The Clarity Of Liking
Seeing As The First Act Of Love
Most people imagine liking as a response—a verdict rendered after observing someone’s behaviour, appearance, or similarity to oneself.
But in truth, liking is not a judgement. It is a form of sight.
To like someone is to perceive them clearly enough that their existence feels continuous with your own. When the gaze is unclouded by projection or fear, the other person ceases to be “other".
You see them as they are, and the seeing itself becomes an act of love—small, untheatrical, and exact.
The tragedy of modern life is that most people are half-blind. They live behind reflex and defence, seeing through the thick glass of expectation. They mistake familiarity for understanding and agreement for connection.
In this blurred condition, true liking is almost impossible. They can approve, tolerate, use, or need one another, but they cannot see.
This blindness begins with the self.
A person who cannot bear to look inward with honesty—who edits, hides, or condemns parts of their own nature—cannot recognise those same parts in others. Every dislike in the outer world mirrors an unseen or unloved aspect of the inner one.
To like oneself, then, is not to admire or indulge, but to see without turning away.
It is to acknowledge the whole topography of the self: the bright ridges and the shaded valleys. Once that sight becomes steady, liking others follows naturally, because there is no longer a separation between what is seen within and what is seen without.
This is the quiet revolution that underlies the Practice of Peace.
When a man begins to sit still and look, really look, without flinching, he discovers that liking is not something to be earned—it is the natural state of clear perception.
The more he sees, the more he recognises. The more he recognises, the more he accepts.
From that acceptance flows the kind of liking that has no opposite. It is not approval, attraction, or preference. It is the simple ease of being among beings—the recognition that each life, including one’s own, is attempting to express itself as best it can.
The clarity of liking is therefore the clarity of sight. It does not depend on merit or mood.
It only asks that we remain visible to ourselves, so that when we look upon another, what meets our gaze is not projection but presence—the pure, unjudging light of awareness.
