After a discussion with a friend who has been through a similar experience to mine that included being lied about by a person who claimed spiritual authority and not really being supported by those who knew us both, this writing emerged.

My friend wanted to include someone in a meditation group who had actively engaged in harmful behaviors toward me, refused to dialogue with me, and shut down the possibility of further communications.  This is obviously not very enlightened behavior. And how could this person sit with me in meditation when this elephant sat between us?  My friend’s reason was something along the lines of everyone deserves the opportunity to be part of a spiritual group.

Well, they do until they don’t.  “Don’t” includes any form of harm or abuse to another.  Anyone can screw up, but truly conscious and loving people own their behavior, call it out and make amends as needed.  They are willing to dialogue about what has happened.  Anyone who refuses or is unable to see and own their behaviors is sure to repeat the behaviors and does not belong in a group of those who have that consciousness.

A person who offends is stuck right there as far as their development spiritually and mentally.  They become experts at creating delusions and getting others to buy into those delusions creating traumas for the others as well as themselves.  Every assertion of “love,” “peace” and “spirituality” after this point is a reaction formation. (Reactions Formation is a defense mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency.  The reaction formations belong to Level 3 of neurotic defense mechanisms, which also include dissociation, displacement, intellectualization, and repression. Wikipedia).Think homophobe who rails again homosexuality but secretly engages in same-sex activities, think of the spiritual authority/priest/monk who sexually offends yet rails against sexual misconduct, think of the little boy who bullies the girl he secretly has a crush on.

I had someone in my life who was a brilliant man with advanced degrees who was a master at spinning delusion. He was so convincing in creating a plausible reality that in truth, was really a reaction formation.  I wanted to believe that what we had was real, I wanted that belonging, and so I let myself be deluded.  His chronic lying and cheating required him to dig deeper into his delusion until that was all he had left.  His gift to me was for me to see where I had been delusional and to work through the pain.  That work has resulted in the awareness that makes it very difficult to engage in self-delusion. No more pretending not to see what is going on-with others or myself.

The kindest, most compassionate thing that we can do for a friend who is offending is to tell them that you see it and that they need to seek help.  (Shunning those who are acquaintances is sufficient.)  If they won’t seek help, we’re not missing anything by not having them in our lives.  Keeping them around wont result in their being saved from themselves.  If there is anything I have learned over the decades that I’ve facilitated thousands on their paths to more conscious lives, is that unless they are making at least 51% of the effort toward their own transformation, there is nothing I can do to help them.  I have ended up regretting every time I made too much of an effort to help someone.

And here is another hard truth:  if you do nothing, you are complicit in their abuse to another.

Buying into delusion is very, very harmful for our spiritual and mental health.  Among other things, it creates double-bind communication.  We see what is going on but because we want to belong, we believe that person is our friend, and/or we don’t want to experience the discomfort of a disagreement, we gloss it over with some delusion or we dissociate from what we have seen.  This behavior will create an internal split.  And then we live in the split.  Double-bind communications are considered one cause of schizophrenia.  From the National Institute of Mental Health:  Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by disruption in thought processes, perceptions, emotional responsiveness, and social interactions.

Doesn’t that describe the world today?  A world where so many are living in the split with disruptions in thought processes, perceptions, emotional responsiveness, and social interaction?  A world of no real consequences because so many can’t see what is going on, so many benefit from the global insanity and so many more lack the courage to do the right thing.

We only get a different world when we create what we want to see in our microworld.  And it isn’t’ easy…we’ve been programmed for thousands of years to put up with behaviors that are antisocial.  So few seem to have the values and behaviors that will result in a transformed world and yet I think that there are enough of us for a critical mass to create sanity.  I still believe that the realities created by lies crumble and that the power of truth will prevail.