That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote about “how do you know you’re a good person?”. An inherently balanced life, okay, but how can you be sure that you’re not just egotistical, thinking you’re not causing any damage but actually doing so? The only way, as far as I can tell, is by comparing yourself with other people, seeing yourself in the context of the world. And how do you detach, love yourself, be free from judgment, and still do that?

I don’t litter because I don’t want someone else to have to pick up my trash, and because if everyone littered the world would be ugly. If no one’s looking, I will throw a banana peel out the window, because it might be a good meal for a bird or other animal of some kind, and it’ll be fertilizer in less than two weeks. Why, then, am I afraid to throw a banana peel out the window when people are watching, but I won’t litter even if no one is? (Rhetorical question.)

Your Holocaust question is one I can’t answer. I have never truly understood what Gandhi was getting at (although I don’t know all that much about him from the primary source), so I don’t know if I can even discuss it meaningfully. Right and wrong in history, it seems, are only clear in hindsight.

You obviously understand that I have had a survival wound, and that I’m trying to work through it at the same time as I’m trying to work through all the other troubles in my other chakras. I’m wondering if one and three are linked (at least in me) in a different way than you say above – you talk of wielding a power I’m afraid of, but I’m thinking it’s more like this: I need to depend upon my personal power to shed my first-chakra survival fear issues, and I can’t depend upon my personal power because I don’t really have any faith in it, so the third chakra energy just hangs up there and doesn’t go downward towards manifestation. The current must flow both ways.

Either way, I’m very impressed and pleased at the thoughtfulness of your response and I’m grateful you took the time to write all that. Truly.

The premise, as I’ve been told, is that the qualities that prevent us from littering, let us govern well, treat others with compassion, and just generally be “good” people; these things don’t come from worrying about how we’re perceived, but from an inherently balanced life.

Not littering because we don’t want to be SEEN as litterers isn’t sufficient force to drive us forward into a life of not littering. It just makes us worry about our reputation when we litter.

Not littering because we don’t want to impact the greater world with our trash is enough motivation to propel our actions for a lifetime.

We can prevent ourselves from littering, we can’t prevent OTHERS from littering. Or governing badly. Or hurting people.

I’ve never met an enlightened person that advocated a police action to prevent pain and suffering; they advocated peaceful resistance to oppression, destruction and hatred.

NOW, does that mean that intervention to stop the Holocaust was “wrong” because it advocated conflict to address a greater evil? No flippin’ clue. My gut says “no” but I’ve never been able to parse non-violence in the face of absolute confrontation or destruction. I imagine there is a threshold where a direct response is mandated…I just have no way of verbalizing that point.

I know that, in general, I can’t prevent people from hurting me. I can only prevent my life from causing as much hurt as possible, and even that is something I don’t control completely.

The process of developing the third chakra is in almost direct conflict with the development of the first chakra. You cannot wield a power you are afraid of…that will only cause you to internalize it upon yourself…which is the primary fear of a survival wound in the first place, that your actions will jeopardize your survival.

Accepting that you may be hurt yourself, surrendering the survival need to the development of emotional strength and personal actualization is incredibly challenging. Especially, if you’ve already sustained a significant external blow to the survival need.

The simple fact that you’ve already identified the challenge shows you are FAR further down the middle path than most people who stumble along from day to day.

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and p.s. I just wanted to say that I didn’t detect any criticism from your response. We’re discussing an incredibly complex thing and it’s easy to either misspeak or misunderstand…so directly challenging my statement and countering with comments and questions isn’t criticism, it’s discussion. Which I enjoy.

I just don’t want to sound like I have all the answers…because I most certainly don’t.

Think of a dragonfly hovering over a still pond. The water is the world, with all it’s expectations, attachments, opinions, burdens and cares. The dragonfly can hover above it and only touch the water when it wants to. It doesn’t NEED the water to fly. The Universe provides the air above the water, just as the universe will provide what we need outside of what we desire/fear/worry about/fret over/etc.; and that is enough.

The human mind looks at the pond and thinks “how do I swim through all of that water?” and the enlightened dragonfly only ponders the reflections on the surface and the breezes that drift around it.

Fly, don’t swim.

…if you figure out how to do that, you’re one up on me. I’m still standing around trying to find my water wings and life-jacket.

Not caring what other people think, to me, can lead into bad things like littering, rudeness, and general bad behavior. To me this is insupportable.

I’m really truly not trying to be critical (especially not to a new reader, hi!), I’m just trying to figure out how to be a dragonfly without hurting anyone or allowing anyone to be hurt…especially me.

“How can you not think about what other people think of you?”

This is a hard one. I’ve managed to conquer this one except when it comes to family. My immediate family, that is. I can’t help it. But I am getting over it. Part of what helps me is that I realize that I cannot control what anyone else thinks, just as they cannot control what I think. Also I’m reading Women who Run with the Wolves as a recommendation. It has a lot of good stuff in it that you might like.

Thanks for the recommendation – I will check it out.

I’m wondering if this might be the root of it for me – that since I can’t control what they think, the answer is to control, very tightly, what I do, in order to get them to think what I want. This is not a fun way to live, and it’s not the way I want to live, ultimately. How to let go of that?

Incidentally, I’ve come 180 degrees from caring ONLY about what my father thinks of me to to not caring a single iota what he thinks of me.