Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible for Helping

I read this piece of work by Jung a long while back
It was a meditation on
The injunction to treat your neighbor as
As you would like to be treated (echo)
And what Jung pointed out which I really liked
Was that, that wasn’t an injunction to be nice to other people
It was an invitation to reciprocity
It was something like this
It’s like
You should figure out how you would like to be treated
Like you were taking care of yourself
Not how you would like people to respond to you
It’s more important than that
It’s like imagine you had a child
That you really cared for
And someone said
«Well, people will treat this child exactly like you want them to»
«But you have to figure out what that is.»
And so, then you’d have to sit down for like a month and you think
Okay well, how do you want your child to be treated?
You don’t want everyone to just be nice to ‘em, you know?
You want people to challenge ‘em
And
You want people to discipline him
And
You want people to tell ‘em when he’s wrong
It’s like
You don’t just want everyone to be nice
That’s pathetic
It’s pathetic
There’s no — There’s no challenge in that
Challenge in that (echo)
There’s no — There’s no challenge in that
Challenge in that (echo)
Human beings are self-conscious
And
We know about our limitations
And we know about our weaknesses
And so, we can have contempt for human beings in general
Because
You know
We’re just
Flawed and breakable and all of that
But we know ourselves better than we know everyone else
And so
You have a very acute sense of
How you’re not up to scratch
And so that leads
Naturally to a sort of self-contentious attitude
People are more likely to give prescription medication to their pets than
To take them themselves
Take them themselves (echo)
Imagine someone that you treat well
That you love
And try to treat yourself that way
You go to detach from yourself for a bit
You got to think; okay well
I’m a person among other people
And I deserve at least as much respect
As
A person among other people
I should be trying to help myself across time
And instead of being self-contemptuous and self-destructive
I need to
Take care of myself
As if I’m potentially valuable
And to lay out my life that way
It’s hard for people
They don’t take care of themselves as well as they should
As well as the should (echo)
Take care of your room
Take care of your things
Like
Have some respect for yourself as a
Miraculous being because that is actually what you are
There is a lot of potential within you
You’re necessary
More than you think to the unfolding of things
That’s the thing about being an individual
It’s the thing that
Western civilization has always recognized
That as an individual
You have a light
That you have to bring into the world
And that if you don’t bring it into the world
The world is a dimmer place
And that’s a bad thing because when the world is a dim place it can get
very-very-very dark