Dealing with hate and intolerance

It’s easy to hate, we all know that, negativity is like the least common denominator.  Constantly going downhill you can hate only to lead yourself to the lowest point of humanity.  Your primal state where you only care about one person, where you only understand one person, where you only listen to one point of view, YOUR OWN.  In that lowly place at the bottom you will be accompanied by other haters, others who like you slipped down without much effort and are there for you to bounce and reinforce your small thinking, your ideas of self-righteousness.  Ignorance is not the result of lack of love, but lack of effort to apply what makes us human to begin with.

Dividing us is easy, we enjoy differences, we enjoy having someone to look down to, someone to consider the ‘enemy’, it takes away from our efforts to improve our own shortcomings.  We coat these divisions with great terms like ‘nationality’ which sugar coat the poisoned minds within our skulls.  Religion, race, nationality, and culture divide us, so easily we are willing to pile on to the negativity that surrounds us.

We all desire our thinking our understanding to be fully accepted by others.  Instead of being challenged we surround ourselves with those who think like us, who will reinforce our mentality.  Who wants to be constantly challenged, that would require work, and it may lead to growth or expanding our understanding!  Most would rather just take the easy way, make a larger group so you never have to hear any other point of view.

Our world constantly is drowned by these individuals, you look online, and you can look in the circles we surround ourselves with.  Anyone who is different than us is open for ridicule, humiliation or disrespect, it’s easy and who doesn't like throwing mud either for fun or to solicit reaction.  At the very list we have tried to tilt the peace of mind of the individual who was the target of our onslaught.

This is where compassion is overpowering.  When hate is thrown your way, it is expected that your response be of the same caliber, hate/negative.  The person who is full of ignorance expects your response to be at their level, and for this they are ready with another reply, to engage you in a battle which leads you down to the same mud/filth they are swimming in themselves.

When egos are attacked we become defensive, angry and argumentative.  We lose our proper judgment to understand that our reaction is not only facilitating to our anguish it is also rarely solves any of the problems we are trying to ‘fix’ to begin with.  Your anger will only lead to either making the situation worse or making your mental state more unstable yet that is the route most take when dealing with ignorance and hate.

However when hate is responded to with compassion that provides two very intriguing benefits:

• The first is that your own peace is not altered; you absorb the negative energy and are able to respond with a clear and conscious state of being.  

• The second it is not something a negative person is used to seeing, so they at times do not have a response.  

They see you as the other, but you see them as a brother, that is when humanity begins to show how powerful love is.  When we overlook the faults of another we practice overlooking our own, when we forgive others, we find it easier to forgive ourselves.  When we realize that nobody is perfect, we understand how far from perfection we ourselves are. 

The truth is when we love others, we love humanity, and we begin to see things not from our ego’s standpoint but somewhere above where we can understand that accepting another is actually just accepting ourselves.

The Race of Insanity

As humans we are constantly testing our limits.  You don’t have to look far or turn many channels to see the constant drive for challenging all types of limitations.  Everyone is constantly trying to outdo one another.  There are world records, Guinness records, local records all that someone’ has set goals to shatter at some point in time.

All these battles are for a spot somewhere, for some recognition for some fulfillment of desire.  Some fame or comfort is achieved at each of these, however it must be short lived.  Most do not stop at the desired result, once there it only becomes one of the stops to the next one which is further ahead.  We are programmed to constantly want to keep striving to keep growing to keep succeeding yet most humans feel totally empty in this cycle.

Even many super stars with all the money, fame and power end up acting up, end up addicted to substances or abusive practices.  They have what many of us want exactly but for some reason when they got there they did not find the satisfaction they were seeking.  The thirst was not quenched; the light at the end of the tunnel was just another portal leading to another tunnel.

Nobody has stopped to figure out what the real thirst is, because we never get the time and understanding to contemplate it.  We see our illusions as our desires; it is almost as idiotic as filling a diesel engine with gasoline and then wondering why it is not running. We are filling ourselves with dreams, with desires and destinations of falsehood, and then we wonder why we do not understand ourselves, our own truths.  We perceiver so much just to get to some point where we only feel fulfilled for a small portion of time. 

What do we really want?  How can we stop this endless cycle of constant war within. Battle after battle the war rages on, success, power, and comforts only mean so much once we are finally there.  If you are not well off you have a desire to be so, if you are well off you have a desire to be even more, we don’t really set our switch to ever turn off or just ‘maintain’ we constantly strive harder, more, and push our sanity.

The truth is to live, we need to have a balance, but the balance has to be one that comes from understanding that there is only so much the external world can do for us.  Time must be focused not only on the external surroundings but internal development. Contemplation of our inner self needs to be part of our life, understanding not only worldly but also spiritually how we can live a calm and fruitful existence needs to be part of our daily practice.

If you have problems sleeping a softer, more comfortable pillow can only provide you so much relaxation, even if the silk is imported the fabric having millions of thread count, can never take care of your internal anguish.  

We have never had it so well, in the human race, yet we have never had it so bad at the same time!  We have all the technology, the comforts, and advances but even less understanding of ourselves.  We have expanded our horizons, traveling to the moon and beyond but internally we have only taken a few steps compared to the countless ones taken by humans of the past.

Electricity, water, food and technology are no longer limited, yet wars, fear, prejudice, stereotypes, discrimination, and anger are still very much factors on earth.   

Early in life we realize who we are, the son of this and that, the owner of this and that, belonging to such and such community, yet even late in life we rarely know who we really are within, what we are connected with, and what we belong to.  

The day we start to be proud of not what we have, but what we have given, of what not what we have earned but what we have served, of not what we have bought but what we have been blessed with, not of our external accomplishments, but of our internal understandings we begin to transcend ourselves.   We connect to something which is much bigger, it holds all the records of the past, present and future, it holds all the accomplishments far beyond what we could; it holds all the power, far beyond what we could ever think about having.  

The best part is it is/ was always there; we just failed to realize how it was in our grasp, as our hands were busy grasping everything else.  Just a flip of a switch, a change of your point of view, one realizes that the race is not against others, not against records or external factors but against your mentality of needing the race to begin with.