How to Know a Person Part 1: I SEE YOU

ONE: The Power of Being Seen

“Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate

understanding of other people. They know about life.” (Brooks, “How to Know a Person”,

p.7)

“Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being. But it is

not enough. People need social skills.

Perhaps to really know another person, you have to have a glimmer of how they

experience the world. To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.

TWO: How Not to See a Person

“If you want to understand humanity, you have to focus on the thoughts and emotions of individuals, not just data about groups.

I will not reduce you to a type or restrict you to a label, like many of those human-typology systems do—Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the zodiac, and so on. Instead, I want to receive you as an active creator. I want to understand how you construct your point of view. I want to ask you how you see things. I want you to teach me about the enduring energies of old events that shape how you see the world today. I’m going to engage with you. Looking at a person is different from looking at a thing because a person is looking back at you. I’m going to get to know you at the same time you’re going to get to know me. Quality conversation is the essence of this approach. If we’re going to become Illuminators, we need to first ask questions and engage with answers. We need to ask:

How does this look to you? Do you see the same situation I see?

So when I see you, I want to see back into the deep sources of your self. That means asking certain key questions: Where’s home? What’s the place you spiritually never leave? How do the dead show up in your life? How do I see you embracing or rejecting your culture? How do I see you creating and contributing to your culture? How do I see you transmitting your culture? How do I see you rebelling against your culture? How do I see you caught between cultures? As we talk about this, we’re going to get beyond the shallow stereotypes and the judgments people might lazily rely on. We’re going to talk about how you were gifted by those who came before, and formed by them. And as we talk, I’ll begin to see you whole. “You live through time, that little piece of time that is yours,” the novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote, “but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours What you are is an

expression of History.