“Can I challenge you with a possible subject for a future video? What would you do if, for years, a colleague is twisting facts, the reality generally, and presents it in an evil way in front of a manager, putting her colleagues down? There is not a perception, there are facts. What do we do in this case? Thank you. Blessings.”
– Comment on recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuZWAr8Otvc
I hear the essence of this question. There are facts to life. If someone takes a knife and repeatedly stabs me with it, they are, factually, trying to kill me.
Jesus, while being hung on the cross, didn’t proclaim, “father, I am projecting that they are trying to crucify me!”
So, I value this question, it’s a real and authentic one, something I think all of us can relate to. We like these spiritual ideals of taking responsibility for our own perception, but then people really do all kinds of intentionally harmful and hurtful things.
So first, dear YouTube commenter, I will not address your specific situation on the basis that I know nothing about your personal situation, this person you speak of, nor of your soul. I don’t want to touch the specific circumstance of your question. I will however, speak to what this question brings up, which again I think we can all relate to.
Let’s look back at Jesus, for isn’t he a great example of someone to whom real bad things were being done to? His words on the cross, as far as we know at least, were, “Forgive them father for they know not what they do.”
The first thing I want to point out is that he is by no means is denying what they are doing, no more than will I deny that I am sitting down writing on my laptop.
However, he acknowledges that these people “know not what they do.” Obviously, this means he acknowledges that their perception is distorted. In this statement he seemed to be refusing to allow his own mind to fall into anger, resentment, victimization. These people are making a mistake, and they do not understand this. This is profound as it offers a potential reframe for the intentional, hurtful actions we often perform as just mistakes.
I suspect that this declaration was really more so a matter of Jesus affirming to his own self to forgive these people; a reminder to his own mind that these actions do not diminish these people as any less than the children of God. God doesn’t need to forgive anyone, this is only something we do relative to our own perceptions.
It is not the physical actions of others that we are perceive, but rather our interpretation of these actions. We make someone “bad” or “evil” in our thoughts. We condemn them because of what we think we see, and then decide that another person is essentially unworthy of love because of the severity and harshness of their actions. This has nothing to do with their actions, but with our own interpretation of who they are.
There’s a beautiful and recurring teaching in A Course in Miracles that says that we owe our appreciation to our brother. Both for the love they express and for the ways in which they have “called for love.” In the course, we are encouraged to practice interpreting the egoic behavior of others as a call for love. I’d like to paste this entire section here which I also turned to as a “random” morning passage for my own prayers a couple mornings ago.
This is long, but I highly suggest giving it sincere attention. I find these words to cut straight to the heart of this matter.
“You have been told not to make error real, and the way to do this is very simple. If you want to believe in error, you would have to make it real because it is not true. But truth is real in its own right, and to believe in truth you do not have to do anything. Understand that you do not respond to anything directly, but to your interpretation of it. Your interpretation thus becomes the justification for the response. That is why analyzing the motives of others is hazardous to you. If you decide that someone is really trying to attack you or desert you or enslave you, you will respond as if he had actually done so, having made his error real to you. To interpret error is to give it power, and having done this you will overlook truth.
The analysis of ego-motivation is very complicated, very obscuring, and never without your own ego-involvement. The whole process represents a clear-cut attempt to demonstrate your own ability to understand what you perceive. This is shown by the fact that you react to your interpretations as if they were correct. You may then control your reactions behaviorally, but not emotionally. This would obviously be a split or an attack on the integrity of your mind, pitting one level within it against another.
There is but one interpretation of motivation that makes any sense. And because it is the Holy Spirit’s judgment it requires no effort at all on your part. Every loving thought is true. Everything else is an appeal for healing and help, regardless of the form it takes. Can anyone be justified in responding with anger to a brother’s plea for help? No response can be appropriate except the willingness to give it to him, for this and only this is what he is asking for. Offer him anything else, and you are assuming the right to attack his reality by interpreting it as you see fit. Perhaps the danger of this to your own mind is not yet fully apparent. If you believe that an appeal for help is something else you will react to something else. Your response will therefore be inappropriate to reality as it is, but not to your perception of it.
There is nothing to prevent you from recognizing all calls for help as exactly what they are except your own imagined need to attack. It is only this that makes you willing to engage in endless “battles” with reality, in which you deny the reality of the need for healing by making it unreal. You would not do this except for your unwillingness to accept reality as it is, and which you therefore withhold from yourself.
It is surely good advice to tell you not to judge what you do not understand. No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness, for truth to him has become what he wants it to be. If you are unwilling to perceive an appeal for help as what it is, it is because you are unwilling to give help and to receive it. To fail to recognize a call for help is to refuse help. Would you maintain that you do not need it? Yet this is what you are maintaining when you refuse to recognize a brother’s appeal, for only by answering his appeal can you be helped. Deny him your help and you will not recognize God’s Answer to you. The Holy Spirit does not need your help in interpreting motivation, but you do need His.
Only appreciation is an appropriate response to your brother. Gratitude is due him for both his loving thoughts and his appeals for help, for both are capable of bringing love into your awareness if you perceive them truly. And all your sense of strain comes from your attempts not to do just this. How simple, then, is God’s plan for salvation. There is but one response to reality, for reality evokes no conflict at all. There is but one Teacher of reality, Who understands what it is. He does not change His Mind about reality because reality does not change. Although your interpretations of reality are meaningless in your divided state, His remain consistently true. He gives them to you because they are for you.
Do not attempt to “help” a brother in your way, for you cannot help yourself. But hear his call for the Help of God, and you will recognize your own need for the Father.
Your interpretations of your brother’s needs are your interpretation of yours. By giving help you are asking for it, and if you perceive but one need in yourself you will be healed. For you will recognize God’s Answer as you want It to be, and if you want It in truth, It will be truly yours. Every appeal you answer in the Name of Christ brings the remembrance of your Father closer to your awareness. For the sake of your need, then, hear every call for help as what it is, so God can answer you.
By applying the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the reactions of others more and more consistently, you will gain an increasing awareness that His criteria are equally applicable to you. For to recognize fear is not enough to escape from it, although the recognition is necessary to demonstrate the need for escape. The Holy Spirit must still translate the fear into truth. If you were left with the fear, once you had recognized it, you would have taken a step away from reality, not towards it. Yet we have repeatedly emphasized the need to recognize fear and face it without disguise as a crucial step in the undoing of the ego. Consider how well the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the motives of others will serve you then. Having taught you to accept only loving thoughts in others and to regard everything else as an appeal for help, He has taught you that fear itself is an appeal for help. This is what recognizing fear really means. If you do not protect it, He will reinterpret it. That is the ultimate value in learning to perceive attack as a call for love.
We have already learned that fear and attack are inevitably associated. If only attack produces fear, and if you see attack as the call for help that it is, the unreality of fear must dawn on you. For fear is a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied.
Fear is a symptom of your own deep sense of loss. If when you perceive it in others you learn to supply the loss, the basic cause of fear is removed. Thereby you teach yourself that fear does not exist in you. The means for removing it is in yourself, and you have demonstrated this by giving it. Fear and love are the only emotions of which you are capable. One is false, for it was made out of denial; and denial depends on the belief in what is denied for its own existence. By interpreting fear correctly as a positive affirmation of the underlying belief it masks, you are undermining its perceived usefulness by rendering it useless. Defenses that do not work at all are automatically discarded. If you raise what fear conceals to clear-cut unequivocal predominance, fear becomes meaningless. You have denied its power to conceal love, which was its only purpose. The veil that you have drawn across the face of love has disappeared.
If you would look upon love, which is the world’s reality, how could you do better than to recognize, in every defense against it, the underlying appeal for it? And how could you better learn of its reality than by answering the appeal for it by giving it? The Holy Spirit’s interpretation of fear does dispel it, for the awareness of truth cannot be denied. Thus does the Holy Spirit replace fear with love and translate error into truth. And thus will you learn of Him how to replace your dream of separation with the fact of unity. For the separation is only the denial of union, and correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal knowledge that union is true.”
– Chapter 12 the Holy Spirits Curriculum. Section 1: The judgment of the Holy Spirit, A Course in Miracles
But what about evil (etc.)?
There are questions we all ask. One of them is, but what about people that are truly evil? Surely we know that exists, that some people out there will not change, and are beyond a mere “calling for love.”
To this I say, we can only deal with our curriculum as its dealt to us. Most of these questions don’t actually lead towards any useful answer other than how it might justify the mind to stay in fear or hate. Sure, evil exists, but what about you, what about now?
I don’t know if that one pesky person in our life who seems to be the source of so much suffering is actually evil. I’m going to suspect that they are not. And if they are, truly what do we lose in regaining our peace of mind? Does that rightly deem us a victim? Is our peace truly then lost to their incurably evil motives?
Desire yields perception which then determines what we think we can do. Perception is far more than the factual recalling of what bodies and mouths are doing. Perception is our personal investment in what we think other people are, in who they are and what they are up to; it is our story about what we see hiding behind the over simplified cloak of merely “what we see.” Perception determines our limitation of response, it keeps us slaved to a narrow world of not freedom – not knowing that we are the ones in fact who have enslaved our own selves.
Hey, maybe this person at your office is as bad as Hitler. But personal experience will tell me, that there are a lot of people out there in deep pain who do a lot of hurtful stuff. This is not evil, it is confusion and nothing more than a call for love. Most importantly, I don’t feel it’s my role to decide and be the one to judge. I’ll leave that to God. The questions I am most curious about is, what is the interface between where I feel most vulnerable to disempowerment and where I perceive another person to be a cause of my disempowerment?
There is a meeting point between my emotional experience and my perceptions – wherein both are understood as simultaneous. Our perceptions merely reflect who we think we are, projected on the outside as an external cause. Thus, the problem we think is out there and the solution for that problem come from the same place. If the problem is our thinking, therein lies the solution.
This doesn’t mean we don’t have boundaries or make choices etc. We will all do what we do. But it does mean it is our responsibility to tend our own minds. If we lose our peace in allowing our minds to become lowered into distorted perceptions of God’s children, it is not because someone made us do that.
I am a devotee of these teachings because I suffer immensely in my own evaluations of people’s character and motivations. Each evaluation is a testament to who I believe I am, and thus to what it is I want to see. It runs deep. I know my mind is fragile and that I cannot depend upon my own past learning. I need instruction from a clear, unconflicted mind to help me along.