Once you begin to familiarize yourself with the worlds of love that benefit your environment—your agape (your being, doing, wants, needs and desires), you will begin to see that there are objects, experiences and paths you don’t need! This is a great revelation for those who are bombarded with peer pressure or feel compelled to act or look like what we are “told” is successful or beautiful or popular. People will begin to see that your inner being is reflecting more and you will notice others around you that want to know what you have been doing that makes you so, well, different.
The truth is once you start looking at everything you are given as a gift—your family, your friends, your city, your body, your situation—you will desire to be centered more and more. You will be blessed with more and more abundance of gifts because the Universe responds to your gratefulness as a reflection of the receiving of gifts. Going back to the example of the visualization: Do you really desire that which you visualized? Do you need that cell phone (whatever object you chose)? Is it important to you for the right reason (your beliefs)? And can you look upon it objectively as just that—an experience for this lifetime?
Let me explain a little more before I am ready to explore another “world.” You may ask, “Why would I receive more blessings by being more grateful?” Well, the Universe sees everything as a gift! The “good” and the “bad” are gifts we receive regardless of their initial origin. Okay, bear with me. IF we have thoughts that go out to the Universe/Collective Consciousness that are constantly “negative” in nature by definition, we will receive what we send out. It’s like a radio system that allows us to gauge the outcome of our thoughts, whether or not we are aware of it, that allows us to receive what we believe we deserve!! Is this starting to make sense?
If we believe we deserve what the world around us gives us, we cannot change the outcome of our thoughts which then give us what we have sent out. Therefore if we constantly think upon the negative of the Universe—disasters, accidents, and our fears of death—we create those realms around us. NOW I am not saying we subconsciously want cancer or a terminal illness, but these too are given to us as part of our life experience! It’s a weird concept, I know, but it’s true.
Now, being grateful for everything, including disasters and illnesses, then allows the Universe to give us the experiences and needs we desire by returning higher vibrations. We find disasters heart-wrenching and we are saddened by the loss of human lives, especially if they are around us or we are directly impacted by them. But after the sadness dissipates, what can we find grateful about those experiences? Maybe that we are alive!! Or that they are not suffering from illness or poverty or anything that physically challenged them. Or that the loss creates awareness of our own humanity (this will definitely be explored later).
We desire what we need. And we think about these needs. Our needs may be elemental like housing and food and shelter, but they can be more in depth such as recovering from a loss and safe travel and passage. They can also be the higher thoughts that can help a child that is raised impoverished to achieve their goals—they are focused more on the outcome and whatever it takes by the gifts of the challenges of their environment.
So again, I challenge you to look within. What do you think? What is going through your head? Do you sit and watch the news and find yourself miserable in your daily life? Or do you find outlets to learn that create a more pleasant environment? Remember I talked about agape love? What is your environment like?
People Are Strange—Creating our Own Worlds in the Company of Others
In this chapter, I want to explore philia love – the relationships we have with other souls who connect us together with our world. You love those who are around you for different reasons. You love your parents (possibly), or siblings, or friends, or spouse, or coworkers, or the guy who serves you coffee in the mornings, as a way of reflecting your own love for humanity. It’s the construct of the human “family” that gives you that kind of love. We are all created to look, sound, and breathe alike. I mean, yes, we may not understand each other exactly (some people speak other languages, others have a different physical appearance), but we all are born, live and die. Right?
Interestingly, our thoughts internally are also fed and nurtured by our relationships with others around us. For instance, we may spend an hour everyday meditating, focusing on our dreams, imagining a beautiful world around us. But as soon as the meditation and quiet time is over, we enter the real world and spend the other 16 hours or so in the day with other people awake. Then if we are lucky, we can focus our minds in our dreams on those pleasant experiences we want to manifest unconsciously. But that is not always something we can remember.
So how do we see and react to those around us? Who is closest to you in your inner circle? Do you have intimate relationships with others, such as parents, children, or partners, who are a positive reflection of you, who tell you the good and the bad, and who can nurture your dreams and growth? This is all too often not a reality. It is usually those closest to us that are the most challenging to our growth.
Let’s dispel a major obstacle to this kind of relationship love: prejudice. We are taught to create a barrier between us and “them”. Do you have a “them” from whom you learned to be separate? Again, this goes back to your thoughts. Dig deep. Or maybe just look at the surface of those around you. What color is your skin? What color do you “see” yourself? This is not rocket science. Your eyes tell you that your skin is the shade you see it. Right? Now, what do you see around you with your closest relationships? What do you feel about the color of the skin of those around you?? Do you have any prejudices? Do you think to yourself, “those people are not related to me because they have a different skin color.” If so, we need to work on this before we move on.
More Than Skin Deep – Going Further Within
Now, seeing that those around us are the most challenging most often, did anyone in your family or your life teach you that we are different because of skin color? Okay, if that’s the case, then that’s where you start to peel away the layers of thought. Radical idea number one: Nobody is different because of skin color. That is a learned social construct, and it is not real. It is only as real as we make it out to be. We may not “relate” to someone because our parents, friends and family tell us that those of another “color” act or think differently from us. But do they really? I mean, don’t they too worry about what others think of them? Don’t they too have parents and siblings and friends? Don’t they too face challenges because of their personal experiences. Of course they do. So what separates us by color is only based on a system of irrational fear and false teachings.
The first time I experienced a truly racist experience was in high school. We used to travel a lot with our acting competitions, called Speech Teams, throughout the Chicago area. I remember the reactions of my teammates going into predominantly racially differing neighborhoods and the false elicitations of fear. Once we traveled to a high school that had locks on the doors and metal detectors at the entrances. This was because there were gang problems within their city’s social systems. We never truly understood the challenge by analyzing our own reactions. All we knew was that they lived in a “different” world because they had to deal with local violence and prevention, whereas we did not have those challenges in our school.
Yet, the immediate association was that it was because they were African-Americans living in an inner city school system. Wow. How do we go from metal detectors and violence to skin color? We are taught this. So that is how we reacted—associating the two together. I can’t recall an exact comment from anyone on the team, I just remember the sentiments of uneasiness caused by the entranceway of the school.
Does this mean all African-American schools have that kind of violence because they are a violent group of people? Heck no! But we have to deal with the media’s idea of African-based countries and the violence and terrorism that is caused by the social constructs of some, not all, of these environmental systems. We see what has happened to dictatorships in Africa, the destruction to Haiti (most recently with the series of earthquakes that has changed their nation completely), the gang violence in major cities in our country, and the poverty that is associated within these communities.
But this has nothing to do with skin color. It has to do with hundreds of years of being told that skin color mattered that created systems of imbalance, like apartheid in South Africa and European-based dominance and slavery. These conditions exist. Yes. But does that mean that all babies born with brown or black-hued skin are violent? No way!! So why do we as a nation “label” and treat people differently?
How about you? Using more than just that example, how do you see people around you with different colored skin? Do you look upon them as equals? Or do you see that maybe your life lessons are not much different than theirs? Do you think that on this gigantic planet we call Earth that there may be people that have a different language or country or skin color that are more loving, more caring and more attentive to their compassionate, giving self than you? Of course there are. And does it not occur to you that maybe they have it better off because of whatever their situation because then they are given tools that we may not have in their society to learn to love fully?
One Big Happy Family – Learning to Love the World We Live In
Let’s step outside ourselves and our family for a moment. Evaluate your immediate surroundings. Take our your notebook. Write down your closest relationships. Include everyone you experience or have experienced in your lifetime thus far that has been close to you (remember, include those who are no longer with us):
• Parents. The obvious first relationship you had was with your parents. It may have or have not been one or both biological beings that created you. It may include a step-parent, a grandparent, or a guardian who raised you. Write them all down.
• Siblings. Write down everyone that you include as a sibling, biological, by marriage, or somehow connected to you through a parental figure.
• Immediate Family. Include grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and all relatives as far out as you can go. List everyone you know influences you from your family tree.
• First Friends. Who are the closest friends you had in your life? Think of who you talk to on your social networks. But also remember those who you grew up with in your neighborhood environment.
• Teachers, Mentors and Leaders. Do you remember all your grade school teachers? Can you remember who taught you music, art, or coached your little league team? Do you have a memory of your family’s religious leaders (pastors, priests, rabbis, and so on). Or your parents’ friends and the neighbor kids’ parents?
• Associates, Coworkers, and Classmates. Who were closest to you in your early years growing up? Who did you hang out with, and who did you have to see on a regular basis? What clubs, sports, activities were you in? And how well did you get to know them? Do you remember that one person from summer camp or from the playground? Do you have a memory of that family that lived down the street, or the classmates who were with you throughout your life in school?
• Societal Members. And finally, take a look at those in your community, now and before, who had some kind of impact on you for some reason.
Once you have written down all those you can remember (if you are like me, there will be dozens of names to recollect), you can start by taking a few at a time, or working through until you have them all down. Now, write next to each name all the physical characteristics you know about them--height, weight, ethnicity, appearance. Write down your first thought about that person. You don’t have to go into much detail, but now finally write an emotion you have about them.
This is going to be your relationship guide. This is how you associate yourself with other people. Once you finish a simple list, go back and read every word you wrote. Here’s what I want you to do:
1. Physical appearance is a non-judgmental characteristic. It is a given—they were born into this particular appearance. Therefore this is not going to influence how you look at them unless you see a difference in them that causes you to think of them as “different”. For instance, if they were in a wheelchair, you would look at them as “handicapped” physically in some way, but do you see them as more or less fortunate than you?
2. Take a look at your emotional response to each individual you listed. Why did you write that particular word? Or why did you use that particular description? This is thus what YOU see in them and in the world. NOT who they may be.
3. Now the fun part begins: Take each name, and each one’s characteristics and emotions, and find ONE thing per person you see in them when you knew them that is the same as something about YOU. This is the mirror from which I want to see all your relationships as we progress throughout these chapters. How do you see them in relationship to yourself?
Here are some good examples:
Mother – physical appearance is obviously like me since it is related to me biologically. Socially, she is very outgoing and talkative like me. Emotionally, I find she is different because she likes to talk about other people often to others, which is a source of major contention between us. Do I find I do that? Sometimes. But do I mean it to be mean? Not really. Thus, should I be careful about what I say to other people about those closest to me. This is a resounding yes.
Son – looks just like my family, like me and my brothers especially. Shy and reflective. Dry sense of humor. Loving. But also sometimes gets angry at injustices and loses his temper. Do I do that too? Of course I do. Do I let it get at me? Yes. And do I sometimes say things out loud that may be hurtful when I feel wronged? Well…where do you think he got that from?
Best friend in high school – Very talented, beautiful voice, loving, great mom, adoring wife, amazing as a spiritual leader. When we spent time together in the younger years, she was very insecure with her relationships with men before she was married. It was a direct reflection of what I too experienced. Our methodologies were different, but we were the same type of woman—physically attractive women with insecurities within ourselves that limited us intimately. She was able to overcome this within her marriage. I was not. But I remembered what I learned from her—how to stand up for myself and not be a “door mat” in relationships with men. But it worked within my social construct for a time, but I eventually outgrew the paradigm of a submissive wife. It didn’t work for me.
Cousin – Compassionate to me as an adult when my children and I were homeless and needed a place to stay. But angry and reactive to her own children, and unable to relate to mine. Jealousy and a negative reaction to me caused us not to talk any longer. Do I still love her? Yes. Do I have negative feelings of that summer? Not really, but I do feel bad that she felt let down by what she thought I was and was not doing—it took me a long time to find a good job and I felt I was not able to pay her and her husband back for their generosity. My kids were affected by her reaction to her own children, which came across as angry and negative. But in the end, we both felt wronged in some way. Do I want to hear from her again? Most definitely. And I always think the best about her and her family.
Most difficult boss – I worked for a man once who had all the money you could ask for but was never happy. This sounds like an allegory but I guarantee he does exist. He had a beautiful and famous wife, two intelligent and creative children, and a multi-million dollar home within which I worked. Was I a great employee? Not always. But did I learn from him anything? Yes. I learned I would never marry an unhappy person again, I would never yell at my children and treat them disrespectfully. But mostly I learned that a shrewd business man can run a really tight ship and still never have what he truly wants: joy in his life. Why strive for monetary success if you have to belittle others to get it? Does it make me question my decision to work for him? No, it was one of my lessons. Was I happy that time in my life? Not really, so I attracted the same type of unhappiness—appeared on the outside as altogether, but inside he must have felt as empty as I did.
I could go on and come up with hundreds of examples. I have lived a fully experienced life when it comes to relationships. I have met the poorest people on Earth who are surrounded by love and contentment because of their family. And I have met the wealthiest and most miserable people that I could ever know. I met movie stars who were really humble and had nice families. I met drug dealers who really only cared about their children and thus created that lifestyle out of necessity. I have met religious leaders who beat their children. And I have met talented artists who hate being exploited in the press. And yet I still encounter the hurt and the downtrodden. What am I learning from them?
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