Some confusion nowadays is the result of the mixed messages between loving everyone as a function of becoming spiritual versus feeling emotionally angry with a person’s actions or beliefs.
Our world seems full of people in the news – from heads of government, to celebrities, and even people at the check-out line or on a plane – to whom you really take a grievance. It seems almost impossible to watch these individuals without feeling a reaction of the negative sort. It’s hard to fathom how to love everyone when you are witness to some reprehensible acts and some plain awful people.
So, is there some way to approach this conundrum with sanity?
Spirituality teaches that the soul is not the personality. The soul, we might say, is the eternal aspect of yourself, above the fray and close to the divine realm. (You might be more comfortable calling it the higher, or supremely wiser, realm than the divine.) It’s the soul that can leave the body before the body dies, and astral travel to remote locations or past lives. The soul is freer than the personality. The soul is not bound by the limitations of the physical plane, including time and space.
On the other hand, the personality is who you are during this life. It includes your gender, your physical apparatus, your manners, likes, desires, and your style. The personality is a result of your karma, and all the baggage you’ve accrued, and the choices you make and how to play with them in the game of life. Some people’s personalities are appealing, attractive, maybe generous, while others are repelling, unattractive, and ungenerous. And of course, there are extremes of personalities – people who are downright monstrous, evil, self-destructive and harmful to others. It’s the latter category that creates confusion, because how can we love everyone when faced with one of these types? The answer, according to spirituality, is to love the person’s soul while disliking their behavior – which, of course, is based on their personality in this life.
It’s possible to find a way to care about that individual’s soul by seeing the suffering they are putting in place for themselves, to be reaped now or in a future lifetime – that which we call karma.
The soul creates this suffering through the personality because of a lack of wisdom, and for various other reasons that enhance their ego. The personality is the vehicle that’s always going to reap the negative karma and its consequences, finding itself perpetually in suffering.
For the spiritual person, the answer is compassion. It’s compassion, born of insight and understanding, that brings one around to the ability of loving someone’s soul while abhorring their actions. Thus, there is no real conflict and you can find the means to love everyone even while rejecting a large part of what they are consumed by and masked with as they live this life, this time around.
Judi Thomases is a contributing blogger for JenningsWire online magazine.
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