Contents
Step 13: “Evil is not fought with weapons, it is fought with books”
The 88 rungs of happy people
In this chapter of “The 88 steps of happy people” I explain that it is correct to repair the bad past and prevent the bad future, but without judging in the present
Imagine you have your first baby. You witness both a lack of experience and a lack of the illusion that every new parent has. The day of birth arrives. Everything is joy, excitement and smiles. You are discharged from the hospital and you come home with the new member who, although you don’t know it, is about to become the center of the universe, of your universe. In China, when a baby is an only child, he has between six and ten adults waiting for him, and the family accumulates enough money for the child to have everything, they call him the little emperor. “I understand why,” you say, after a month of “your” new life has passed.
Now, imagine that someone wanted to enter your house, be the center of one hundred percent of your attention, break glasses and goblets when they please, spit out the food you serve them and relieve yourself anytime, anywhere. How many people would you allow it? And to how many without the slightest reproach to his person and his actions? Absolutely no one except one: your “little emperor.” Every time the baby goes into “destruction mode”, you do three things … On the one hand, what he has destroyed, you try to rebuild. If he smashes a white wall with a black marker, you give the wall a coat of paint. If you pour a glass of water on your clothes, you dry them. And if it breaks a vase, you start gluing its pieces. This has to do with fix past damage.
Furthermore, you avoid encouraging destruction. If a plate breaks on the ground, you do not give it more so that it continues to break them, but you remove them from the radius of its reach or change them for other plastic ones. In other words, you take steps to prevent it from happening again. This has to do with avoid future damage.
But the most important point is the third, and that is at no time do you judge your child in the present, no matter how enormous the disaster it has just caused. If he sticks his finger in your eye and leaves it irritated for hours, you protect yourself from his finger, but you don’t get mad at him (unless you have a very low Belt), and you don’t condemn or punish his attitude. Not only do you not return his damage to him, but you don’t even teach him that he cannot do that, as it is too early for his maturity level. The least of these behaviors carried out by any other person would have provoked within you a bonfire of frustration and fury; And yet with your baby, who has just been born, you manage to contain it all thanks to two words. Both are the culmination of the previous rung. The first is ignorance. There can be no reproach towards someone who does not know what it means for something to be reprehensible. And the second is that ignorance brings understanding. That is why you respond to their ignorance with love, a compassionate love.
—Anxo, I know exactly where you are going, but not for a moment am I going to buy you the theory that this, which is valid for a baby, is also valid for an adult who acts incorrectly, since the adult does know the difference.
(Attention because you are about to read one of the most powerful messages in the entire book). I understand you. I thought the same. But we are both getting it wrong. Me before and you now. Why? Because, in reality, babies are both, one at an external biological level, and the other at inner evolutionary level. When I speak of ignorance in an adult with a low developmental level, I do not mean that he does not know the difference between doing evil and doing good. That difference of course you know. What you don’t know is how to transcend it to stop doing what you do. Does not know how to develop internally to choose the good over the bad on a recurring basis. He continues to eat in the bad restaurant because he does not know that there is a good one and that it also does not cost more than the other (just as when you do good, it does not cost more than to do bad).
Therefore, of course, you do not have to fall into the arms of an abuser to allow yourself to be mistreated, just as you do not have to give more dishes to a baby who tends to break them. The conclusion of the baby simile is that it is correct to repair the bad past and prevent the bad future, but without judging in the present.. When someone throws an insult at you that you would never throw at him, it is not correct to say that the insult is good, but it is not correct to say that the person who uttered it is bad. It is simply that he lives in the shadow of ignorance.
Just think that the reason he’s done something like this is because he hasn’t reached your evolutionary level yet. Someday you will transcend your current level, look back, observe your ignorant behavior, and exclaim while shaking your head, “How little I knew then.” If you manage to see people as babies, you will be able to increase your compassion for the world, shrinking your shadows a little more and enlarging your light a little more.
# 88StepsPeopleHappy
@Angel