Why Assessing People’s “Character” Is Making Your Life A Living Hell
If you’re anything like me, you were taught most of your life to predict the future based on the past. Logical, right? When interacting with people, we should trust or not trust them based on their past behavior. The extreme version of this was when I was working as a prosecutor and would read extensive criminal history reports detailing every little thing the person did “wrong” pretty much since birth. The more “wrong” things there were, the more severe the next punishment.
Funny how those people never ever seemed to get rehabilitated. “Ah,” the ego says to us, “that’s because they have bad character. Those people can’t be rehabilitated. So we are going to throw them away like the trash they are.”
Which is all fine and good for a while, during a brief period of time where we can pretend that we can pursue our “personal interests” without regard for all the people in our lives that we have “thrown away.” But I tell you, a day of reckoning will come. For me, it came in a hospital bed on the brink of death. And when that day of reckoning comes, you will realize you were lying to yourself the whole time. How many more people will we “throw away like trash”? Can there really be any hope of world peace in a world where the prisons are full of human trash, and even if they are not in prison, we treat them like criminals – whose sole “crime” by the way is loving us.
I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching and a lot of reaching out to people from the past to make amends over the past few days. I’m still flabbergasted that a man twice my size feels so threatened by me he would use physical force to remove my totally harmless existence from his physical vicinity. That shows us how deep into the darkness we have plunged, because that man is not seeing ME at all. All he is seeing is his own nightmare. If he were seeing me, he would perceive me as I am: harmless and with loving and peaceful intentions. He is not seeing me. He sees only the past. And that is obviously what I am also seeing in him.
Another man I reached out to yesterday did write back and literally listed out all the reasons he believes I am “evil.” Yes, he used the word evil. The response was so extreme that you would think I was a mass murderer to invoke that kind of hatred in another human being. And I wonder: does anyone ever stop to ask themselves when they have such an extreme response to another human being – “Hmm, maybe this is something I need to look at more closely. Why is it exactly that I am so terrified of and hateful toward a 108-pound woman who has never engaged in physical violence and is not a threat to me in any way?”
We all do it. We were trained from birth to think that the future can be predicted based on the past. So the fact that some of the people I reached out to appear to be exactly where they were several years ago, with no personal growth evident whatsoever, is an indication of my own failure to forgive them. That’s a good reason to reach out to them. Now that I can see these “images” of them without being emotionally triggered, I can do my forgiveness work to change my perception of them.
But nothing will change as long as I believe this is “who they really are.” Because when I believe that, I have locked the image into my subconscious mind beyond any hope of change.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the belief in “character” is one of the most dangerous beliefs in the world. If you believe that people have a “fixed” character, and that nobody really changes, then you have condemned yourself to hell. Because all those “evil” people you’ve created with your subconscious mind will remain fixed there as “evil.” And all the while God just laughs, because YOU created them as evil in the first place.
The joke is on us. Any “good” person in our lives can suddenly turn “bad” in a moment when we are both triggered. Harsh words are exchanged, people get defensive and shut down, and next thing you know, another person has been thrown in the trash. Instead of viewing this as a temporary energetic glitch that can be corrected in five minutes, we lock it in as “character.” And that person remains forevermore condemned.
Character is one of the most dangerous beliefs in the world.
Love,
Erika Awakening, High Priestess of Miracles at TAPsmarter