The single most important thing about Trump—by that I mean his deepest service to the human family, even though he’s likely unaware of it—is that he is not responsible for a single thing anyone feels or thinks about him.
I say that as one who champions what may be the most fear-provoking point-of-view the world has ever known: Everything is a gift, and the business of life is discovering how come.
Love Trump or hate him, indeed no matter what we feel or think about him, the cause of those feelings and opinions has nothing to do with Trump himself, and everything to do with how we have defined reality for ourselves. Allow yourself to feel for a moment that all your happiness and misery is self-created—because how you define your world actually creates your world.
Oh sure, Trump triggers all sorts of responses in all sorts of people. But triggering is one thing, cause is something else, something fundamental, and Trump doesn’t “cause” a single response. His actions become triggers because they activate fear we hold in the form of beliefs or preferences or habits. Which is to say, the cause of our every feeling and opinion is our definition of reality.
My late AA sponsor Long Island Pete brought me up short one of his many times as I was waxing my conviction that “I’m not perfect.” He said, “How would you know? Can you define the methodology by which you would prove to the satisfaction of reasonable people even the definition of perfection that could be useful to every person on earth for all time, much less apply that definition in any situation?” Then he gave the nail in the coffin of my delusion a final wack: “Maybe everything is already perfect, and at this point in human evolution we’re just too immature to know it.”
Duh!
One of the greatest blessings we ever give ourselves is our commitment to explore and understand as best we can just how we define reality. This can mean engaging with undeterred persistence and courage, not to mention a willingness to honor our ignorance, such depthless questions as:
- Who am I?
- What is the purpose of life?
- How does the universe work?
- What is health as it applies to every person who has ever lived or will ever live, or every institution (family, nation, home town, ball team, etc.) that has ever existed or will ever exist?
- Who am I committed to being or die trying?
All of that and more can be reduced to the two endlessly powerful questions we are always asking ourselves whether we know it or not:
- What’s going on?
- And what’s the healthiest action I can take in this moment?
My experience is that as this exploration becomes ever-more something we chew on over years and lifetimes, we reveal to ourselves our potential to grow our capacity to love, a potential that exists in every single moment, no matter how otherwise self-destructive or heartbreaking.
Any event that triggers a powerful reaction—including something we can’t get free of quickly enough, or something we wish would last forever—is an exquisite teacher encouraging us to scrutinize the self-created reality that is the cause of our reaction.
This is the #1 gift of Trump. Our own self-realization.