I’ve been known for being very impatient, and especially angry and vengeful when things don’t go my way. More so, when I find a scapegoat to blame, I’ll go to the ends of the earth to hurt them. My wars have been famous – especially the one with ISSC three years ago.
This time however, I decided to become a “better person”, and perhaps see if spirituality, religion and all that stuff could help me find a better way – if for no other reason than to grow towards my goal of becoming a true Jedi. No matter how much I “got back” at the people I hated, it really never made me feel better about myself. If anything, I felt worse for having done all those bad things to people. You feel good the next morning, but the morning after that, you see them happy and smiling, and you are still left with your anger. So you decide what you did to them wasn’t enough Justice, and try to do something much worse. The cycle pulls you in and you keep on at it – until you realise that what you do doesn’t affect them at all, which is when you go into a state of complete disillusionment and resentment and self-desctructive behaviour. Of course, over time I forgot them, but I don’t think I ever forgave them and the next time, I brought all that wrath of my previous hurts against an unsuspecting victim who had done me no wrong. Clearly, this wasn’t working. There had to be a better way for a wannabe Jedi.
Just to give you an idea (this is very vague and generic), the problem involved a very disturbing combination of work problems, hatered towards some of the stuff I did, resentment at some business decisions of the company, the complete obliteration of my social and personal life due to the PDC push that isolated me from the world, and so on – a combination where I was (and perhaps still am) unable to separate and identify my problems, a task which I’m supposed to be good at. This led to a lot of anger, hate, frustration, at almost everyone and everything. Remote friends were of limited help – how much can they do over messengers and e-mail?
This post is my narrative of this journey towards self-improvement and spiritual growth. It’s not over yet – far from it, but I hope that public acceptance will allow the people I’ve hurt to forgive me, and perhaps help others from making the same mistakes. I still don’t feel good about myself, and I still feel anger (even if rarely) at what happened. However, every day I truly believe I become a better person, as I learn the meaning of humility, and as I learn to face my mistakes and face the people I have intentionally hurt. If you really analyse the situation, you’ll realise many times that they have their reasons too, and those reasons are just as silly and unjustifiable as the reasons you convince yourself are valid ones for punishing them. Help them overcome their hate and anger. Show them that you are not the same as those who have hurt them in the past. Show them that they can trust you with their lives, no matter how much hatered they shower on you. Defeat hate with Love – the most powerful weapon in your arsenal against evil.
After many months of pain, I realised one important thing to remember throughout the process – be selfish. Be VERY Selfish! Repeat this to yourself over and over again. You are the victim here, and it’s you who needs help. This is about you, and about nobody else. This isn’t about righteousness. The biggest mistake I made in the first few months was thinking that all this spiritual crap was about righteousness and helping others. It’s NOT! This is about YOU! What naturally follows from this acceptance is that affecting anyone else won’t help you, and it makes living your life so much easier than it would be otherwise. Obviously, vengeance is ruled out – what good is that to me? How does it help me? I want to live life my way, and hurting irrelevant people doesn’t make my life any more Awesome.
A few weeks ago, I began looking at various philosophies, and religious teachings. The first step was approaching the problem solvers with an open mind. We have so many people around us who claim to have all the answers, so why not give them a chance? Since this is about you, do it on good faith. Truly believe they are going to help you. Do whatever they ask you to do in good faith if they can justify their position. This went well. Some helped. Others didn’t. All in all, it was pretty insightful to see how people look at problems from different perspectives, and many times, you find that unless they’ve gone through it themselves, their arguments aren’t very convincing.
The most obvious feeling I had was that of hatered. I hated everything. I hated the company, I hated my colleagues, I hated my job, I hated my friends, and anything else the world could throw at me. This led me further from them and the further they got from me, the further I convinced myself I was in the middle of some conspiracy to isolate me. You know what that leads to – rampant paranoia and utter lack of rational thought. At one point I reached a stage where I couldn’t separate delusion from reality. I decided I had enough and it was time to fix my life! Hating people was getting me nowhere but was causing just more and more pain and I was alienating whatever few friends I had left. I decided to face my fears (you’ll find tons of movies I admire that say stuff like, “Fear leads to anger, Anger leads to Hate…”, or “What you really fear, is within yourself, the anger that drives you, to do great and terrible things.”)
For a social misfit like me, the biggest fear is that of loneliness. Having been kind of a pushover in any matters non-technical, and not able to understand many social constructs, I tend to get paranoid whenever I feel abandoned or betrayed. It was time to face this. That’s why when something I work on gets killed or shelved, I get an unsurmountable burst of anger and hate. At my age, I knew that friends can betray us too. So who is there standing by our side? As escapist as it may sound, I turned to God. Faith in God saved me! I had one ally in this world, and a powerful ally is he. Repeat that to yourself a few times and you’ll be feeling so much more comfortable knowing that the most powerful being in the universe is on your side. (I know I’m going to raise merry hell with this, but I found faith in Christianity, but we’ll come to that later.) This was the most fundamental of fears to combat, because once conquered, no power on earth can hurt you. Remember the famous dialogue by Luna Lovegood? “Perhaps that’s what Voldemort wants you to believe, because alone, you’re easy to fight.” Nothing could be more true. Satan wants you to feel betrayed and alone, because once alone, you’re an easy target. All it takes to fight loneliness is to realise that the most powerful being in existence is on your side. If you truly believe in this, is there any power on this mortal earth that can hurt you? (By the way, once you start believing there is one person on your side, you’ll see that there are so many people who love you and care about you.)
Once the fear is gone, came feelings of “justice”, “fairness”, etc. “Life is unfair”, people say, “deal with it.” What they don’t tell you is just how you’re supposed to “deal with it”. Should you ignore it? Should you descend into anarchy and treat everyone else unfairly? This is where I looked at every faith and philosophy. Some have heroes that fought unfairness through battles and wars. Others advocate war as a means to save others. One faith has a Hero who defeated the ultimate fear of all – death itself. He fought death with the most powerful ally of all – God. He fought no battles. He killed nobody. He was treated the most unfair of all. He hurt nobody. He never sinned. Yet, his disciples betrayed him, denied him, abandoned him. His own people asked for his crucifiction, people to whom he had done no harm. He was spat at, teased, humiliated, and tortured. All through this ordeal, he had only one thing to say, “God, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He overcame death itself! What more harm could he be subjected to now? Compared to this, what is your unfairness? Were you denied a raise? Were you teased? Were you made fun of? Think of what happened to Jesus Christ, and he conquered death itself!
Yet there are questions of justice – if those who wrong us aren’t punished, then what’s the point of doing right? There are two ways of looking at this. The key to both of them is to prevent yourself from seeking vengence at any cost – believe whatever you must to make this happen.
1. I have always admired Mahatma Gandhi, and have tried to follow in his teachings. He said that if someone slaps you on one cheek, turn the other towards them. I know it sounds like puny advice, but consider this – he brought Independence to an entire nation. During any crisis, other leaders were thinking of “killing others”, “hurting others”, etc. The Mahatma never hurt anyone, he hurt himself. He went on a 390 Km march to prove his point, instead of starting riots and driving people hundreds of Kms from their homes. And boy did it make an impression! Yes, it’s difficult. When people are hurting you, the first instinct is to get out there with your guns and shoot them. Takes a very patient man to do something seemingly as simple as take a casual stroll for a few miles and in the process inspire thousands!
2. The Bible has one verse which I found repeated in every Google search I made on “dealing with hurt”. “Vengence is mine”, says the Lord, “for I shall repay.” Here again, we come to our faith. If you believe in God, if you have faith, then why do you want to trouble yourself? Vengence may indeed be sweet, but it’s a lot of effort. If God has agreed to do it for you, why bother with it? Why waste your time which could otherwise go into leading a life of pure Awesomeness? Besides, what’s the best you can do to hurt them back? Here’s a guy who can bring back people from death, and who’s willing to hurt people on your behalf. Isn’t it so much easier and also pleasurable to allow this all-powerful dude to go and unleash all his wrath on your enemies, while you spend your life in awesomeness being all happy and smug? Take comfort in him – the kind of damange he can do, we can’t even begin to imagine. Isn’t that sweet vengence on your enemies?
Here I think it is fitting to divert to a small play I saw during my college days which will piss off religious fanatics, but was so amusing to me. In the play a certain diety is being worshipped in their idolated form. The worshippers are drunk and dancing around the diety praising it and shouting how it will burn their enemies and destroy them and stuff. Accidentally, one of the dancers tips it off it’s base and it falls and breaks on the ground. Suddenly they all start shouting, ” fell! fell!” If their diety can’t prevent it’s idol from falling, what can it do to their enemies? When we try to avenge ourselves, we become that idol of the diety. We can fall easily by one accidental push by one of our own followers, and yet we have the arrogance to think we can damange others. Why bother when someone way more capable than us is already on the job 24/7? Seems a bit redundant.
The final step – defeating Evil with Love! This is the step I’m struggling with. Maybe I still don’t believe it works, or perhaps my faith is weak or maybe I’m just not strong enough. Satan wants us all to feel we’re alone in this world which allows him to play Divide and Conquer. The only way to conquer Evil is to Love your enemies. This is much harder than it sounds, especially when you have been hurt by them bad. But look at it this way, you’re not fighting them, you’re fighting Evil. Wanted to be like those Evil-fighting super-heroes in all the cool movies? Want to be a Jedi? This is how you fight Evil. You don’t let it spread. You contain the disease. You show it you’re immune to it’s infection. People hurt you. You love them back. People tease you. You love them back. People hate you. You Love them back. Frustrate Evil with Love. With God as your ally, what can it do to you anyway? It’s not as if it can kill you, can it? But death has already been conquered! What’s left?
The most difficult phase in all this is when you have to face the facts. God asks that we forgive our enemies. This isn’t easy, but what’s worse is forgiving ourselves. Many times, when we’re hurt (at least in my case), the feelings we don’t want to admit to ourselves are those of embarrassment at our mistake. We trust someone, they betray us, and sometimes they go on to rub it in our faces. We’re embarrassed at having trusted them. We hate ourselves for ever having loved them. Forgiving them is easy. Forgiving ourselves is difficult. We make mistakes. We’re only human. Whenever we come close to the truth, our ego defends itself with thoughts like, “How could I have done this? How was I so stupid? No! I was right! They were wrong. They hurt me!” This makes it harder and harder for ourselves to ask forgiveness. Here again, there are feelings of “giving up”. Don’t they “win” if you give up and admit our mistakes? If we make ourselves vulnerable, Of course they don’t! We have the most powerful guy on earth seeking vengence on our behalf. You’re in no way “giving up”! 
If anything, it’s at this point that your enemies should be running for their lives, because you’ve given up your urge for vengence into the hands of the most powerful being in the universe.
If you’re more mature mentally than I am, perhaps understanding what they’re going through can help too. I recently read a story that affected the way I looked at those who were trying to hurt me. It was a narrative of an employer who hired an employee who had been laid off once before. The employee came with feelings of resentment and anger towards his former employer, and chose to take them out on the current employer. The employer was left in the middle of a critical phase of the project as this employee left with a smug look upon his face. The employee was avenging himself on the wrong person. This story gives two perspectives. For one, when you go out to avenge yourself, you may not be thinking straight, and secondly, those who seem to hurt you may have nothing against you personally
The final step – asking for forgiveness. When in the US in my childhood, at Sunday School they taught us a very important lesson, but one which is so difficult to follow in real life that we conveniently forget it. They always taught us that if we went down a wrong road, the very first thing to do was to trace our steps back up the road to the point where we forked off. Then to follow the right path. Ask forgiveness from the people you’ve hurt. Ask forgiveness from the people who’ve been accidentally hurt (yes, when your mind is calm, you will see them too.) Ask for forgiveness from God.
This one I actually took from Mahatma Gandhi – especially from Lage Raho Munnabhai. Trust me, no matter what, this policy works. It may seem like when you ask forgiveness, people don’t forgive you or that they make use your against you. Out of recent experience I’ve learnt a valuable interpretation. You should be worried if they don’t get angry and mad, and don’t take out their hurt on you. It means they don’t care. The fact that they’re angry and bitter, means that they still care, and they care a lot. At this point, you need to know you’re the most beloved person on earth. It takes courage to face your enemies in battle. It takes even more courage to face your friends in seeking repentence. Takes courage to face Evil head on, and to declare, “You shall not win! It ends here!”
