To know the world, know yourself, to know yourself, be the world.

We think we hate the world, but the truth is… our “hate for the world” is rarely about the world at all.
Psychology, spirituality, even trauma theory agree on one simple thing:
what we feel outside is almost always a reflection of what we haven’t met inside.

The world is not perfect — and it never claimed to be.
Yet our reaction to it is shaped by the parts of us we haven’t understood:
the wounds we carry quietly,
the needs we never voiced,
the anger we never acknowledged,
the grief we packed away,
the expectations we built around how life should be.

So the world becomes a projection screen for all that remains unobserved within us.

But something magical happens when our inner chaos begins to settle.
The same people stop irritating us.
The same problems lose their sharpness.
Even the same old noise of life feels less threatening.

Nothing outside has changed — only the one who is looking.
And this is exactly where Lao Tzu’s teaching comes alive:
To know the world, know yourself.

As we learn to meet our own inner parts with honesty —
the anger, the fear, the ego, the tender insecurities —
we stop placing them onto the world.
We no longer walk around believing, “the world is against me,”
because now we can see where our pain truly comes from,
how our mind interprets reality,
and how old wounds colour the lens through which we see life.

With self-understanding, hate naturally begins to soften.

And sometimes, what we call “hate” is nothing but self-protection in disguise.
When life feels overwhelming, hate becomes armour.
When people feel unpredictable, hate becomes distance.
When life feels unfair, hate becomes a shield we hold up to survive.

But the more honestly we face ourselves,
the less we need these shields,
and the more the world starts looking like a place we can breathe in again.

And maybe this is the quiet truth we often overlook —
the world is not asking us to love it perfectly.
It is only asking us to meet ourselves honestly.

Because the moment we sit with our own wounds,
the moment we stop running from the chaos within,
the world stops feeling like an enemy.
It becomes gentler, clearer, almost familiar.

Not because it changed —
but because we finally did.
 

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