There Are No Good or Bad People
The other day, I went into an establishment I frequent, and the lovely woman who works there was making idle conversation, telling me about another patron.
“She’s good people,” she said. “She’s like us.”
I heard myself respond, “All people are good people.”
Naturally, she caught herself and said how much she loved that response because, after all, she’s in a “higher consciousness” community and knows better, or at least should.
It was as if I witnessed her catch a corroded microchip in her brain. I call it a corroded microchip because our brains are machines and tend to pick up viruses from erroneous thought patterns.
These viruses slip by our awareness so that even when we put ourselves out to the world to be on the “enlightenment journey,” we find ourselves speaking into division and unconsciously acting it out.
As a former psychotherapist, I had the opportunity to sit with a man who beat his wife, a woman who disowned her son because he was gay, a nurse who crossed a massive boundary with a new mother, an ex-convict who had killed a man, and more.
If I put my mind to it, I have never been unable to empathize with any other human being in my three decades of work.
No one wakes up and says, “I want to be an alcoholic, a racist, a tyrant, a gossip, a bitch,” or to live in the self-loathing and misery that breeds these behaviors.
And even more importantly, we (you and me), when in a state of stress –defined by any time you’re feeling even a mildly negative emotion – are incapable of objectivity.
So, the name-calling and labeling of any person or collective you deem “bad” is merely you not seeing a whole person because stress is causing your machine (your mind) to malfunction.
When you add to this a nation in acute stress and, therefore, actively fueling a divide (because that is what fear does to the human mind), we have an us vs. them mentality infiltrating our daily language, even by people who know better.
To say that the right brain's capacity to see the “whole picture” and experience inspiration, curiosity, and creativity is undervalued and underutilized is the understatement of the last few thousand years.
It’s not your fault; it’s how we’ve evolved, but it is our responsibility.
The truth is that we each have the DNA necessary to be anything from nasty to murderous. What makes us one or the other has little to do with our innate moral high ground.
I am not a nice person when negative emotions hijack my brain and body, and neither are you. While understandable, we must cool the system down for better functioning in those moments because there are enough people who can’t or won’t.
Don’t be one of those people.
When the microchip corrosion gets to the point that even in passing conversation, and in perfectly good spirits, with well-functioning systems, we are saying to one another that one set of people or persons is “good,” and another set of people or persons is “bad,” we have a humanity problem.
YOU must save us by looking into YOU for this corrosion. I must investigate ME for this corrosion.
Here are some tips:
Do not believe what you read (even this). Do not believe what you watch. Instead, try it on; see how it feels. Investigate for yourself. Think for yourself.
Ask yourself in the morning: Who do I want to be today? What is the truest expression of that Being? Are you a mean-spirited person? If not, then wake up to your words and how you behave toward everyone and anyone.
Scan your memory at the end of the day. Ask: Who was I today? Where did a software virus overtake my best self?
