Tag Archive for ultimate truth

Killing the right one…

Close-up_of_a_blue_and_pink_Morning_Glory_flowerI can remember James saying, relating a conversation with someone very troubled,’ Oh sister (or brother)… you are wanting to kill the wrong one!’

This was his unspoken response to someone who was so angry that they wanted to kill someone – the someone they saw as the creator of their suffering.  Linked with this is the unexamined belief that the death of that person would make them happy healed whole again… that this death would be appropriate and perhaps the only way for them to move on through life.

I recently spent time with someone who now has quite wonderful circumstances compared with what they were when I first met him. However these improved circumstances have given space for the dominance in thinking about a wrong which was perpetrated in the past. This person strongly believes that they were cheated of what was rightfully theirs and now they are running this thought to the point where they’re using alcohol to get to sleep, to get some rest from thoughts. They are unable to enjoy the new circumstances and heading for further trouble… given a gun they would happily kill the perpetrator. It’s very sad.

A lady I met on the train told me she had been robbed both of her son’s life… she had assumed his would naturally extending past her own, and also by her sister on her mum’s death. These events had shocked her to the core as she saw it… and she was still shaking. She was heading off for some ‘retail therapy’ with a friend who understood her… and wouldn’t cheat her. I wonder…?

From my own experiences I know about the betrayal of expectations, the behaviour changes which can occur when money is at stake, and about projection.

Earlier in life I had experienced projection without understanding it, then later I knew it as a concept, but later still as an experience which I had to be with, until I could really be with it, unsurprised, undisturbed.  There is no curiosity with projection… no space for the other person to be different from prior, held in mind, assumed certainties.Touch a sore spot and you get a sight of the whole undigested works, everything that has been slid into the shadow, spews out and then slides back into the deeps!

One question is Who is it that you want to kill, are killing – any idea?… when this person is in front of you what do you see?
Do you see their face, their hopes and fears, their potential, their buddhanature….. or do you just see your beliefs stuck onto their image…with the thought this person is ruining my life?
The latter view leads to a sense of entitlement to treat them as objects – bad objects…. the scapegoat for all that’s not gone well in life….and as someone else  is putdown there’s a sense of going up, of power, becoming more important. Also as we tend to collect people around us who are thinking the same way (our ego likes that sense of confirmation) we find that the energy of the group can often take things further than one person on their own.

Hatred and the sense of injustice won’t be assuaged by killing… it won’t bring peace and ease and a release from tension… quite the contrary… but without looking to see the situation and consequences clearly there are no brakes on surrendering to highly cooked up, instinctive, reactive thought.

Little children can understand the effect of these thoughts…
In an assembly of primary school children if you ask them to think of someone they love, someone they care for, and let them sit with that for a minute or two… then ask how they feel in their body… they come up with words like soft warm comfy…
If you then ask them to think of someone who they want to thump, someone they are cross with, and then after a few minutes ask them how that feels in their body… you’re likely to get words like hot tight hard etc.
Mmm…hmmm…. So you see that these thoughts have an impact on you… the person suffering while you are thinking these angry thoughts is… Yourself, not them!

The angry thoughts may be perfectly appropriate and if they come and go quite quickly no harm is done but stewing over them, putting your life energy into them is really unhealthy…living in a stew!

In relative reality it is clear that all actions, arising from a belief in the true separate existence  of ‘I’, have consequences, both now and through time,

Deep dharma, answering the question Who am I?, reveals the non-entitative nature of self and other…it reveals the nature of the would be killer…(who me? a killer??? … well, jailor if you like!…) and that investigation kills, with wisdom, the  ‘I’ as something real and separate. This resolves the conflict…and frees the other from your own projections.
Form is not other than….

 

 

Image of morning glory flower :    wikipedia taken by  Koshy Koshy from Faridabad, Haryana, India