461. Need For The Other

All need is need for the other. The need for food, water, and air from the other, the need for shelter in the other, the need for connection with the other, the need to love and be loved by the other, the need for purpose and meaning through the other — all need is met by the other. The other, which is all that is not the self, is also the world and everything in it.

A need is a requirement that cannot be immediately self-fulfilled, for if it could, there would be no need. Need is a requirement for the other to be brought into the self and for the self to be brought into the other. Compassion, as action to meet needs, is thus a process of creating greater connection between self and other. Even self-compassion cannot meet needs without the assistance of the other, and it is only feasible by using parts of the other that are accessible to the self.

The other cannot be escaped or abandoned, as that would mean all need would go unmet and suffering would encompass the whole of life. In many cases, need for the other seems to only require the use of the other as a means, like when we meet our material needs using plants and animals. But even then, if we do not consider the needs of the other, we doom ourselves to potentially irreversible environmental and ecological disasters.

Attention to the needs of the other reaches its pinnacle in our need for love. We need love from the other and the other needs love from us. To meet this need, we require more than an object or a body. We need the other to unite with our own self. With awareness, we learn that the object of the other is no different from the object of the self. The separation between beings that we feel so sharply exists entirely in our subjective perception — we are the ones who distinguish between self and other.

In meeting our need for love, we begin to see that this separation is an illusion. What we take to be separate subjective existences are really parts of the whole subjectivity of existence itself. It is this whole that we must learn to see in everything for our actions to be fully oriented towards meeting needs and creating joy.