Humanity’s biggest conjecture. If You Don’t Understand This, You’ll Always Be Confused.

I endured decades of head-on collisions before grasping this. So please make use of it to undo mental knots.

The bullets that blew the shopkeeper’s brains out, did not match the old, unused gun, the police found in Anthony’s house. But this evidence was deliberately withheld from the jury.

Therefore, despite being at work during the time of the crime, he was sentenced to the death penalty.

While on death row in the good-ole-boy state of Alabama, USA. Anthony Ray Hinton, a twenty-five-year-old law-abiding black man, became friends with another inmate named Henry Hay.

Henry was born into a racist — Klu Klux Klan — family; and thus, conditioned to hate black people so much, he took it upon himself to beat, stab, and lynch, a teenage black boy for no other reason than skin color.

Yet, Anthony did not despise him, because he realized Henry had been groomed by his parents to hate black people.

Amidst the rat-infested and cruel environment of death row. Five black and two white men awaiting death by execution. Persuaded the officers to allow them a book club with regular meetings.

During one of their discussions, Henry read out a story about a black father teaching his son that all white people are evil.

And went on to say:

“It’s a shame to see what fathers teach their sons. It’s a sin to hate.”

The group, including the five black men from the good-ole south. Recognized Henry’s shame and attempted to comfort the white man who would forever be known for carrying out the last lynching of a black boy.

Yet, according to the book — The Sun Does Shine, How I Found Life and Freedom On Death Row. When Henry received his execution date. The support kept pouring in from both black and white men on ‘the row.’

The book states:

“Compassion doesn’t know what colour you are, and I think Henry felt more love from the black men on death row than he ever did at a K.K.K meeting or from his own father and mother.”

Thus, the neutral hand of life — reached out for Henry from both innocent and guilty, black and white men.

“Before you judge me, try hard to love me, look within your heart. Then ask, have you seen my childhood? — Michael Jackson.

The Seed of Rivalism, Planted by Parental love.

A former white supremacist, Christian Picciolini, speaks of parental abandonment and childhood anger. In a desperate need for love and belonging, he grabbed a lifeline thrown to him by a Neo-Nazi Skinhead, and became a full-blown Nazi overnight.

After eight years of leadership roles in the movement. Involving senseless acts of violence upon innocent people; for the mere color of their skin, or other personal preferences. He fell in love with a girl who didn’t have a racist bone in her body.

The birth of their first child reconnected him with the innocence he lost at age fourteen; and challenged the sense of purpose, community, and identity, that drew him into the movement. Triggering him to leave the movement and turn his life around. Christian now mentors other lost youngsters.

Stories of early life conditioning are never-ending. We all have one, but why? Why did I rebel against rigid parenting, schooling, and society in general, before joining a similar hate group?

Although the organization I joined was milder than the Neo-Nazi movement. As a black man, I blamed white supremacy and the powers that be for my shortfalls.

Pent-up anger, and the need to belong and identify, also enticed me into following a charismatic leader, who claimed to posses my exact prescription of pain relief.

The common thread throughout these stories is rivalry. The —them versus us — syndrome.

Robert Greene’s book, The 48 Laws of Power, presents rivalry as a key ingredient in the formation of a cult: give followers an enemy — real or invented — to focus their hate and competitiveness on.

Yes, I know we’re bombarded with the notion that competition is healthy and all that good stuff. But if your path in life is as unique as your fingerprint, why compete? Isn’t success a done deal if you just be you?

Competing in sports, tournaments, board games, or quiz shows is healthy when we remain balanced losers.

For we’ve all seen childish tantrums in adult sports. Ranging from assaulting the referee or ball boy; to throwing belts out of the ring and biting off pieces of flesh. This poisonous rivalry sprouts from the seeds of hate planted by parental love. For like inhalation and exhalation of the looping breath, it’s impossible to have love without hate.

I don’t mean true love as demonstrated through inclusion — the essence of life.

What we call love, switches to hate in the twinkling of an eye, because it’s based on evaluation, infatuation, neediness and clinging. A study titled — The Deeper the Love the Deeper the Hate — published in the Frontiers of Psychology, on 7th December 2017. By Wang Jin, Yanhui Xiang, and Mo Lei: echoes this insight.

Rivalry, also known as — keeping up with the Jones’s — has become the norm. As for normality, how do we define this? One of the world’s leading psychiatrists, Dr. Allen Frances, demonstrated the difficulty in defining normal for his book — Saving Normal. So what chance do we have?

Professor Peter Kinderman writes:

“There is no easy cut-off between normal experience and disorder.”

His book — The New Laws of Psychology, turns abnormality on its head, and calls for,

“A wholesale revision of the way we think about psychological distress.”

Because…. he says,

“Such distress is a normal, not abnormal, part of human life…”

In other words, seeds of hate are planted by parental love. The key motivation behind rivalry is success, but hey, this too is just an idea.

According to Yogi Sadhguru:

“Failure is an idea because success is also a stupid idea.”

We have bought into an idea of success and can thus, give it back. For shouldn’t success be based on how intimate we are with life?

The Mystery of Duality.

Our classroom lessons on opposites may have set us up for rivalry, and created more obscurity than clarity in our tender minds. As the belief in a dual existence bolsters the illusion of a divided world; and thus, fuels an attitude towards judging ourselves, other people, and life in general.

The opposite of love is not hate. Neither are — up and down, left and right, hard and soft, wrong and right — opposites of each other. Like pleasure and pain, they’re all one and the same.

Looking up into the sky from English terrain is akin to looking down from Australian terrain. There is no universal up, down, hard, soft, left, right, or wrong. And if you keep traveling west, you’ll eventually be heading east.

Negative energy is no better or worst than positive. It’s all relative. After all, it takes both poles to run a vehicle, energise the home, and keep our children warm. Fire is bad when it burns down a home, but when used to warm a baby’s bottle it’s sustaining.

As a child, I was beaten with a leather belt and verbally abused for not obeying the rules. Then, like Henry Hay, I took that learned behaviour to school and beat fellow pupils who wouldn’t obey my rules.

Yet, I was then caned by the headmaster, and further beaten at home for behaving in the only way I knew how to. Both I and Henry saw our behaviour as normal. Innocently, we judged the environment, ourselves, and everyone else.

Yet, we adopted a common lopsided approach that can only exist in our minds. In other words, our lives amounted to a psychological drama.

My Futile Attempt To Divide Life In Two

Acidity doesn’t exist without alkalinity no more than hot water exist without cold. Or aversion exist without craving.

My aversion to emotional pain, resulted in the craving of pleasures, nicotine, cannabis, and alcohol. Causing more pain in the form of addiction, conflict, and prison.

I tried to exhale pain and inhale pleasure. But the aversion of one meant the crave of another. This response to childhood pain served as a futile attempt to divide life in two. But as a naive child what else could I do?

Like a reflex instructs the dropping of a hot plate without reporting to the brain. An involuntary response to rigidity, shifted my attention from the open heart-space to the narrow head-space. This fall from grace, tossed me like a ping-pong ball, between the polar twins of love and hate.

After a lifetime of external distractions. A marital breakdown turned me inwards to find the most natural and neutral realm of understanding. Where I learnt to forgive and accept life as the precise and neutral source it is.

He Who is Without Compulsion Cast the First Judgment.

The human body is oblivious to the political terms legal and illegal. It reacts to nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, cannabis, heroin and cocaine with the same mode of rejection, but in varying degrees.

This reaction is received as a high by the compulsive user, desperate to soothe their biochemical inconsistencies. The addict is then judged by fellow humans who are themselves, cycling the treadmill of human compulsions.

Which raises the question:

Do we intend to create a better society by producing balanced minds, or are we content with condemning imbalanced minds?

As the production of balanced minds must surely begin with those who sit on their high horse believing they are different to others.

Politicians, judges, and the likes. Right down to social services and probation departments; judge fellow human beings for normal reactions to everyday problems.

“No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation” — Woodrow Wilson

The basis of everyday problems is compulsive behaviour. Whether that be an addiction to caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, or cocaine. Workaholism, retail therapy, crime, violence, or any other compulsive pattern. All of it, including Henry Hay’s, Christian Picciolini’s, mine, or you’re acting out; however horrific it may be: are normal reactions to everyday problems.

And no, this is not a rant of anti-authority, anti-psychiatry, or any other label a hypocritical society wants to place on it. It’s simply a balanced perspective residing in every heart-space, beyond the concept of duality.

Morality has its place, but it’s actually a descent from life’s highest altitude — neutrality.

The Depth Of Neutrality

Henry Hay or any other ‘bad man’ wasn’t born with an opaque vision. It was developed through conditioning. Thus, every hard nut (bad-man) has a soft center, and in a conducive environment would rather cry their eyes out than defend the fake mask. But when the mask becomes the actor’s face. It takes one of life’s sledgehammers to crack the nut.

Death row was the hammer for Henry Hay.

The birth of a child was the hammer for Christian Picciolini.

A marital breakdown was the hammer that cracked my knucklehead.

Dr. Wayne Dyer also found this neutral realm before he passed on. Filled with pent-up anger towards his father for being abandoned. He went to his grave to piss on it. Yet, while there, experienced a great change of heart, and his life began to blossom.

On the front page of his book, titled, Change Your Thoughts Change Your Life — Living the Wisdom of the Tao. Wayne writes:

“For my father, Melvyn Lyle Dyer. Even though I’ve never known you, after thoroughly digesting the Tao, I finally get it! It is — and always was — all perfect. I love you.”

When Mark Strowman’s sister was killed in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, New York. He took it upon himself to kill two people he deemed as the enemy; and attempted to kill another man by shooting him in the face.

Although Mark was known by friends and family to have endured an abusive childhood, he was sentenced to the death penalty.

Rais Bhuiyan, the man who survived the shot in the face. Petitioned the legal system ferociously to have Strowman’s death sentence reprieved. His neutral humanitarian stance was so strong it initiated feelings of remorse in Mark Strowman.

In the book, messages of life from death row, Pierre Pradervand, documents letters written by Roger McGowen. A man who took the rap for a murder his brother committed in his (Roger’s) car. Yet, the depth of neutrality Roger emanates is refreshing.

In response to the inhumane treatment of death row. Roger speaks of turning inwards for long hours of meditation and days of silence:

“But instead I go inside, because that is where the heart really is, and it is where my strength lies.”

After spending over two decades on death row his sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. While on death row, Roger said:

“God has been very good to me, Pierre. I may not have physical freedom, but I have an inner peace and love that even death cannot kill. I would rather be imprisoned with God than free without him. I ask myself: Why has God bought me this?”

Neutrality, Life and Truth, are One and the Same.

When Anthony Ray Hinton, was advised by his lawyer to take a plea bargain, he responded with:

“I’d rather die for the truth than live a lie.”

He stood firm in his truth and also turned inwards for days at a time. On one occasion he even stopped speaking for three years.

Anthony told the book club group, including Henry Hay:

“ I’m going to tell the world about how there was men in here that mattered. That cared about each other and the world. That were learning how to look at things differently.”

The book also states:

“Henry was the first white man to be put to death for killing a black man in almost eighty-five years.

His death meant something to people outside of death row. It was making a point about racism and justice and fairness like all the books we had been reading in the book club, but to us, it was a family member being killed.

There was no racism on death row.”

The execution chamber was not too far from death row so,

“I could hear that Henry was crying, and my heart broke for him,” said Anthony. Who wrote the book after spending thirty years on death row, only to be exonerated in 2015.

“In the end, none of it mattered. Who you were, what color your skin was, what you had done, whether you showed your victim compassion at the time of his death — none of it mattered.

There was no past and no future on the row. We only had the moment we were in, and when you tried to survive moment to moment, there wasn’t the luxury of judgment.”

Despite the blatant stitch-up by white folks. Anthony Ray Hinton, like Christian Picciolini, Rais Bhuiyan, Dr. Wayne Dyer, and Roger McGowen, continues to stand firm in the neutral realm of forgiveness; which also descended upon Henry Hay and myself.

But these human principles are not only found on death row. The row just slowed them down enough to see life as it is.

What will it take for you to see life as it is?

Will it take a whack from life’s sledgehammer to crack your nut?

Or will you be among the wise who learn from other people’s mistakes?

Psychology’s Karpman Drama Triangle speaks of three primary roles human beings occupy — perpetrator, victim, and rescuer. Yet, all three roles fall under the state of victimhood, because they apportion blame for events life serves us graciously.

In order to rise above the state of victim-hood one has to accept full responsibility for everything one encounters on the journey. This neutral stance allows one to live a full fledged life. Free of heartache and suffering.

Of course, like all of life’s blessings, one has to put in the work:

Focus on an event you currently apportion blame for. Analyse it step by step. Right back to your initial involvement.

Does a fault really exist or was the event simply one of the cards life dealt you graciously?

These few pointers may help you to slow down and find a level of acceptance within:

• Spend lengthy spans of time alone.
• Meditate or just sit still for your life’s sake.
• De-clutter the mind by getting rid of what you don’t use.
• Become closely acquainted with nature.
• Challenge your early life conditioning.

For no-one, or anything is against you. It’s all in the mind.