The Beginning Point for Everything

Today I’d like to write a passage that I think could open up people who don’t believe any of this love and oneness crap. Especially now, so close to when I started opening my mind to it, I feel I could make a decent bridge from “reality” to spirituality. So here is what I would say to a newcomer.

So, I’m not going to pull any fancy psychology crap on you. I’m not going to bring up any fancy theories.  I’m just going to have a conversation with you. Aside from how you feel about the type of person someone could be, would you agree that a human being is a human being? I’m a human being; he is a human being; she is a human being? And again, we’re not going to get fancy, but do you have a basic understanding of how the human mind works? When we are presented with a threat or problem, we can either see it as something we need to flee from, something we need to attack, or just as a challenge we must rise to meet. And you know that, as human beings, we always do things that serve us in some way. Either they bring confidence to us, respect, attention, love – they make us feel worthwhile and happy or loved in some way. Even if someone is sadistic and likes to punish themselves, they feel they are better for it, because they are paying their karmic debt and getting closer to some imaginary equilibrium point. So people think if they do something, they will be loved, and people will want to be around them. Or maybe they do something and they want respect and to be feared so no one will mess with them. Regardless, we always do things that serve us in some way.

Do you think people are born to be the kind of people they are? Do you think being an evil immoral jerk is engrained into someone as an embryo in their mother’s womb? If you believe in God, does that not collide with your thoughts on the matter? Maybe you don’t believe we are born with it. Maybe you believe we are pure and innocent as babies, and as we make our way through the world, something changes in us.

What do you think changes? We experience things, good things and bad things. As we said before, we do things that make us feel worthwhile and happy. So we must all have some innate desire to be worthy human beings, whatever “worthy” means to us. If at all possible, we try to not feel bad. We develop coping mechanisms to handle bad situations. We develop thought patterns so we can identify when something made us feel bad, and how we can prevent that from making us feel bad again. Maybe someone made us feel weak, and we didn’t like that. So instead, we look for every opportunity to prove to everyone (and to ourselves) that we most certainly are NOT weak. Maybe someone made us feel respected and important, so we obviously want to continue to do whatever it was that gave us that feeling. Those are the kinds of habits we form that turn into our character and our personality. It has to do with everything that is happening around us and how we interpret it inwardly. It is going to be different for every single person, because every single person experiences the world differently. They’ve developed their own coping mechanisms, and their own habits that make them feel good, and most likely they absolutely cannot understand some of yours, and you absolutely cannot understand some of theirs. Because you didn’t live their life. All the things they’ve experienced in their life led them to have the thoughts and behaviors that they have now, and the same goes for you.

Our society and our culture ends up being a mirror, and we reflect the same fears and hopes off of each other, and we assume everyone feels the same way we do, which, in effect, does influence everyone to a certain extent. And those coping mechanisms start compounding on each other.

Let’s say you needed attention when you were younger, so you were loud and obnoxious, at which point people called you annoying. You didn’t like being called annoying, so you stopped talking and requesting the attention and support you needed. When you didn’t get the emotional support you needed, you internalized the despair and loneliness. To prevent feeling bad about that, you determined that you are a strong person who doesn’t need anyone. So now, even though deep down you want that human interaction, now you’ve vilified it. Now you’ve decided reaching out for support is weak, so you absolutely refuse to do it, and you think anyone else who does it is pathetic. You see how the coping mechanisms compounded on each other? It can get way more complex than that. That’s just one of mine from my own life.

Let’s try a different, simpler one. You felt weak once, so now you size up anyone you come into contact with and use a strong stance and voice. That rubs people the wrong way, so they get a little hostile with you, too. So now you’re manifesting a confrontation simply from how you are showing up to the interaction. That is the only reason the hostility is there. So now you have a reputation, which draws other people like you to you, because they also want to size you up and prove that THEY are not weak. So now you are drawing people towards you who are exactly what you DON’T want to be around. But you can handle it, because you are strong, and you’re more than happy to prove that to these jerks. They’ll be sorry. They don’t know who they are messing with, right? So now you’ve got a whole bunch of enemies, and you are always on guard, waiting for someone to strike. Ready to strike back. Because the unconscious thought way down deep in your mind that started all of this, was that you don’t ever want to feel weak again. So now you have high blood pressure and you see everyone as a potential threat, and you won’t let anyone close to you, just in case they decide to stab you in the back, since that seems to be the only kinds of people you’ve found in your life. Don’t you see? Suddenly your ENTIRE LIFE is plagued with the fear of being weak. But you were NEVER weak. You are not weak. You didn’t EVER need to prove it. You didn’t EVER need to be on guard in the first place. If you’d been able to process the situation fully, and didn’t create the coping mechanism, you could have just existed, without all this unnecessary hostility and stress. Sure, some people may have been a threat. But that next time you would have been able to handle it better. You didn’t have enough faith in yourself to handle the next situation when it came along. The point isn’t to be a sitting target, the point is that you can handle whatever comes your way, so in the meantime, don’t ruin your life sitting around waiting for bad things to happen.

Everyone has some issue that engulfs their life. Maybe it isn’t a weakness thing – maybe you need to be needed. Maybe you thought being a moral person made you worthwhile. Maybe you thought it was your appearance. Whatever it is, it always ends up tainting your life until you finally wake up and realize no one was ever testing you. You are already strong and good and worthy of love. You don’t have to prove it or take it from people. It already belongs to you. You had it this whole time, and for some reason, you thought it was outside of you. That is how the human mind works, so it’s okay, but when you finally get it, you have to take a step back and see how that false belief poisoned your entire life, and now you get to go in and eradicate all that crap out so you can finally start down the road to being HAPPY. You can’t just make that realization and then go back to life as usual – that’s just denial. You HAVE to make the change and re-evaluate your life and behavior, or else the realization completely loses its meaning and disappears again.

The important thing is that you can’t fully fathom that the way other people think is a perspective until you can grasp the fact that the way YOU think is a perspective. Otherwise, you are just going around tolerating and pitying people for not knowing the “truth”, which is what YOU KNOW. And the point isn’t that you are WRONG about anything – the point is that you don’t have all the facts. You can’t EVER have all the facts. And the way you analyze and summarize people is laughable, because you just don’t know what they have been through that made them that way. Sure, maybe you know a couple things, and maybe you are right, but if you are not filled with understanding and compassion for that person, you simply don’t know the entirety of it. You can’t ever know the entirety of it – it’s not just all the big things, it’s all the little tiny things, even subconscious things, they’ve experienced in their life. Even the worst human beings started with a humble life and became the way they are through coping mechanisms and perspectives that helped them respect and protect themselves. Unfortunately, that could mean they’ve turned out dangerous and hostile to everyone else. But that just means there is a really complex combination of thought patterns covering their deeply engrained fear of worthlessness – that they are not even aware of anymore. And I’m sure bringing that up to them would not help – they’ve been guarding that reality so no one would see it, and they won’t take kindly to you pointing it out. Plus, it won’t even make sense. You have to connect the dots all the way back.

In my own example, that’s like if you told me, someone who thought it showed weakness to ask for emotional support, that deep down I’m really needy. Um, excuse me?? I’m the opposite of needy – I don’t need anyone. I never ask for anything, and I certainly don’t need anyone. I can take care of myself, and all my actions back that up. You can’t simply connect the origin to the current state. It obviously doesn’t fit. But when you connect ALL the dots ALL the way back, it makes perfect sense. You just don’t KNOW all the dots, and they might not, either.

My real point here is that deep down, we are all the same. We just felt insufficient in different ways and developed coping mechanisms to deal with it, and that is what has made us different. We are not good or bad, inherently – some of us are just more broken than others. And unfortunately, being broken sometimes means being dangerous. But labeling people as some mythical evil creature doesn’t help anything, it just denies the humanity in all of us if it ever excludes even one of us. Trust me, you have the capacity in you to be truly evil. You do. The right set of circumstances for the right amount of time – you’d be doomed. But it would have been what you needed to SURVIVE. Instead of out-casting you and making it worse, it would have been great if someone had taken the time to work with you and show you some compassion, right? But there lies the problem – people can’t change until they are open to it. You can’t just take someone and point out why they are the way they are. They have to be in the right mindset to even be willing to listen. Something has to resonate with them in just the right way. Something about their current thought patterns has to break down and weaken enough for some light to get through.

So the reason I wrote all this is because, in my thoughts of what I want to do and how I want to contribute to the world, considering my gift seems to be making people feel acknowledged and understood (since I never felt that way myself), and since I seem to be decent at taking a step back and going over something at a high level, I feel like I could contribute a whole lot if I could rehabilitate bad people. That’s obviously WAYYYYY over my head right now and I’d be terrified to even try, but honestly, I think eventually I could do it. I truly believe now that deep down we are all the same. Everything I just wrote – that’s all that makes us different. I bet now that I’ve said that, that belief will be challenged! But that’s how life works, and I think my belief is strong enough to handle that challenge.

I don’t know. We’ll see. Thoughts?