“The Other”
Taking a deep dive into spiritual health for mental health awareness month.
Intersections begin with a system. A system begins with people. People create oppression; we create the oppressed and become oppressors. How? It begins with the decision to act in one’s own self-interest. To deny the humanity of another for the sake of cognition that allows us to act in superiority.
From criminal justice reform to marijuana to religious diversity to the relationships we have; we are given opportunities every single day to either be inclusive of people or be exclusive. Unfortunately, it is human tendency to create an “other” out of our fellow human beings.
What is an “other”? What are the different types of ways we create “others?” Making people the “other” is very easy. It is built into our own nature, specifically the nature of the ego. Everyone has ego. Even if you’re aware of yours it might creep up on you and push you into that binary spiral again where you feel like you have to make “rightness” in yourself to be happy. The nature of the ego is to make everything not of its own desire and perceived needs lesser than itself. It’s simple survival technique. Things that push at the fringes of our understanding, our empathy, our selves; these things take lesser priority. We feel empowered to say or think things like “These type of people or person always do(es) this,” or “This is just happening because of circumstances I can’t control,” or “Why is this happening to me? I didn’t deserve this.” Immediately when confronted with a challenge we fall back behind our defenses of understanding instead of questioning why they exist in the first place.
The brain is both the house of the soul and its captor. Depending on the control one has over it, it can both alleviate suffering, and perpetuate it. It takes great care and training to learn how to alleviate suffering in oneself and in others. Once one can learn how to do this (once we all learn how to do this), we may be able to tackle some of these intersectional issues stemming from the creation of the “other”.
Firstly, when our mental defenses arise, we must learn to recognize this. If you find yourself needing to be right in a situation, question this. Don’t assume you are right. To alleviate suffering, we must detach the notion that we need to be right, or that there are right and wrong ways. Right and wrong are equal and opposite ideas, but the truth is that binary systems like these perpetuate suffering. Often times, in interpersonal struggle, when we find ourselves at odds with another person, we create a list or a “wall” to defend the ego, of all the reasons we may be correct in our way of thinking. Beyond that, we create ultimatums. We create rigid pathways by which we might be “righted” again from the wrong that was done against us.
If it is in our path to become the healer, then we must go beyond these ways of thinking. Our ways of being healed must be as fluid as our ways of healing. When your mind raises its hackles, take heed. Stop, and breathe. Go to the person who has wronged you and say, “You have caused me suffering, please help me understand so we may reach a new level of compassion.” It takes great patience and practice to be able to overcome one’s initial sense of pride. This mantra is inspired by Thich Naht Nanh in his book ‘True Love’. It may be surprising that these concepts stem from the idea of love as a central energy and way of thinking when it comes to the practice of identifying and accepting “others”. Love is more and more a central totem or theme used in many spiritual teachings, and love is exactly what will help achieve the defeat of the ego, alleviate the suffering of oneself and of others, and ultimately acheive a new state of being.
Once we have gained the ability to recognize the ego and distance ourselves from it, what next? The answer is time, practice, and contstant checking. Once we are aware of the systems we have put in place (whether by nature or by nurture) in our minds, we can begin to deconstruct them and find the truths that lie inside. Meditation is a great way to travel inside the mind and find obstructions to the flow of mental energy, otherwise called pain bodies.
‘Pain body’ is a term coined by Eckhart Tolle and referes to a mental formation that causes one suffering, usually based in preconceptions and desire for something that may be unttainable. Consumerism and capitalism in our society both creates and perpetuates these pain bodies. By associating our identities with material things, like our favorite sports team, a new phone, a new house, a new car, we then make our happiness reliant upon it.
If we are always seeking happiness in the external, it is no wonder we lack the ability to heal others and in turn stop the creation of “others”. We must recognize this inherent need in ourselves for identity, for association. When we associate with a certain brand, for example, we are simply saying, “This brings me happiness,” or “I identify with the group of people who have typically also associated themselves with this product or brand.” This is normal human behavior, however, because of consumer-capitalist society and intersectionality, this type of identity-branding becomes very very dangerous.
What happens is we feel empowered to make less of other, competing brand or ideas. Think about sports teams; think about religion. Think about Android v. iPhone, think about different types of cars. Think about politics. Binary systems when combined with instant gratification (money), and then associated with our identity, basically creates the breeding grounds for oppressors and oppressed. Now we must add into the mix, intersectionality. Intersectionality is the concept that minority groups are disproportionally oppressed by these systems that are in place.
Money itself is not equally available. Racial and ethnic minorities have less availability to education than caucasian Americans, therefore limiting their access to higher paying jobs. Women earn less on average than men. So the availability of these goods and services that we are so desperate to make the foundation of our identities do not even have equal representation or availability.
So what should we base our identities in? Backtracking a little bit to the concept of pain bodies; as we learn to identify the ego and break it down, we find more and more about ourselves. It then becomes easier to root ourselves in our true nature, or Being, than the external world around us. A natural patience sets in, and we are not so eager to satisfy our next desire as it arises.
This takes times and sometimes years of practice. However, the rewards are there to be reaped. Having deep roots in oneself instead of passing, material objects, creates the foundation for healing and the ability to recognize the humanity in our fellow humans.
It also allows our relationships to blossom and thusly for our world to become bigger and more interconnected.
Ending oppression in our society begins with ending the binary thought patterns in ourselves. To combat a Trump society where immigrants are constantly made the “other” as a blanket-source of our “problems”; a society where we glorify big business, money, and companies that otherwise perpetuate intersection and restrict our access to important things like healthcare; a society where religious minorities are constantly under scrutiny and blamed for terrorism, when we fail to recognize the terrorism breeding in our own schools as a result of this oppression and intersection; to combat all of this, we must change the way we fundamentally react and understand other humans.
Reject the “other”. Embrace everything that you encounter as something that even if you don’t understand at that very moment, as something that you can come to understand with patience, love, and compassion.
Love is crucial to the evolution that must occur. The four elements of true love are “maitri”, “karuna”, “upeksha”, and “mudita”. Translated, those words are sanskrit for loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanamity. Once we break away from the control of the ego, and start to embrace ourselves and our fellow humans, these four elements of love become very crucial. There cannot be love without them. To learn more, read “True Love” by Thich Naht Hanh.
Everyone is capable of this change of understanding and of destroying the binary that creates oppressors and the oppressed. The first step is of willingess to change that which causes us all suffering, in the end. If we can accomplish this, we can change the world.
Glo
Digital Director — The Political Revolution
Spiritual Activist
