Other People Suck
Sunday, February 17th, 2008I have been a member of several spiritual communities. Each time, I left because people were more interested in socializing and gossiping. People didn’t like me and thought I was aloof. Like if you didn’t join in their games, you weren’t accepted. I wonder if the whole idea of practicing in a community is just a kind of spiritual babysitting service. –from Portland, Oregon
Let’s cut to the chase. Whenever we criticize other people, we are feeling insecure and alone. I mean every time. No exceptions.
Anandamayi Ma never criticized anyone. Yet she was a fierce teacher. Criticism is when you feel self-hatred or a lack of self-worth and you try to deal with it by hurting someone else or making yourself look good in the eyes of others at the expense of whomever you are criticizing.
Teaching is when a person with some embodied realization serves as a mirror, verbally or otherwise, for the benefit of assisting a student to recognize her or his own fixations.
When you are being taught, you may be reactive, you may feel extremely uncomfortable, but you will always also feel loved.
People express their feelings of lack of self worth and loneliness in different ways. Generally, this involves some form of demanding other people take responsibility for your situation or projecting your bad feelings and anxiety onto others.
If you tend to live more at the projecting end of the spectrum, as does the reader above, you probably have a running dialog in your head, and coming out of your mouth, about how other people don’t care, screw up, piss you off, let you down, are stupid, arrogant, slow, and on and on.
It’s also common, in this situation, to ascribe your bad feelings about yourself to other people: They don’t like me, are angry with me, or don’t appreciate me.
A young man in a community I am associated with was liked by all. He was quirky, but appreciated. However, his self-concept was of a person everyone rejected. Even though no one was rejecting him, or maybe because no one was rejecting him, he built a wall around himself and basically confirmed his self-concept by not speaking to others or joining in group activities. The more he did this, the more isolated he felt, and the more strongly he was convinced that his situation was due to being rejected by the group. Many of us tried to intervene, but he had no capacity to self-reflect or receive nourishment. Eventually he left–a victim of his own karmic drama.
Of course, a student can be critical of others, and people really do end up not wanting to be around this person. So, you start off lonely and feeling lack of self worth, and you end up pushing everyone away from both ends. You find fault with them, and you are certain they are finding fault with you. Then the situation self-destructs.
It can also happen that spiritual communities build a self-narrative of superiority grounded on criticism of other groups. Spiritual communities suffer from this and can be attached to criticism and narratives of persecution just as individuals can.
When we are projecting our karmic fixations strongly onto others and ourselves, it is very difficult to recognize this. Fortunately, most of us have at least a little capacity to self-reflect and find the irony in our situation. With at least some capacity to receive the reflection of a teacher and laugh at ourselves, we can slowly break the grip of karmic vision and come to have more clarity about Reality.
Being a part of a community of people all on the same path is part of the practice. It is sadhana. With everyone trying to be more aware together, we can develop more quickly. This is what spiritual communities are for.
Also, we are human. We are social beings. We need nourishment from other human beings, and we need help. A spiritual community can help you to recognize this. Recognizing that we live in continuity with other beings is Realization.
If you find that the same pattern in your life keeps happening over and over again, you can reflect on this message from Reality. These patterns are our responsibility, even if we did not cause them. Now we are the bearers of them, and once we recognize our situation, we have the opportunity to relax and grow. We tend to think of karmic patterns only as burdens, but there is wisdom in the pattern if you care to listen.
In Ma’s Love,
Shambhavi
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