CAN WE BE RIGHT WITHOUT MAKING OTHERS WRONG?
Self-righteousness is akin to self-poisoning. Yet we learn it from the cradle.
The term “Influencer’ is extremely popular in the age of social media. In the online world, a social influencer is someone who’s avidly followed and revered.
But did you know that every single person we encounter infuses our conditioning, to some degree, with their own conditioning?
Consciously or unconsciously, we take in what we see, hear, touch, smell and taste. We come to agree or disagree with another person’s views. We take a position, thereby creating our treasured sets of likes and dislikes.
Less often do we think to ourselves: ‘I don’t know about this’, and remain open in our views.
Even before the cradle (science suggests), we absorb information from all sources. We learn many useful and essential things from others, as we must: how to find our way home, how to speak, add and subtract. We develop our knowledge.
We also learn, in multiple ways, everything we come to believe in, everything we have opinions and judgements about.
Collectively, our beliefs, opinions, judgements and knowledge is our lifetime accumulation of ‘stuff’. Sometimes very useful – but often useless, self-destructive and pointless – this is our clogged filter through which we see our life. It is our reality; how life is for us.
Even more, the higher the level of love, respect and reverence we feel for people that influence us – the more erudite, educated or enlightened we think they are – the more we take in their ‘truths’. Either intentionally or unwittingly, we adopt their views as our own.
We are constantly being conditioned – it continues throughout our lifetime.
Is it any wonder, then, that so many of us seek out like-minded others to join and ‘be right’ with, thereby justifying our imagined ‘right view’ of the world?
Needing to be right and needing to make others wrong is a state of mind – one I call ‘impossibility’.
Needing to be right becomes the acid that destroys goodwill between couples, families, friends and colleagues. It does likewise between religions, political parties and groupings of all sorts. We find it on the most tragic scale between nation-states.
‘Possibility’ is also a state of mind. Yet when looking through the prism of Possibility, we are genuinely open to seeing life afresh. In that state, we see beyond our conditioned mind – beyond our beliefs, opinions, judgements and knowledge.
With conscious intention, it is challenging but not impossible to transform ourselves into genuinely open human beings.
As the adage goes, we can be right, or we can be happy.
From which state would you prefer to live?
If these ideas have opened your mind, you’re welcome to open this link and discover more: https://www.therealmofpossibility.org.au
Warmly… John
The Realm of Possibility Foundation
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