I’m a good person. I mean it. I’m a good person.
That’s the problem.
The Fall was the creation of the small self. The fruit that brings knowledge of good and evil signifies the ignorance from which we must liberate ourselves. The small self is not a good person. If you are a good person, then you are also a bad person. Stop projecting the bad onto others. You want to be equal? Then be equal by surrendering to God and letting go of your individuality.
People work to maintain their individuality. They keep secrets in order to prevent people from knowing and understanding them. All people committed to their dark secrets assume everyone has a dark secret. They try to make everyone equal by making everyone deviant, just like them. That way they believe they can still call themselves good. Rather than raising themselves up, they try to pull everybody down—especially those they see as morally and spiritually superior. Their real deviance is their attachment to their deviance.
Believing we will die if we surrender is the delusion of death. That “death” is actually life. What people call “going and living my life” is actually death. The life of the small self means the death of the true Self in our lives. It’s total delusion.
The delusion is that we can be happy locked in our individuality. A happy small self is impossible.
And yet we are encouraging the small self to think of itself as a good person; that is good self-esteem. We cannot accept that we do anything wrong—we only have accidents—so we end up projecting wrongness on others. We are innocent and others are bad. We define bullying down: if someone says something about us that we do not like, then instead of learning from the situation we say we are bullied and feel justified acting out with knives or guns or tongues. We are the victims, and the one who says those mean words is a bully and should be punished. The problem with this worldview is that those mean people are as innately good as we are. Our read of reality is a double standard; it does not make any sense.
So we force people into the small self’s idea of unconditional love, which is the acceptance of anything we do, no matter what. We are good people. In the meantime we are acting inappropriately. Love means putting up with my dysfunction and supporting the delusional idea I have of myself. NO.
This is where the Abrahamic traditions have it right; we have to accept our innate badness. The Fall is true. We need to get over ourselves both as good and as bad. The small self is not innately good or bad; it is a made-up construct; it is not who we truly are. We need to return to ourselves, and we cannot do that unless we return to God.
The Enlightenment brought us to think of ourselves as something more important than we are. We are not the center of the universe. We are not special. We exist. It is only in returning to God that we are who we are, that we are Alive. When we return to God we will see that the self we thought was so important did not even exist.
Because we have taken God out of the equation, the I that is perfect is the me I think I am. We are confusing absolute with relative reality. We do not realize that what is truly good is something we have to surrender to. It is not just who we are now. If that were the case there would be no evil, no cruelty. We do in fact have to develop character and practice good; it does not come innately.
The psychological, corporate and pharmaceutical complex has removed God from life. God is just an idea within the framework of the small self. We are who we think we are. So we believe whatever we do is true and good if our intention, our thought, is good. We live in a world of excuses against the rest of the world.
A self-righteous man once asked the great Sufi saint Rabia what more he needed to do to be holy. She replied, “You haven’t dealt at all with your greatest sin—the fact that you exist.” As long as we want to be separate and special, we are committed to the small self. We must give up the delusion that our attachment to goodness will bring us closer to God.
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