Sunday, October 11, 2009

How a victim can be victorious

You are who you are and this is from the time you are alive.
In mother's womb.

Already during the 9 months there, awareness of the outer world exists and those experiences are added to who you are.

After birth, the loading of experiences and influences increases.
And when the threshold of adulthood is crossed you are who you are plus a load of extra's put on you by parents, family, school, religion, culture, tradition and anything else that was happening around you.

This can be a good thing.
When you are born in a happy family with love between the parents.
In a peaceful situation with harmony, good health and prosperity.

Therefore, no matter who you are, the rest of your life you will operate a lot based on everything that was put inside you in the first 20 years of your life.

Now, what to do when the influences of the first 20 years have been partly extremely negative?
You have two options:

1/
Go down the drain and end in the gutter.
To accept to be drowned and overwhelmed and dominated by the negativity of the past.
To become an alcoholic, a drug addict, unsuccessful in work and relationships.

2/
Or, you can work on dissolving the extremely negative influences of the past and sublimate them into positive driving forces in your life.
You can work on liberating yourself from the influences of the experiences of the past to reach the core of who you really are to use as the only platform to live from.

Option 1 is the most easy, convenient and logical.
You just give in.
You refuse to fight and you sleep outside the ring.
Even the people around you will agree: after what you have been going through as a child they see it as only logical you drink and drug yourself into oblivion.
You have the best excuses not to become who you are and be meaningful for yourself and the community.

Option 2 is the hard way.
It is crossing hell.
Walking through a bush fire.
Swimming an ocean.
Losing almost everything.
But if life has any value to you, it is the only way.
It offers the chance to make right what was wrong.
It is the way to dump the garbage left in you by others and once cleaned up one discovers the true self from where life has the best quality.
For you and for the others.

Depending how bad it was, it can take a lifetime to free oneself truly from past negative influences.
This is not a problem because the process itself of liberation, although difficult and hard, is very fascinating and eventually fulfilling.

One aspect of this process of liberation is very typical.
During moments of dealing with the past when remembering the specific events, it is very easy to get a feeling of being a victim.
Which, in a way, is a very justified feeling.
Isn't someone who is abused not a victim?

However, to feel a victim is a very dangerous position to take.
Because it offers justification for failure, inaction and inadequacy.
Most of all, a person feeling a victim easily slips into depressions and other negative emotions.
To operate in life with the conviction one is a victim, closes every way to liberate and get out to go to who you are.

The key to deal with the past in a positive and constructive way therefore is to be able to see oneself not as a victim.
But as a person who had a series of experiences that are the signs along the way to reach the core of the own being.
Once this attitude is reached, the process of dealing with the past becomes more easy, interesting and productive.

It is very difficult not to feel a victim.
Even for persons who have managed to enter the territory of the real self almost completely.
The reason is that remembering experiences of the past comes with the emotions attached to it.
These emotions drive the person into thinking and feeling to be a victim.
Unless there is an awareness about it.
To observe oneself slipping into victimhood but to detach of that movement through a high level of awareness.
To stay in the true self and have it not hauled into a poisonous pit.

A victim can become victorious.



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2 comments:

raj said...

at one level, it is necessary to be a victim to be truly victorious. Unless you really reach the depths, it will be difficult to relish the highs. many great 'saints' are also great 'sinners' in a manner of speaking. the average fellow who obeys the rules leaves no footprint. in my opinion, the average life is a wasted life.

Anonymous said...

Yes you are so right. I know it works that way by own experience. And I also think it is true what raj says, there will be no growth without suffering pain. To live in this moment, means letting go, release yourself from precious and familiar feelings of being a victim and that is so hard!
Bouwina