Saturday, January 21, 2017

Famous Mistakes




1899:

My attitude to you as a meat eater is what? It’s none of anyone’s business what anyone thinks of anyone. But behaviour is important, it’s the clothing of our thoughts. I sense you knowing better than me, and that’s guaranteed to make things go wrong between us. There’s a microsecond of feeling being transmitted, before the brain catches up and tries to hide it. This is where the real damage is done, feeling-wise - you feel you’re being judged by me. You’re something between being disliked and being thought of as distasteful. And in reply, you think much the same about me.



If I sense your dislike and if I let my ego sweep in, in defence of ME, then I begin to move towards retaliation. If we’re enjoying the struggle, that’s fine. That can be liberating and stimulating. But if we’re not on the same sparring level, and it goes wrong, and one or the other slips into value-judging or condemning, that’s where the rot sets in.



If I start disliking you because I think we should all be vegan, then mine isn’t just a specific dislike but a whole-person dislike, catastrophic enough to cause a severing of connections. It’s like two jarring tectonic plates leading to earthquake. So, in the delicate rose beds of human to human relationship, we are careful about who we are sounding-off to. If it goes wrong, I’ll probably be de-friended but worse, by association, my ideas suffer the same indignity. When trust is withdrawn, it can become a war zone, me demanding air space, you just wanting to catch me out. End of.



Or maybe it’s a beginning. But a dangerous route to take and not in keeping with the principle underlying non-violence. Rough and Tumble is sometimes essential, but delicate handling is appropriate at other times. If we really were to operate between ourselves on an instinctive, vibration-ary level, we’d have no trouble reading the signals and never make the really bad mistakes of mis-communication.

No comments: