This post about "The persecution mindset..." is about the apparently severe need in society today to express feelings of being bullied by others. It is an issue that is elusive to describe for me because some of the things people come up with I wouldn't have ever thought of being something that I would want to have brought up about me to others. The issue leads to the outbreak of violence in society not only towards others but also violence against ourselves in the form of suicide and other self harming practices. While I understand that people need to reach out for help so that they can get help I am not sure that blasting it all over social media is the way either.
Being "normal" is what we all want would like to think we are. Conversely, if people feel that they are "abnormal" then they think something is wrong with them in some way and in order to feel normal people will take steps to find a path towards that.
But here is the truth. Nobody is "normal". The struggle to cope with finding your place in society is a battle of arranging yourself to fit in to some idea about who we believe people are supposed to be.
"There is something wrong with me." This is a thought I have always had about myself. I have come to the conclusion that everyone has these thoughts. I think it is part of the human condition. The result is that everyone is trying to correct that something wrong to different degrees throughout their lives. We are mammals. We are part of the pack mentality. We don't want to be left out of the herd. We want to be part of it. How our lives are depends to what degree we spend time on the outside looking in.
No...you aren't normal. You are different. How you feel isn't based on what you think others see you as being but rather about some intellectual construction of that. Humans by nature like to complicate things. So, we tend to reach in our little bag of thoughts and complicate who we think we are and begin to take steps to shore those thoughts up. After all, we must be right about ourselves, because if we aren't who could possibly be right about who we are...who I am.
All of this is quite normal in my view. What isn't normal is publicizing it and making my issues everyone elses issue as well. The idea that people should understand or accept me for who I am is really giving humans a lot more credit than they deserve. Why? Because nobody spends much time thinking about anyone else but themselves enough to have time or mental capacity to understand or accept or reject me.
No, the world does not understand you. It is a pipe dream to think that it can.
The first tendency the world will have is to protect itself from challenging ideas when the root of these ideas are no different than the human condition has been over the course of time. There is nothing new under the sun.
We have a right to be who we are, who we want to be, and to do what we think will make us happy. Asking others for validation, understanding, and acceptance is however a bridge too far. Stop expecting the world to understand you. It isn't going to happen. Just do your thing and move on. Every battle one fights brings an injury and the war will not be won, because it can't be won.
On the other hand, let people be who they are. The highest level of human understanding exists at the level of seeing the human being in everyone and to see beyond the layers of the worldly trappings we clothe ourselves in. Those things don't matter all that much.
At the end of the day, when all of the shouting is done and the battles are fought we will be faced with the reality that is life...which is the annoying, inconvienient, and all leveling prospect of death and the infirmity that life brings to us preceding it. In the end the ego must give way to the being. So our passage into life is not much different than our passage out of it and the dominating difference between the two is the powerful ego telling us who we think we are, which is actually not true. Who we are is "Being" not the costume we put on throughout life until it is unceremoniously ripped from us at our demise.
So, when we protest against our situation in life out of a perception that the world must treat us a certain way it only serves to increase the suffering in life. People will travel from one thing to the next in search of validation when validation is something nobody can give you. Finding happiness through validation is a very thin expectation.
We are seeking 'happiness' in life. But I don't believe it can exist as long as we have expectations as to how we can achieve it.
It seems to me that the only way to happiness is not to focus on oneself but to focus on seeing the humaness in others which is what it means to "love" others. This is the essence of the cause of the persecution mindset. The persecution mindset is focused on self and as long as we don't feel like we are loved enough, understood enough, or accepted enough we are going to feel like the world is being unfair to us and we cry like a baby when the candy is taken away. Our whole existence becomes consumed with me, me, me, me, me, me....and as we all should realize...the world doesn't really care about "our 'me'" at all, no matter who we are.
I realize that I live most of my life in fear. For some reason I'm afraid that I am wrong and that I'll hurt someone or do someone injustice. In my efforts to help I feel like what I do will be wrong somehow, either legally, morally, ethically, or factually. So, my tendency is to try and not affect anyone else's life out of a fear I will do wrong.
This is apparent in the care for my elderly parents who have now passed. I look back at that experience and think I did everything wrong, or at least didn't do them right enough. I am sorry that they had me taking care of them, because I'm quite sure that I was the worst person they could have found to do it. That is how I feel about it.
So, the realization that thinking and doing for others is simple, when that is the only thing that can bring happiness, then we become unsure about our ability to actually be of benefit to others...the result being of course that these thoughts are self centered.
The very wise sayings in the Bible are ...
"Love others, as much as you love yourself."
"Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you."
But what it doesn't say is, "you can't expect others to do that to you." Expecting that is selfish and leads to unhappiness. So, these ideas are extremely subtle and ultimately delicate in daily practice.
There is so much judgement in the world today and everyone seems to be taking sides. All of the flag waving, banner carrying, and protest posters in the world aren't going to make any situation better. The only thing there is to do is to stop complaining, judging, and feeling as if the world is persecuting "just me" for whatever 'thing' we feel misunderstood or mistreated about and to start showing love to the ones who we feel are persecuting us.
Life is fair. Nobody wins. We are all in the same lifeboat together. At some point...we are all going to drown. Maybe we should get along better in that lifeboat and it starts with focusing on others.