Many of the spiritual leaders who talk about spiritual awareness tend to bang on about ‘understanding’ a great deal.
In my first few readings I had missed what they meant but I went over De Mello’s Awareness again today and this time heard him say it was how to “see people for who they are“. This is not what you think it is!
He went on to discuss how people who do bad things to others do so out of only two possible motivations:
- A mental illness
- A lack of awareness
However for those who do such actions because they lack awareness attacking them changes nothing. In fact it can make them feel even more righteous.
In fact, here is a fascinating story about how some people have a belief system which is built upon being attacked. The more people tell them they are wrong, the more they see this as verification that they are right!
We kind of know this even in less radical circumstances. If we are criticized our first response is to defend (and we might even do that by attacking – verbally or physically). Anyone who is calling us ‘wrong’ is wrong by definition!
We might think we are intellectual because we present facts that prove us right but the opposing side did not come to their point of view randomly, they also have facts that counter ours.
A more constructive approach is to try and understand what those facts were and gradually track back how the person built their belief system. In revealing it to you they also reveal it to themselves and so often realise they have built a castle in the marsh.
You won’t admit that you have been brainwashed until you look back and see where the brainwashing happened. Suddenly you then realise “These ideas weren’t mine, I was given them and I believed them without questioning them”.
You won’t put them in a situation where they can admit that though if they feel you are just waiting to pounce. You must also be prepared to reveal how you built your belief system and see its faults.
By chance last week I also saw the video below which will probably be one of the best spent 15 minutes of your life.
It is a fascinating look into how someone used ‘understanding’ to help free an everyday woman (Megan Phelps-Roper) from a radical religious movement. How by, over several weeks, a person got to understand what lead her to become so hate filled towards certain groups in society.
As she explained to him what she thought was her rock solid belief system out loud she was capable of spotting the cracks in it and the questioning began to start.
The next time you feel like shouting someone down for disagreeing with you perhaps it would be better to ask them to shout louder instead.
Don’t make assumptions about who they are and what they are like. Take the time to find out who they are and what they are like. You’ll learn a whole lot about a different belief system and might even improve your own as you do.
To have a constructive argument with someone who is against your belief system is the best way to test its validity.
Why are we hesitant to do this?
I’d always thought this approach gets ignored because it is a lot of effort. Spouting of some facts to show you are ‘right’ is just the easier option and the other person is then an ‘idiot’ if they don’t get it.
But actually I think it runs deeper than this. We ourselves are afraid of questioning our belief system. If we’re going to question someone, they’re going to question us.
Is what we believe really that water tight? BBC Radio 4 recently put out a programme called ‘A Brief History of the Truth‘ in which someone points out our denial can be so strong that when someone presents us with a fact which would shake our belief system to the very core we somehow just blank it out as ‘not true’.
Because if we realise our belief system is fundamentally wrong we are also admitting to having been brainwashed, being stupid, being a fool, etc.
What Megan managed then, in the video above, was to muster enough strength to admit these things even though she knew it would alienate here from a current society and family and with no solid confidence she would find any acceptance in the world she had criticized for so long.
That’s brave.