Understanding Yourself and Others

Understanding yourself and others

The absolutely most important thing to understanding ourselves is to realize that we are at least three separate distinct individuals.

Kabbalah teaches us we are a composite of a rational mind that can see things objectively; inside our mind is in fact our soul, which is part of God and is kind and compassionate; we then have a heart and in our heart there are two drives: there’s the drive for pleasure and then there’s the fear of pain; for example what causes me to eat food ? It may be I am seeking comfort, it may be that I’m hungry so I’m trying to get rid of my pain; So an action can either come from Love for something or Fear from something. For example two people are playing a game, one person is dribbling the ball towards the goal, the other is trying to defend the goa; one is going towards the goal, the other is trying to prevent something which he doesn’t want happening.

Now psychologists who study the psychology of vacation report that to a large extent the most pleasurable feeling of the vacation is actually the anticipation – because at that time a person is feeling hopeful and joyful; that’s the feeling of love . So love feels good which is why often our hearts will focus on daydreaming about vacations or marriage or anything that we think that will give us pleasure. In other words , when we are thinking we are often not thinking, we are just reacting to the heart’s desire for pleasure. The flip side is also true, because when we are afraid of something, so somebody whose been criticised unnecessarily will always fear people, because they’re always afraid that somebody else will do to them what the other person did. This is the statement “Once Bitten Twice Shy” because the person who say was bitten by a dog and has a negative memory so he is afraid that the next time any dog may do the same thing to him. So he develops an innate fear of dogs.

Now fear actually leads us to the next stage and the next stage is anger. Because we also have an ego and the ego is a desire and a high from being superior to others. This is a sadistict cruel and sick evil feeling but seeing that it’s a desire and we don’t imagine that “I am evil” so it masqurades itself as competition. Nonetheless the flip side of being superior to other people of-course means that someone else must feel inferior. That’s why jokes that make fun of people are funny, because it taps into the ego. There are many television shows such as Desperate Housewives and others which tap into the ego by showing you people who act stupidly and that makes you feel better than them.  That’s the good side of the ego, the bad side is that when you feel that something is unfair that’s called jealousy. I find it amazing and telling that the only emotion God tells us that we should not have in the 10 commandments is to not be jealous. What a person is jealous they lose their mind and they will do anything to destroy another person which is causing them the jealousy.

For example, jealousy is what causes bullying. In other words, someone feels that they are worse than someone else and their ego cannot handle this, so they come up with a feeling in their mind that the other person deserves to be shamed. The real reason they desire to shame the other person is not because the other person is bad. Because even when they do something wrong they don’t want anyone to shame them! rather, because their ego feels that it’s not fair that the other person feels good but I feel miserable.

This is why there is anti-Semitism and anti-Israel and anti-Americanism and anti-western people in the world; because unless you’ve been brought up with a sense of dignity and a sense of pride in your goodness and kindness then usually you have been brought up with criticism and bullying and shame to coerce you into following your society’s predelictions.

I met someone who job is that he is hired by Asian companies just to think. Because people can easily become workhorses; they learn that someone is the boss and you just have to follow orders; but in order to be able to think you have to have confidence in your ability to think, you can’t just be working and following orders.

So now we see that in summary, within us we all have 3 very different drives/people. We have the mind which is the smartest and the best part of us and the truest part of us, the part that can see things objectively and can understand that another person is going through the same difficulties and challenges that I go through too. In fact it can understand and have compassion on all animals, even on God, because God also must have feelings and feel compassionate and desire to be kind.

However we have a heart and the heart is driven as we see clearly in drug addicts by two emotions: love or fear. The first emotion is the desire for pleasure and when that emotion overtakes the mind as they say “love is blind.” So somebody in love or love of a substance loses the rational mind and will do anything to achieve that pleasure.

From here it just keeps on getting worse because a person who is in fear will also even more so lose their mind and will do anything to make themselves safe and secure.

And then it gets even worse because within us there is the ego.  The ego is as we said being superior, which means someone else must be inferior. And that’s only the good side of the ego because the bad side is that when we feel it’s not fair that someone else has something better than us without realizing it, the mind begins to rationalize why that person is evil.  For example Hitler murdered over 1.5 million Jewish children, many Gypsy children and others and he really believed that he was good and they were evil; so we see that from jelousy comes the the evil desire to rape and to murder and torture, in order that other people should feel as miserable as I am feeling because “it’s not fair that they are feeling good while I am feeling miserable.”

So what we must realize is that there are three people in us: there is our mind which is God; there is our emotions which is the nutcase , because it is not rational; and then there is the Nazi because it desires power and it is evil.

The problem is that how do you know which thoughts comes from God, which thoughts come from the nutcase, and which thoughts come from the Nazi?

Because a thought is data and you can’t tell which one of these three individuals has created the thought.

But the simple answer which is obvious is that if the thought is about goodness and kindness, helping another person, then it comes from God. If the thought is about something that will give me pleasure or something that I am afraid of – I’m trying to prevent – because fear always creates the need for protection and prevention, then it is coming from the nutcase. And if the thought is about how this will lead me to recognition and certainly if the thought is about how someone else is evil no matter how justified you feel, as long as your feelings are with the emotion of anger because it is only the ego that gets angry – the mind is objective, the mind has no anger in it – so then you know for sure that that is the Nazi in you.