COMPLAINING AND RESENTMENT
Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself.
Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you
completely believe in.
Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference.
Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to identify with easily
survive on complaining alone.
When you are in the grip of such and ego, complaining, especially
about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which
means you don't know what you are doing.
Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their face or more commonly
when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often
part of this pattern.
Name calling is the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego's
need to be right and triumph over others: “jerk, bastard, bitch” all
definitive pronouncements that you can't argue with.
On the next level down on the scale of unconsciousness, you have
shouting and screaming, and not much below that, physical violence.
Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental
labeling of people and adds even more energy to the ego.
Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended.
You resent other people's greed, their dishonesty, their lack of
integrity, what they are doing what they did in the past, what they
said what they failed to do, what they should for shouldn't have done.
The ego loves it.
Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it in to
their identity.
Who is doing that?
The unconsciousness in you, the ego.
Sometimes the “fault” that you perceive in another isn't even there.
It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to
see enemies and to make itself right or superior.
At other times, the fault may be theirs, but by focusing on it,
sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it.
And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.
Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not
only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the
collective human ego.
But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize
someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of
the collective human dysfunction.
When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to
react as if it were.
By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the
sanity in others,
which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned.
At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply
unconscious people.
This you can do without making them into enemies.
Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious.
Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that
is the ego.
Non reaction is not weakness but strength.
Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness.
To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through.
You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as
his or her
essence.
The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only abut other
people but also about situations.
What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it
into an enemy.
The implication is always: This should not be happening; I don't want
to be here; I don't want to be doing this; I'm being treated unfairly.
And the egos greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment,
which is to say, life itself.
--
Thanks and best regards
J.Suresh
New No.3, Old No.7,
Chamiers road - 1st Lane,
Alwarpet,
Chennai - 600018
Ph: 044 42030947
Mobile: 91 9884071738
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