The core of all disharmony with others

At the core of our disharmonies with others is the desire in us, for them to act from their essential nature, which is equivalent to love, kindness, understanding, compassion, gratitude, etc.

And of course, human beings often don’t act from their essential nature because they get taken over by other things.

Human beings are, in part, meat robots, after all, and are susceptible to being “hacked” and taken over by things other than essential nature. For example, we share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and we can get taken over by primate instincts.

Yes, it’s shitty when a human being has been taken over by a script that makes them act selfishly, falsely, and hurtfully towards us and others, but it is important to recognize a few things.

One is that their essential nature is still there, even while they’re behaving hurtfully. All of that love, kindness, goodness, etc, is still right there in the human being. It’s just not in the driver’s seat. It’s been pushed into the backseat by something else, but it’s still right there, and we can still connect with it, even while hurtful “malware” is running their body/mind.

In fact, it’s not that we connect with it. We recognize we are already connected with it.

We can’t actually disconnect with it, because our essential nature is inseparable from other’s essential nature.

And that’s kind of the problem, in a certain way.

If the other person didn’t have an essential nature, we wouldn’t get upset with them for behaving hurtfully.

For example, if someone throws a stone that stings when it hits us in the head, we get angry at that person. But if the same stone happens to fall from a ledge and hits us in the exact same way, we don’t get angry at the ledge, because there is no one there to get angry at.

I don’t want to diminish that it sucks to get hit in the head with a stone, but when a person throws the stone, it is not really their essential nature throwing it. It’s always something else that has taken over their body/mind that throws the stone.

Therefore, if it’s not the real them that throws the stone, it doesn’t make sense for us to get angry at the real them for throwing it.

We get angry at them when we confuse the real them with whatever “malware” has taken over their body/mind.

A couple more points:

Trauma doesn’t come from what another person does to us.

Trauma is our reaction to what they did.

True story: when a bus filled with children was kidnapped by a deranged killer, and later they were all rescued by police, psychologists found that some of the children were deeply traumatized, while others were not. The difference, they found, was in how the children reacted to the event. The ones who reacted in an empowered way (from their essential nature) were not traumatized. The ones who reacted from a feeling of helplessness and fear (not their essential nature) were traumatized.

Trauma can only develop in us when we forget the things I’m explaining in this essay.

Trauma only forms because we disconnect from our essential nature. That is literally what trauma is: a place in our psyche where we’ve lost connection with the reality of ourselves, others and the world.

Usually, this disconnection happens because someone else has convinced us to believe that their hurtful behavior is real; that it is coming from the real them, and is hurting the real us.

This can never be true.

Hurtful behavior can only hurt the body/mind.

Hurtful behavior can never hurt the real us, and it never comes from the real them.

The only force in this universe, powerful enough to disconnect us from our essential nature, is ourselves.

No one else can do that to us.

But yes, their body/mind can be taken over and act hurtfully towards us, and in this way they might convince us to believe that something bad is happening to the real us, from the real them.

In other words, they may convince us that “badness is real.”

Isn’t that what “evil” is? The conviction or belief that “badness is real”?

When we believe that badness is real, we have begun a long and winding journey into illusion, trauma and suffering.

Healing begins when we turn around and start the journey back to reality.

Reality is our essential nature, the real us that can never be hurt by anyone or anything.

Just like the image of a car hurtling straight towards you on the screen of your TV can never actually hit you, nothing and no one in this world can actually hurt the real you.

No matter how terrifying and realistic the circumstance might be—and yes, it can get pretty terrifying, for example, when someone is burning to death in a house fire, and they’re watching the skin on their arms blacken and crack, and they’re feeling intense pain, and so on—no matter how realistic it appears, it never touches the real you. Their essential nature is never burned.

No matter what might happen to the body/mind, there is an unbridgeable gap between it and our essential nature, that does not allow any harm to cross.

Love can cross, but never harm.

No one is making it happen that way. It’s just the nature of reality.

Our essential nature is real.

Everything else is just a movie.

A movie can never harm you as you sit on the couch watching. It can only trick you into believing you’re being harmed, for a little while.

To recap: trauma is our choice to disconnect from our essential nature and/or the essential nature of someone else, also known as “disconnecting from reality.”

No real person ever harms us. It is only when a harmful program, a biological “malware,” takes over a body/mind that it behaves harmfully.

Therefore, there is no one to blame or get angry at.

But it can still be very useful to assist a body/mind in reconnecting with its essential nature, so that it resumes control and peace is restored.

We all want others to do this. We want them to put goodness back in the driver’s seat, if it has been pushed out.

It is natural to want this, but sometimes we fixate on this and make it a condition of our happiness, and in doing so we forget that we can still connect with their essential nature, even if it’s not in the driver’s seat.

No matter what their body/mind might be doing, their essential nature is still right there, loving us with all its heart—and isn’t that what we really want?

Even if a serial killer is murdering us, we can still connect with the goodness and light inside of them, and still recognize that it is not this light that is killing us, and that in reality, it is not the light in us being killed.

Their body can only kill our body, but it can never, ever harm the real us.

Yes, I understand, these are very advanced lessons.

But look around.

We’re in a school.

<3