Other People

Would our lives be better if we limited our interaction with other people? The author Tom Wolfe once surveyed the debris of civilisation and exclaimed in horror: “Other people’s lives!”. When we look closely at the lives of others, we often see struggle, chaos, even trauma.

Why do people harm other people? Sometimes (often) we are harmed by those closest to us (“loved ones”). This was most eloquently put in Josephine Hart’s shocking novel Damage. She described the damage between the characters in the novel as “a love story”. It was the story of two people that had loved each other obsessively and left a debris of damage around them. But the novel’s title is more appropriate: Damage. Irreparable damage.

At the macro level (rather than micro level), human pain and suffering is caused by things that are generally beyond the control of the masses, such as war. This is easy to understand, and has been written about ad nauseam.

A good example would be Wilfred Owen’s exquisite war poem Exposure, written about a slow war death, not from weapons but from the freezing cold at the end of “The Great War”. The poem sums up the pointlessness of the suffering inflicted on humans by other humans. Owen says in the poem, which he wrote while freezing in a war trench in 1918:

What are we doing here?

And then lines such as:

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us…/Tonight, this frost will fasten on the mud and us./Shrivelling many hands, and puckering foreheads crisp./The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp,/Pause over half-known faces. All eyes are ice./But nothing happens.

One way or another, the soldiers suffer. Through waiting, death from cold, trauma, bullets. Why?

Then there is the micro level suffering. This is the harm other people inflict on us over slow, long periods of time. The drip, drip, drip, of suffering. This is the real suffering, far greater than war, earthquakes, financial collapse in society, or similar macro things.

If one searches on the internet for “harm by other people” it will usually throw up the well-used phrase “Hell is Other People”, from the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play No Exit about three people trapped in a room together indefinitely. They undermine each other constantly, and target each other’s failings and negative characteristics.

This “hell” inflicted on us by others usually relates to the six negative emotions outlined in The Tibetan Book of the Dead which need to be overcome to avoid a painful post-death: pride (hubris); jealousy; desire; ignorance (the celebration of ego and image so loved by today’s society); greed; and anger.

But what is the real source of the suffering inflicted by others (which manifests in the above six negative emotions)?

It is thought. These are mostly implanted thoughts that are not our own thoughts. They come from outside of us. If we could reach the point of ‘no-thought’ (or as Norio Kushi put it, “the space between the thought”) we can purify the mind rapidly and change our ways. We can observe the thoughts as they arrive in our minds.

The solution to all this is to remember that it is not real. Nothing is real. The only thing that is real (to us) is what is in our minds. Our minds are a holographic projection. From this perspective, everything or nothing is possible.

Our lives are just a story, and the real journey is on death, when we should be heading back to ourselves. “Other people” matter no more.

As Ouspensky said about death:

There is no need to look anywhere. We are already there.

Or as the nineteenth century Austrian philosopher Rainer Maria Rilke said long ago:

The only journey is the one within.

The journey within does however require the purging from the mind (because the mind is all that there is) of all the debris of ‘living’, the false attachments, attractions, emotions and so on. Purge all thought of others. Let it all go.

23 August 2025