not because they are supplying us with a transfusion of identity.

The Presence Process, brought to us by Michael Brown, is about authenticity. It’s about no longer living in a dream world but about becoming real—and seeing others as real.

In fact, only to the degree that we are ourselves real are we capable of tolerating another person as she or he actually is. This is because we are all both wonderful and flawed.

We are complete, and we are simultaneously in process of bringing this completion into everyday life. As the name of Michael’s book implies, it’s a process.

Once we see our own amazing self, and also how dysfunctional we can be at times, we can accept others when they don’t match up to our dream of them. The dream is shattered, but only so that the real person can be discovered and embraced. We no longer demand they be a certain way for us, but instead become grateful recipients of who and what they actually are.

So it’s vital that we experience disillusionment with others. Disillusionment is a gift. Without it, we won’t be forced back into ourselves, where alone we can discover what it is we have been seeking in someone else. It’s in being let down by another that we have a chance to find our own two feet and, as Michael likes to say in his book, “show up” in our lives.

Said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, rector of an underground seminary during the Nazi era in Germany, who was eventually martyred by the Third Reich, “The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both.” The shock may be painful, but it’s necessary.
As long as our relationships with each other are built on pretense, instead of the presence and acceptance of real people, there really is no relationship at all, just a pipedream. We are imagining connection, but there is no genuine connection; it’s just fantasy. There can be no authentic relationship as long as we are trying to get something from another to meet a need in ourselves.

When we don’t make someone an idol, a source of identity, we don’t go through the experience of having them fail us. As long as someone is a mere dream and not real for us, they will always ultimately fail us.

Find it in yourself, which is what The Presence Process will enable you to do, and there is an amazing leveling of the playing field. You stop looking up to others, dreaming of them, imagining them in unreal ways. Instead, you see them in their humanity—and in their divinity—and you value them as real individuals, and appreciate them for having the courage to engage in the process of emerging as their own true star.