“Me too”, why good people do bad things
In the wake of the recent headlines with names like Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose, Al Franken, and the list goes on; we wonder why these things happen. If like myself, you have been the victim of sexual abuse, you can answer the when, where and how, but many are still struggling with…why.
There is significant distinction between WHO someone is…and WHAT they do. Perhaps at some deeper level than physical form, we are all made of the same thing, come from the same place, are here for the same reason. Just suppose, for a minute, that the things we do…have nothing to do with…Who we are.
I recently read an article in Readers Digest (12/16-1/17 edition) titled My Father Was the BTK Killer, by Roy Wenzl . The subtext asks, “Could you forgive a serial killer? What if he was your father? Here, the tale of Kerri Rawson’s ten-year hunt for answers.” The article chronicles the plight of a young woman’s desperate search for meaning in the midst of inconceivable tragedy. And herein lies a perfect example of the distinction between Who we are and what we do. This young woman’s torment came from her inability to understand why anyone would do such horrific things (“BTK” means Bind, Torture, Kill), much less someone she knew to be a loving, present father her entire childhood. It was a horrible conflict that didn’t make any sense, at least from the place that she, like most of us, start from. How could someone be both, loving… and a monster?
While this is an extreme example, it is nonetheless the very thing all of us must deal with, in ourselves as well as in others. We all have a “good” side and a “bad” side…right? Does this mean we are all loving saints and evil monsters at the same time, to some degree? Yes…and no.
In broad strokes, religion has sought to deal with this conflict through salvation from sin, while spirituality focuses on the Reality beneath the illusion rather than attempt to rationalize the apparent paradox. “It is what it is” is a common refrain but not particularly enlightening.
Contrast and Meaning
In a tropical paradise…a long time ago…the ancient Hawaiians had an interesting perspective that provided a logical explanation for what appeared to be irrational, illogical conditions in life. In my e-book The Magical Gift of Ancient Hawaiian Wisdom, I talk about the “Reality-based” assumptions they used to make sense of the world. Contrast, it turns out, creates Clarity. And Clarity, makes sense of Contrast.
What if…
What if… before we were born, we all came here from a place of Love, Light, Peace and Joy? What if…the reason we were in a place of Love, Light, Peace and Joy is because we were one with…God? If this is true, then we are all an integral part of It, and if we are all a part of It; we must be all Connected. What if…we come here to this World of Form for a short time, and then go back to where we came from?
A Foundational Principle
For about 2,000 years the Ho’ala Huna based culture of ancient Hawaii lived in Peace, Balance and Harmony. This incredible achievement was accomplished with a set of Principles they based their entire lifestyle and culture on. The Foundational Principle is that the only definition for God that can possibly make any sense is that God is: ALL THAT IS, because how could anything smaller than All That Is, be God?
But how can our very limited human brains even grasp a concept like All That Is? To think about everything that exists in every realm and dimension for eternity micro and macro, is sort of mind boggling. The important thing is to realize is that God is: All That Is…that has Consciousness. All That Is, is not just random stuff flying around in space, but ALL THAT EXISTS… as a single entity, AND…has Awareness of Itself.
The Ancient Hawaiians used the term “Aumakua”, All That Is and the Revered Ones, the Ancestors, those who have walked in the World of Form previously but are now back in the World of Spirit and available to assist us on our magical journey of illusion in the World of Form. Highly attuned to the energies of Spirit and Form, they had an innate sense of the Nature of Reality.
The Purpose of the World of Form
The purpose of the World of Form is: Contrast. We come from a place of Beauty and Peace, but how could we possibly be able to appreciate Beauty and Peace if that is all we ever know? If you want to truly learn what something is, what it means and its real value, then it works to experience its opposite. Of course you don’t have to experience all manner of dark things to appreciate Beauty and Light. But if you knew, from the World of Spirit perspective, there was no way to get lost, impossible to be separated from All That Is, then what would you choose to experience?
What movies do you like to see: Romance, adventure, horror, comedy, drama? When you go to the movies you want to have an experience without actually having the experience, right? Just knowing that you’re sitting in a theater but still get a taste of the peaks of ecstasy and the pits of hell, allows you to appreciate the energy of that experience.
The Game of Life
The ancient Hawaiians, saw life in the World of Form as a very temporary “movie” experience while flying on a speck of dust for a speck of time. The Grandness of Diversity lends itself well to the Abundance of Adventures available to all who show up in this World of Form experience called Earth.
If we are fully engaged in the movie, we completely forget we are sitting in a theater. And this is true of the World of Form experience. If we are completely and fully engaged in this experience here on Earth, we must pretend that we are not Spiritual Beings from a Divine Realm. Birth and childhood work quite well to facilitate forgetting. And this is all by Divine Design in order to maximize the purpose of the World of Form experience.
Malu and Akua
To assist us in making the most of our World of Form experience are malu, illusory dark energies/spirits. These dark energies resonate with the dense vibration of Form. They include the energies of anger, hate, jealousy, fear, anxiety, rage, greed, etc.
Akua, on the other hand, are reflective of our Divine Nature and are therefore Real rather than illusory as they have a vibration which resonates at a higher frequency that is way beyond Form. They include the energies of Love, Grace, Kindness, Generosity, Forgiveness, Courage, Patience, etc.
The Difference Between Conscious and Unconscious
Choice, knowing or not knowing, that you have a different Choice, is the difference. As my spiritual teacher Lono would say, “You know you have a malu when you think you only have two choices and they both suck!”
In the “movie” perspective, we all have roles to play and we play these roles with the help of malu and Akua. Malu energies take over wherever we are unconscious by giving us thoughts and feelings that aren’t actually ours. The thought and feeling of anger, comes from the energy of anger, not from a Divine Being. If someone has had a childhood rife with turmoil and pain, you can bet several malu came in at that vulnerable time and posed themselves as a “survival skill” which in fact, they may well have been to some degree. Feeling the strength of anger may have seemed a viable defense to the pain of victimization when you were ten. Once malu take root, however, it is loathe to relinquish control. It will convince you that for your own protection you do not have a Choice but to respond with anger to every supposed anger inducing event that happens, hence the drama of the World of Form, the “movie”.
The “theater” perspective however, is where Choice resides. The “theater” is the World of Spirit. It is where you realize that everyone is playing a role in this drama, comedy, adventure, romance, horror. So whether we observe the comedy/drama of the Al Franken shenanigans, or the absolute horror of the “BTK” killer, these dark energies that managed to manifest themselves in the bodies of unconscious Divine Beings, are not Who they Are. That is how good people do bad things. By simple virtue of the fact that we are all Divine Beings, we will all have, at least moments of, being in our Divinity. When Kerri Rawson wondered how her father could be such a wonderful father while at times also doing horrible things, that’s why: her father is a Divine Being who at moments of being in his Divinity, naturally expressed love to her, but at other times, for reasons most likely precipitated by childhood experiences, identified with a horrible malu which is what did the horrible things, the energy of hate and murder, not the Divine Being! This is not to say that the Divine Beings will not suffer the consequences of their actions, of course they do. This also, is by Design of a Self-Correcting System: when we have had enough pain we wake up and take our power back from that dark energy we were unconsciously identified with. The term “unconscious” means we don’t know we are identified with a dark energy but the inevitable consequence, like a slap in the face, will eventually come. Or invoke the Akua of Grace, we’ll talk about that later.
Some of us have been there done that, while others of us are still experiencing “the movie” in all of its diversity of life-taking scenarios. Some of us are Conscious enough now to Choose a different movie. But no matter where you are on the Conscious/unconscious spectrum, it is all a perfect part of A Perfect Plan.
A Perfect Plan
If all you ever knew was the Heavenly experience of Love, Light, Peace and Joy, how Blissful could it really be if you had no point of reference for its opposite? How could you possibly appreciate it? In the World of Form there is Contrast by virtue of the dark energies that exist here. With Contrast we have a distinction between that which is Life-Giving (Akua) and that which is Life-taking (malu), and when you are aware of these distinctions, you can walk out of the movie theater with an intense appreciation of ALL of the energies that were experienced, just like you do when you see a movie you really enjoyed. That experience, no matter how dark, is of immense value to All That Is. Nothing gets wasted. It all counts. The deeper the Contrast, the greater the Clarity. At the end of the day (on Earth) we can take away, at the very least, profound Appreciation.
What’s Trending at the Movies?
When Donald Trump got elected President, a friend of mine who is in her 60’s but had been sexually assaulted in her 20’s, reached out because she began having panic attacks. Thinking that wound had long ago healed, she was as surprised as anyone that she would react in this way to news of a sex abuser being elected to power. And there is the key word: Power.
To be clear, the perspective I am sharing, regards all malu as life-taking energy and that includes “victim” as well as “perpetrator”. Both assail with thoughts and feelings. Both cause pain and separation. And they do the malu dance until one or both Divine Beings…Wake Up to Who they really are.
For the person identified with “victim” it can be an uphill struggle to dig deep and find the Strength and Courage to regain Identity with their Divinity. But this is what is required to take power back from “victim” energy.
For the person identified with “perpetrator” however, it can be almost impossible for the Divine Being to wake up without a push back. In other words, if “sex abuse perpetrator” keeps getting away with the behavior it will continue until the consequence is manifested by the Courage invoked in a “victim” who has taken their power back, as we saw with the Harvey Weinstein case.
Both “perpetrator” and “victim” are life-taking energies, obviously. While it may seem that the perpetrator has a pleasure motive, try this perspective on for size: a man manipulates, corners and assaults a woman for sexual pleasure, and then threatens her with the power he wields over her if she does anything about it. WHO, in their right mind, would want to be that person? There is no Divine Being who would EVER deliberately do that to anyone. The person who does do that, is checked out, out-to-lunch, not home! It is a very ugly energy that does that. And the more it gets away with it the more it will continue to do it. And it will get worse and worse until it is finally forced to stop! This is just the nature of what malu do, what they are designed to do. And anyone who is identified with that energy cannot be without pain, pain they may not even know they are in.
So here we are now, at a place on our country, where our society and culture are finally putting the quash on this particular life-taking energy. With our collective embrace of the Akua of Equality comes the shaking out of all that is not in alignment with that higher frequency. It’s messy but necessary in order to move forward and forward movement is the Nature of Divinity.
Here is the most important thing to remember: we are ALL Divine Beings, we ALL have our own malu to deal with and we deal with them the best way we know how to with our current level of Consciousness.
The best thing we can all do to keep the momentum moving forward for the “Me too” movement is to pay attention to the Contrast between Life-Giving and life-taking energy, in ourselves first. Be humble enough to see and notice whatever feels out-of-balance. Take responsibility and ask for Spiritual Guidance/Assistance. It will come. And secondly, pay attention to the energies of the people around you and in the news. When you do this you will begin to notice Clarity emerging. Be willing to release attachment to out-of-balance loyalties and instead be loyal to Principles of Integrity. Replace judgment with Compassion. Even nasty, horrible people who are obviously identified with nefarious energy, are in pain, even if it doesn’t appear that way. And CHOOSE…from the theater perspective, what part of You, will support what part of Them.
Aloha!