Beyond Behavior and Beliefs

When I was a kid in St. Mike’s grammar school Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union.  This was the 1950’s.  Mr. Stalin, we were told, was an evil man.  His evil was the reason we practiced hiding under our desks to protect ourselves in the altogether possible event that he would rain nuclear missiles on America.  He sent millions of his own people to Siberian prison camps we were told.  His goal was to take over the world we were told.  Perhaps because my trust of adult wisdom had already begun to fray by that time, as I heard “Nothing but evil,” I wondered, “How would you know?”  

There’s been a divine presence in my being since birth.  My bet is we all feel that presence––that light––in our early life, but society’s norms or a lack of nurturing causes it to be smothered by delusion well before our age reaches double digits.  Mine was not, for reasons obscure to me.  Among the results is that I can’t fathom anyone being completely without kindness in their heart.  And if that kindness might never be evident, the reason is surely a story of darkest heartbreak.  

I accepted that Stalin was dangerous, even mean-spirited.  (Thank goodness when the air raid siren went off my classmates and I would know just what to do!)  But was that all he was?  Did he not have a child in whose company his heart softened?  Did he not pet his dog?  Didn’t he ever witness a sunset and feel gratitude for being alive?  What kind of a life must he have had if the answers to those kind of questions was no?

Today it’s Trump, a man I once likened to a sleepwalker driving a Ferrari through the Louvre.  The damage triggered by his political ascendancy is incalculable, at least by me, and will take humankind a long time to understand and recover from.  Only lack of opportunity, not inclination, keeps the equivalent of Siberia from being part of his legacy.  

But evil?  Not to me.

Actions are evil, people are not.  Evil is whatever leads us away from growing our conscious oneness with all of existence.  Good is what leads us toward that oneness.  Choices have consequences, and in every moment our choices are actions of either expansion or contraction, love or fear, good or evil.  But our choices are not who we are: a manifestation of God and just don’t know it yet, or don’t know it well enough to avoid taking seriously the nonsense of ego-based reality.  

Among the reasons the world seemed incomprehensible to me in childhood was the pervasive chattering of so many people’s dislike of others.  How effortlessly and quickly labels were affixed and dismissive attitudes adopted.  And always, it seemed, the reason was the offending party’s behavior and/or beliefs.  Who they were under those presentations (aspirations, intentions, wounds, etc.) was either ignored or not even considered.  

My sensitivity to this was no doubt born of personal experience: behavior being the everyday price of approval.  The real me was seldom prized.  This was traumatizing.  It meant the loss of security that allows any of us to make a fool of ourselves or think differently or follow our whim or be a jerk, and have the experience celebrated as a learning opportunity, not who we are.  

In my case, overcoming that trauma and its destructive implications has required that I cultivate a relentless orientation toward freeing pain, a practice essential for expansion I’ve discovered.  Among its rewards is the awakening of empathy for others who face a similar (and often much more brutal) absence of unconditional regard. 

Trumpy, for instance.  I eagerly resist every sentiment of inhumanity he inflames with his grotesque immaturity.  His behavior and beliefs, if you will.  But dislike him?  Not at all.  I wish I could hug him, if it would give his tortured mind a moment’s relief.  Even in my occasional fantasy of drenching him with a water balloon I have compassion for him.  I cringe when I imagine the Hell Realm of his consciousness, the violence and cruelty that created it––and the next incarnation that awaits him.  

Perhaps the most rewarding part of the Trump phenomenon is the animosity his presence engenders among both those who approve of him and those who don’t.  Trump and all he represents isn’t responsible for anyone’s feelings of any kind.  He’s simply a mirror revealing what’s already within us.   

But animosity is poison.  It undermines expansion, love, goodness.  It makes healthy problem solving impossible.  Its gift is the invitation to free the pain that is the core of all inharmony.  I find it a lifetime practice, one of continually making more space for our true self –– who we are beyond any behavior and beliefs.