Two Wrongs and One Right
I want to return to the conversation I shared above to bring clarity to what major Jackal thinking stood between me and the connection I longed for with the upset woman in the grocery store.
The obstacle here was very elementary, but for that same reason had me at a loss until I was willing to slow down and really sit with what had happened inside me. What was additionally funny about this situation was that both the upset customer and I shared the same deluding pretense in how we listened and expressed ourselves to each other: that something in what was happening at that moment was wrong.
The woman appears to have believed that something was either possibly wrong with her for wishing for respect and support, or wrong with everybody else (namely, the cashier) for not showing her the respect she was wanting and believed she had a “right” to. (It really doesn’t matter which of these it was, if either — the same disconnecting energy underlies them both.)
Just as well, I was convinced that something in our conversation had “gone wrong” (that is, that I was doing something wrong), or that something in me was wrong in trying to help when it was “clear that I didn’t know how” (as the story I told myself at the tail end went, stimulating shame in me around a need for self-efficacy in attempting to give support).
The judgments and evaluations that make up Jackal language or Jackal thinking are generally expressions of either one of two fundamental axioms of “disconnecting morality”:
(1) People/things/etc. are good or they’re bad.
(2) People/things/etc. are right or they’re wrong.
These people or things can be one another, or they can be ourselves. They could be the world at large. They could be my alarm clock or the city bus terminal.
Essentially speaking, when we experience pain or discomfort with whatever/whoever it may be, we often pose the situation as that “something somewhere has gone wrong” or “isn’t right.” “________ was a bad thing to do.” “________ is no good for me.”
Approaching someone from any of these pretenses may stem from what we grew up understanding as the basic perceptual framework of our culture — a framework that is the mainstream and deeply embedded in our society’s conscious and subconscious. It is also the most effective and efficient way to sustain the very social mores of disconnection and (sooner or later) resulting violent strategies.
You have an amazing capacity for thinking these things through – it is the power of a philosopher. As you should imagine – most of us move through these scenarios with a shrug and keep going down our own paths. It is good to pause through your reflection.
Thank you, Mike! I really resonate with that thought. I’m making a very conscious effort at this time to slow down, in order to fully experience the greater depth to what may seem a “trivial” matter to me at the time. I’d say I probably even take more time to try and meditate with it and feel it out over think through it much (since my thoughts on the first go-round tend to stimulate more frustration or pain than acceptance or gratitude for the experience). It feels great to receive that recognition for my efforts!