Let’s Talk About Villains and Victims
On the stage of life from an emotionally and spiritually intelligent perspective
Yesterday in the wee hours of the morning, I received an alert that Diana C. had self-published a poem, her first in several weeks. The title, I Am Not A Victim, intrigued me as I felt it might relate to concepts I think and write about, so I felt compelled to click in rather than go back to sleep.
Indeed, I related to much of the poem and loved her sublime metaphor of watching candle wax drip rather than the common analogy of witnessing the slow but impending trainwreck of a relationship with someone battling addiction and the broken trust resulting from any one of a number of broken promises. Moreover, the title, reflected in these lines
Because it’s so easy To fall in the trap Of pointing fingers Just to call someone A villain. Every love story Has one, doesn’t it? … No, I’m not a victim
did hint at the synchronicity I suspected, and I riffed off this instant tanka as my comment:
villains and victims roles we play on stage called life yet do not dismiss very real we all witness screw those insist otherwise
Decoder Ring
As I comment rather frequently, many soul contracts/lesson plans, or improv scripts, which term I prefer because that encompasses the reality of free will, require villains and someone has to agree to play those parts — they could do so just for the experience of what it feels to perpetrate evil, they could do it just because someone has to for all this to work…some people believe that every script provides for growth in some fashion for every soul — perhaps, but not necessarily from the current life cycle — I firmly believe that some souls have amassed so much karmic debt that they have to agree to incarnate into a “throw-away life.” I believe my father, being an extreme covert narcissist, is living such a life. I needed a torturer and he played the part. A match made in heaven.
So if there is someone in our lives who appears to be an enemy, they may have been our lover in another play (life). And our lover may have been our slave master or murderer in another life (play). If someone trusts us completely they may have betrayed us in another life and those who betray us may very well have been betrayed by us before.
While probably accurate on a cosmic scale, I do not like to use the terms illusion, game, or worse yet, simulation as descriptions for life. I wrote about this recently in my poem and essay:
I understand that for many people, those terms make their lives easier to cope with so those are the lenses through which they view life. Yet, as I commented to Joyce O'Day last night:
Great piece. Glad you gave me the title and that I felt synchronicity at play as usually, I would wish the person had given me a link and when they hadn’t, I would move on and forget to go back...This fits very well with a theme I have touched on lately and will again soon that I detest those that talk about life as a dream or an illusion or a simulation, which it might very well be, but using those terms is dismissive of people’s very real struggles and emotions and feelings. I told one person I find the terms dismissive and she said she likes to be accurate. I felt like saying, “Shove your accuracy up your devoid of empathy ass!!”
I included the full conversation with the writer who drew my ire in my “Of Lenses” (link above). I did not express any of my pique to her — I just tried to get her to see that she could have expressed her view in a manner that would have been considerate of people's very real feelings. Other proponents of the illusion perspective understand this. John Ege is one. In a conversation in his Can You Test Simulation Theory, John replied to me:
Did you ever play a video game, and get so mad you tossed the controller…
The video game is a simulation. Your reaction to the video is solid real! The emotions are real.
I know Simon Heathcote is another (I can’t put my fingers on a specific quote). After all, he and John are both emotionally and spiritually intelligent (jules - Miz Mindful) therapists and thus would never take the extreme position that all suffering is a construct of the mind. Yet, there is some truth to that (Joe Moody). Again, it’s all in the delivery.
I loved Joyce’s essay, which rips Eckhart Tolle a new one.
Telling these people that their misery is due to negative thinking is both cruel and inaccurate….I have been in dark places and desperate situations: depression, poverty, and having my child diagnosed with a brain tumor. The problem was not my negative thinking, it was the reality of a terrible situation that I was forced to navigate through….Instead of telling people who are dealing with extreme hardship or tragedy to separate their story from the situation, give them grace and acknowledge their pain. It is real….express genuine sympathy, be available for a talk and a hug, and acknowledge the pain the person is experiencing.
Yet as I said earlier, there is some truth to the mindset perspectives. I love these quotes from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way…between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
and
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility [emphasis added] to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
Yet these quotes do not deny the enormity and validity of anyone’s feelings or trauma and do not say that the suffering is all a product of the patients’ thinking.
Our first sonnet, co-written with Sitara, covered some of these topics:
On the 3rd deathiversary two weeks ago, we all wrote:
Jenine "Jeni" Baines recently published a great poem and discussion about soul contracts:
DL Nemeril wrote a relevant and very deep channeled essay a few weeks ago:
Our discussion therein included this mic drop moment:
Someone once asked me while in channel if Hitler would be punished in the next life. They said no. It took a great soul to pull people in that way and the task was to reveal the shadow of the world and work to heal it genre
and this one:
we would like to add that we do not agree with karma meaning you have to ‘pay’ for what you did in another lifetime. That is a very human perception, of life being a court system meting out reward and punishment. Karma is a vibrational level that draws the experiences needed for healing and growth to a soul. Nothing more.
That sparked me to revise my belief that the law of attraction does not exist and I published this redefinition of the faulty new-age concept:
I realized after reading NL’s guides’ thoughts on karma that the law of attraction describes the vibrational pulls of our soul contracts, not what we humans consciously or subconsciously emit.
In Rama I create, with soul energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
