Consciousness and Participation

Even awareness itself appears to be participatory rather than purely internal. We come to know ourselves largely through being known — reflected, recognized, responded to. The sense of a coherent self is, in part, something assembled in relationship and sustained by it.

This is not mysticism. It is the ordinary fact that people who are deeply seen tend to become more themselves, and people held in isolation tend to come apart. We are participatory beings whose interior lives are shaped, continuously, by the quality of our encounters.