Let’s go back to our scale of different levels of development.
People on the first 2 levels project themselves onto other people and situations. They are completely unable to process reality without reflecting it back to their own life.
These are the people who can’t read books or watch movies where they can’t find a character to “identify with”. When you tell them about something that happened to you, they respond with “Yes, this happened to me, too”. If you say that you are from Australia, they start listing everybody they know or heard about who’s from there. Any event on the news sends them to dig through their experience in search of something similar.
These people are incapable of understanding others or analyzing events. They reduce the world’s complexity to the the dimensions of their self. It’s not their fault. They are simply stuck on those levels of development.
On the third level, people start realizing that other levels exist, people with a different experience exist, and a road opens for them eventually to stop projecting themselves onto everything.
I used to get extremely annoyed with such people but now I know they aren’t trying to be obnoxious on purpose. It’s simply their level. They honestly have no idea anything else exists.
Clarissa's Blog 