Absent Father and how it affects well being

I think one of the most important things I have learned from counselling with experts from numerous fields, is the effect an absent parent can have on your well being.

In my case, my father left me at 9 years old. So I will focus on absent fathers only from here on in, as it is all I have experience of. Maybe some of these points could relate to an absent mother too, I don’t see why not. I also want to point out, an absent father could be someone who left the household or who remains there but is absent emotionally. For example it may be a father that is in the family home, but works so much that you never really felt they were there for you.

Almost everything about your character and how you deal with the world, and your relationships today can be traced back to your childhood.

Here’s a summary of how I have dealt with having an absent father –

1. Identify the effects on yourself of an absent father
2. Understand why your father did what he did
3. Forgive
4. Endeavour not to make the same mistakes
5. Work on breaking the habits in day to day life to prevent the cycle continuing

Now let’s take a look at these.

 

Identifying the effects of an absent father

Identifying the hugely damaging affect on your psyche is the first thing, and that’s often rather difficult. You see the effects can and do cover a range of subtleness and may have been going on for so long they are entirely second nature to you. They might be glaringly obvious – for example violence, general anger, substance abuse – anything to let out that hurt or just ‘feel good’- this were rife in my early 20s for me. They may be mid range – taking it out on those that were for you – such as your mother. Then there’s the far more subtle. Subtle effects could be a greater than comfortable sensitivity to what others think about you or how they act towards you, never feeling like you match up so an impossible standard, shutting down your feelings to avoid pain, an obsession with avoiding rejection, and difficulty handling rejection.

All this comes down to ‘power.’ The power is always out of your hands and in the hands of the ‘world’. If only I could be “X” or get “X” – then I would be loved and feel loved is the overriding belief. At last I would be worthy! That power for your well being could be put in alcohol, drugs, a need for approval from others that is so great it causes suffering, oversensitivity to criticism, obsession with being successful, having a perfect body, anything to feel self worth and love.

It’s all about feeling good you see. Feeling good about yourself.

A lot of love you should have for yourself, especially when a father leaves, and never comes back, in my experience, feels like it gets sucked out of you there and then, never to return. Life becomes about getting that love back, however you can. You put all the emphasis on others and things around you, to make you feel good about yourself, to gain that love back.

Of course, that’s quite dangerous. And it’s a dangerous delusion. (God knows people are rarely in a position to handle such power constructively over you and nothing you can buy can ever love you back.)

You can end up dismissing the love you have from others, rejecting it, and chase love you don’t. And when and if you get that love, you dismiss and reject it too.

Yes, the rejected person – you – can end up becoming your greatest fear – the rejector. The truth is, you may have been rejecting yourself for a very long time. You may have been following your father’s example, when he rejected you, you believed it was something wrong with you.

 

Understand why your father did what he did

This helps you gain some context but can be complex. For me, I never fully understood my father’s motives before I was re-united with him 20 years later. I knew my father never forgave his father who did the same to his family – walked away and never came back. But my dad told me he never saw us again because it was too painful to see us and for him to hand us back each week. Arguably hugely selfish yes, but, what you see was management of the world for him and his well being.

See we can fall into that habit of managing our pain so deeply, that we find it almost impossible to think outside of ourselves and the effects of our actions on others. Everything in the end, becomes about us and it’s affect on us. When that happens, we can’t help but cause pain to others, because they become very much secondary to our own well being.

In the end, I became a pawn in my fathers game of feeling good. Did he consider any ill effects on his own son? Unlikely, he was too busy trying to manage his own suffering.

 

 

Forgive your absent father

Forgiveness is a deep experience. No books or words can do it for you. They may point you in the right direction granted, but unless you can feel some peace, show some love, and be friendly to the person you forgave like you would anyone else, you haven’t really forgiven. Could you really be in a room with them and show them a little love, genuinely? Forgiveness isn’t just words. It’s an experience. It’s real. And only you know when you’ve truly done it. It doesn’t mean you agree with what happened, that you like the person. It just means the anger, and the power they had over you, has gone. You finally see it as their issue, or an issue they had, not yours or something that was done because of you.

The deeper the pain, the harder it is t0 forgive and take that power back over your life.

Forgiveness is primarily for you, it sets you free. If you withhold it, you only damage yourself. The deeper the pain, the longer the process could be. Real forgiveness, could, take many years. Yet any step, however small, is a dose of healing.

 

Endeavour not to make the same mistakes as your absent father

So what mistakes were made? Well, my father gave up on us, he rejected us. So firstly, I don’t want to give up on other people, including him or reject people even if relationships come to an end. I want to be there for people. Secondly, he never forgave is father, or my mum, so I checked that box, I forgave. Thirdly, he was selfish, so to try and be less selfish is important to me too – to realise people’s feelings and well being don’t and shouldn’t all centre around me. People can and are idiotic sometimes, they are hateful, harmful, but that’s more about them than me. I don’t want them to have power over me. My father rejected me, not because of me, but because of his own issues. Finally, power, my father put power over his life in other people’s hands – his father, us kids and not handing us back – and took the power over his well being out of his own hands. Anyone that was true at peace and loved themselves, would not have done, what he did. He simply reflected his own feelings of rejection outwards.

 

Work on breaking the habits in day to day life to prevent the cycle continuing. Don’t become that absent father/mother yourself one day!

Finally, we are creatures of habit. So many patterns we have of acting are indeed very complex.

It takes a lot of self awareness to spot yourself doing things you’ve always done, without ever noticing them. As you deal with some, you often find others uncover.

But old habits can be undone, and replaced with new ones, of that there is no doubt.

Today, my big one is putting too much power in the world over me and my week being. What people say towards me, how they act towards me, matters way too much to me.

And why is that? It’s down to a lack of true genuine love for myself. A love beyond mere words, love that is a feeling. Something that I give to myself. To be kind to myself, about myself. Not too critical. Not harsh. Just to feel a little love for myself, each day.

I am learning to love myself, have confidence in who I am, regardless of anything else.

From a good, loving, relationship with yourself, everything else flows outwards. It will flow naturally towards others both close and far from you. I am learning to give that love to myself now, not make it dependent on anything else, a change or some goal to be achieved that allows me to be ‘more loveable’. (You will notice such a goal always shifts and it never pays up!)

So breaking these habits means –

• I will accept myself as I am, love myself as I am. Now. I don’t need to change to be loved, but change will come from that love
• To be decent towards people and set yourself and them free from needing their reciprocation or approval
• Not to try and portray some false image of perfection to the world in order to get it’s approval
• Ease up on myself, stop being so critical, and realise I don’t have to be perfect
• I am not defined by the gaining of material items or success
• I will learn to love those that love me – not chase absent love or those that withhold love
• I will see people as they are – rather than making their behaviour something to do with me or seeing them as a device or adjunct to my well being
• Be fully responsible for my behaviour and not blame others for it
• I will align myself with love, and the light side, not hate and darkness

It’s a tough job, but there’s enjoyment in there, as you figure it all out and yourself too.

You are, and always were, very loveable really. At the end of the day, you just got hurt. The power to remove that hurt, lies within your own hands.

Good luck!

Best Wishes & God Bless

Advice & why no one cares

Good advice comes from the benefit of experience. Experience, is the biggest teacher of all. And experience takes time.

I’m the sort of person that loves to learn. I want to make my life better and the life of those around me better too. What I’ve realised more and more however, is most people don’t care about what I have got to say. Nor for that matter do they care about what others have to say either!

You can hit them with every fact, every bit of proof, say everything objectively and it matters not.

All my advice is always backed up not only by experience, but by evidence if required – tangible facts, yet when faced with it, people will do as they like, as they see best. They will learn, if they want to learn at all, in their own way and in their own time.

And as with most things in life there’s a beauty to that. You can’t push it or force it.

Learning is happening.

But there’s also a sadness to it too. You see people doing things that are going to harm them and others around them. You see them walking into traps and mistakes that will effect them for the rest of their lives. You plead and plead for them to see sense, but they simply can’t or won’t.

But I’ve done it too. Yet I’ve learned when I’ve gone through suffering. And for myself, a lot of suffering has become a catalyst to learn something that’s made me a better person.

For example, chasing material, living without God, over indulging in alcohol and drugs, being dishonest, being violent, disrespecting those that look after me, not exercising and eating harmful foods in excess. I’ve done all these and suffered as a result. But I had to learn myself.

Ultimately, you must take people as they find them. People may or may not learn over time. But once you’ve said all you’ve got to say, (and tried to do it calmly and patiently too) you’ve really done your job. You risk getting dismissed, attacked, ridiculed, but you know your intentions in your heart and that’s all you can do.

Sometimes it’s true too the best advice is given when you act, rather than talk.

The best ‘advice’ often teaches people there are consequences to their actions. Those consequences may come from you, or they may simply come from reality – e.g. consequences of their actions to them or others.

Great advice may come when you do something that might be hard. It might cause a lot of suffering for you and others in the short term. But in the long term, you know what you’ve had to do is going to be better for you and for them as well.

Good advice, good action then, has the long term well being of everyone at heart. Even if they don’t understand it at the time.

And it might mean you lose someone or something very dear to you in the process.

So all in all, the best advice there is, is action, because action effects people’s experiences. It’s from these experiences that people really learn because they always deeply effect something at the centre of their life – them.

Ambivalence, Apathy, Light Heartedness & Indifference

Ambivalence, Apathy, Light Heartedness, and Indifference are not words you’d usually see in any piece of spiritual advice.

For me though, I’m learning day by day not to be concerned by the ways, manners, views and philosophies of others.

Now let’s be clear. I’m not ambivalent or indifferent to things such as discourtesy, racism, religionism, aggressiveness, hostility and dishonesty in myself – far from it – but I’m becoming more ambivalent, care free, and indifferent to it in others when displayed towards me and mine.

You see that way, the fire ends in me. I’m able to be above and beyond such occurrences, and be better for it. I give them the freedom to be exactly as they like – I’ll concentrate on being me and doing what I know is right, and you can be you, thanks very much.

It’s back to what I’ve mentioned before, often the things outside of us aren’t as bad as our reaction to them – which is often on the same level or worse.

For example the Church I attend indulges itself in regular bouts of religionism. I am learning to take it with pinch of salt, the Pastor believes that ‘Christianity is the only way’ is right in the eyes of God, as much as do I with my words – “There are many different roads lead to the same place.”

Is God more or less in either one of us? I don’t think so. His words send shudders of discomfort through me. They ostracise, divide and discount billions of people’s experiences. For if a non Christian is not worshipping God – what are they worshipping? I can only imagine what a God fearing Muslim or Hindu would think of such words.

The trouble is God’s loves me and the Pastor both as much with our conflicting views. To me the lesson is clear – live and let live – religionism really doesn’t matter – unless we make it into yet another barrier between us and our fellow human beings.

This world is God’s Church, and those that promote religionism are loved by him as much as those that don’t, the reality of that, is clear.

Dealing with adversity

Adversity, and the distress it causes are their own type of energy. They make us suffer. Whether we have done wrong, and suffer guilt, or someone has hurt us and we suffer pain, it’s hard.

So how do we best go about dealing with adversity?

Well whatever life throws at you, you are alive, and at the base of that life, your life, at it’s foundation, there is a subtle something. Something that is there through all hurt, all upset, all distress. Something that stays exactly the same and is unmoved.

That intangible, eternal, un-manifest within, is always there. Simply find it and keep with it, always. Love those feelings of hurt and upset you are feeling, because they will pass and you shall come out better and stronger.

Suffering is the birth of all healing, and all healing leaves you better than before.

At first keeping with the eternal may take so much practice, because the by-products of the un-manifest and ever present – such as our thoughts, emotions, experience seem greater than it. Indeed, in reality, they can seem to be. Yet over the long term they will be shown to be secondary, if you keep with that presence that is always there. That is God. A constant that never leaves. It will heal you by changing the very fabric of your existence.

Pray to it, worship it, unite with it, for without it you would not exist nor be alive.

Within this eternal within, is the capability to deliver all the peace you’ve sought form the world, and to overcome all the issues the world can possibly cause and throw at you.

Thanks and good luck in dealing with adversity.

God Bless

Barclay Littlewood

Dealing with Destructive Force

I don’t see destructive people, but I do see destructive actions, destructive force or energy. Dealing with destructive force isn’t easy at first, it’s often counter intuitive.

So what is destructive force?

Well, several times over the last few years, wether it be individuals or companies, I’ve had to deal with people who use the following tactics –

• Deceit
• Threats
• Abuse of Power
• Unbalanced self interest towards them and theirs
• Aggressiveness
• Lack of consideration
• Lack of respect
• Manipulation
• Desire to harm you or make you look bad

Sometimes this can be down to the character of the individual themselves or what they perceive they can gain. Other times it’s because of how circumstances work out, or an incorrect interpretation of how they think I am as a person. Yet other times they dislike what I am trying to achieve (them thinking I’m being destructive) or they just harbour a general dislike, jealousy, or ill will towards me.

So how do we go about dealing with destructive force?

When dealing with such approaches, it’s very important that you never forget what life is about

• Mutual well being and interest
• Respect
• Integrity
• Justice
• Truth
• Strength of character and purpose
• Tolerance
• Being impervious to manipulation
• Living up to your own standards no matter how others act
• Giving freedom to others to act how they see best and to think about you what they like
• Forgiveness
• Constructiveness over destructiveness
• Not mimicking, aping, magnifying or reacting with destructive force
• Praying to God for peace and for the other party, and aligning yourself with goodness and his will

It’s really all about playing good defence in a situation and standing for what’s right for both parties and in both their interests.

There’s no point in trying to educate someone about how they act, or what they should do, if they knew better they wouldn’t act the way they do. Your best hope is to tell them what you’re doing and that they learn from how you conduct yourself, and the outcome of the event.

Indeed so many people work against themselves in situations they often do a lot of your work for you.

If you stick to the above tenements, no matter how much it suits you, you can’t really go wrong. Win or lose, you always win, because you stood for what’s right and that’s the greatest victory of all.

You can use this on a micro level or a macro level of course.

So that’s how I deal with destructive force, I hope it helps you.

Thanks for reading & God Bless

Barclay Littlewood

Dealing With The Darkness

There are two overriding forces in this world, the light and the dark.

How do we deal with the darkness both within and outside us?

Love, support, peace, patience, forgiveness. But as human beings are are flawed in these characteristics. Therefore we must come closer to God to let him exhibit these things through us.

Spiritual practices such as prayer, meditation, yoga, worship, the reading of Holy Texts will help achieve this. The gross senses and our sense of self are flawed, rely on them at your peril, rely on God and God alone.

There is a wonderful balance to the world. The dark is there for the light to exist. The dark outside of us should be embraced as the light, it is then, also light, because your light shines and the darkness disappears.

God’s Rules

These aren’t God’s rules according to Barclay Littlewood. Whilst they were revealed to me, they have been revealed to others. They are objective rules of reality, AKA God’s rules. You can see them for yourself by looking at reality, the true nature of things and also from knowing and experiencing God’s love for us. These rules trump personal beliefs about God. They are more important than doing things we believe God wants. Finally, they are of course far more important than simply acting as we wish. I would think the world at large is hundreds of years away from truly understanding these rules and living by them. Yet it is because of these rules that ultimately the world will have peace. These rules are imbued in the physical reality of creation and will stand the test of time, forever. These rules are –

1. God wants life over death, peace over war, love over hate.
2. All people are God’s children – whether we act like it or not. We all came from the Universe, the same creation after all.
3. Your main relationship should be with God for the well being of yourself and the World – however do not rely on yourself or the World for your well being!
4. Let God be God, you weren’t designed to be in charge of yourself, others, or the World – God is in charge and it’s all running with or without you around.
5. Choose your path to God and stick to it closely.
6. Never lower anyone below their real identity of a child of God. The World is a veil over all. For example, don’t lower people to the level of your ideas, judgements, your perceptions about them. Don’t confuse the real identity of a person with your feelings about them or their actions and then mistreat them accordingly. All these things are worldly differentiators and are the Devil’s tools.
7. Wonderfully and dangerously, God’s love remains for us no matter what our interpretations of him are. All interpretations are worldly, and again the Devil will use their differences as much as he can to override peace and love and cause friction and hatred.
8. God knows what’s within you, your heart, and will judge and reward you accordingly. Act from your heart to please God, not to please the World, yourself or anyone else.
9. Difference, the past and worldly pleasure are three of the Devil’s greatest tools. He wants you see others as the Devil or different and trick you into attacking them based on differences only observable in the world. The Devil wants your past to haunt you forever and haunt others with their past, because the past too is attached to the world. The Devil wants to trick you into believing that the world can bring you everlasting satisfaction. How do you know the difference between God and the Devil? Simply – Peace and Hostility, Constructiveness and Destructiveness, Gratitude and Ingratitude, Forgiveness and Grudges, Satisfaction and Desire.
10. God loves all his children. He doesn’t care what race, what religion, what nationality, what their character is. If you want to be more Godly – you should follow that lesson yourself.
11. Forgive others for the harm they have done to you and others. Seek God for your own forgiveness. Both these release you from the power of the world and the past.
12. Do not intentionally attack or cause harm to other people. Never try and harm people mentally, emotionally, or physically. God does not do that to you, so why do you feel entitled to do it to others?
13. Never debate interpretations of God to others, they are entirely personal, worldly devices only and of no consequence. If someone has found God give thanks for that, whatever way it occurs.
14. Be patient, respectful, kind, forgiving, take others as they are.
15. Honour your Mother and Father.
16. Do not steal or deceive.
17. Do not coveter worship anything or anyone asides God.
18. Do not commit sexual sins.
19. Avoid drugs and alcohol as much as possible, do not resort to drink and drugs to resolve emotional issues. If you drink, drink the drink, don’t let it drink you. Don’t drink to get drunk.
20. Eat natural, real food and avoid refined foods asides for rare treats.
21. Keep physically active every day.
22. God will discipline you if you don’t follow his design for you and life. This discipline results in suffering. You will find this suffering in your own experience. Thank God for your blessings as well as your trials and tribulations, for they are blessings too.
23. God is perfect, as perfect as we can conceive. The creation is not perfect however. God did not want a 3 year old child to get cancer. God did not want anyone to suffer starvation. God did not want thousands to be killed in a natural disaster. These are problems with the creation (for a standpoint of humanity) that we have the power as God’s co-creators to resolve.
24. Finally, do these each day. Pray. Always offer thanks for whatever you have. Read and discuss God’s word. Worship God. Meditate on God’s love. Forgive those that wrong you and you have wronged. Forget worldly consequences. Do what you do for God, not yourself or others.

Thank you for reading and God Bless

Barclay Littlewood

For more websites owned by Barclay Littlewood please see www.learnbliss.com.

How to be a real man

I wish my father had taught me how to be a real man. Sadly, he was consumed by the suffering from his own absent father and left us when I was 8 years old. I have great sympathy with him. Many times we don’t deserve the hardship we suffer when young. It just happens to us. Likewise, the love we receive is a lottery too, as are the habits, often passed down from generation to generation. I didn’t see my father for 20 years after he left so, with a lot of trial and error, a lot of anger, a lot problems, I had to learn myself. I continue to learn.

Everyone can learn to be a real man, the truth is without good fatherly guidance today, it’s hard. Many boys, and men, are ‘developing men’. Now they may or may not be developing, but everyone has the chance to! There are no lesser men really, there are just those with more struggles, more hardship, more adversity than others.

Here’s my top ten ways of how to be a real man –

1. Real men feel a lot of love for themselves. They have a high opinion of themselves and high esteem but not at the expense of others. Yes they love themselves, but no more than others. Thus, their love flows outwards in a spirit of comradery and unity. Real men like who they are, they feel good about being them, they are very comfortable with who they are.

2. Real men evolve. They learn, grow, they are like putty, strong putty! Real men don’t try and change to feel love, they feel love, and this propels any change. They change, learn, and grow, with their inner joy touching all they do.

3. Real men forgive, and they respect kindness and love from others – developing men can’t overcome the pain needed to forgive. Developing men take advantage of kindness and love as something to be exploited because they are yet to feel true love for themselves within. Developing men therefore often find it hard to fully appreciate love given to them and often abuse it.

4. Real men compete with themselves – they don’t feel the need to compete or compare themselves with others in order to feel worth. Real men feel worthy of their own fruition. It’s not about how much they lift in the gym, how good they look, how much they earn, or their fame or job title. They don’t look up or down at others based on this. Real men try to be the best they can be – that is where they know the real competition is. They don’t get envious of other’s achievements but get inspired, they don’t feel the need to put others down to feel better.

5. Real men are honest – they don’t cheat on their wives, they don’t steal, they tell the truth, and are honest about their mistakes and affairs. Real men apologise when wrong, they are big enough to handle the fact that they mess up. A developing man will try and hide the fact he is wrong, lie, excuse it, just so his fragile sense of self remains intact and he feels okay. Developing men would rather blame and point fingers at someone else for their issues than take ownership of them.

6. Real men don’t blame the world or others for where they are at, or what they are feeling. They take ownership of their own stuff, there own lives, rather than trying to explain it away. They put the power of their own lives and in their own feelings in their own hands, not that of others.

7. Following on from the above point, real men don’t rely on others to feel good about themselves – they rely on themselves to feel good. A real man is independent in his ways, not a reactor or puppet to others. A real man isn’t phased by others opinions about him, or potentially harmful acts towards him. He’s secure in who he is, his own values, confidence, attributes and so on. Accordingly, a real man can absorb his woman’s pain, and be there for her to support her through her vulnerabilities. He can do whilst lending a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on. Many times, a real man won’t try and be a fixer – he will just try and be there.

8. Real men don’t physically or verbally attack others. Real men don’t often feel vulnerable, developing men do. Anyone that verbally attacks usually feels threatened, or is expressing some fear, trauma or pain inside, real men see the source of that and don’t often feel threatened by it. A real man will only defend his body from attack using only necessary force, he will never attack another or cause harm to them.

9. Real men look after their bodies – they eat healthy, they keep fit, some may drink a little, but they do not rely on food, drugs, etc. in order to shore up their emotions and feel good about themselves or cope with the world.

10. Real men don’t turn their backs on others. They support their families – they look after them and love them. Even if a relationship breaks down, they are there for their exes and their kids. Real men try and help others in trouble or in need, even those who have broken their trust, or have wronged them. Beyond that, real men try and be there for the world at large, irrespective of race, religion, nationality, social status or anything else.

11.Finally, a bonus point – Real men show special people in their lives they are special by doing something special for them – perhaps cook a meal, a secret date, buy flowers, or just some special words.

 

Thanks for reading & God Bless

Barclay

I Worship God

I will never put my well being in another person’s hands.

I will never put my well being in my own hands.

I will never put my well being in the hands of money.

I will never put my well being in the hands of circumstances.

I have fallen out of love with my self.

I have fallen out of love with my knowledge.

I have fallen out of love with my wisdom.

I have fallen out of love with my pride.

I have fallen out of love with the world.

I have fallen out of love with my life.

These are the greatest blessings.

My well being is with God.

I have fallen in love with God.

I am God’s child.

You are God’s child.

All that is loving, forgiving, peaceful is of God.

Anything else is of the evil one which God helps me defend against and overcome.

I am a vessel for love, forgiveness, kindness that flows from God.

I am in love with God and God in love with me.

His love is real, and accessible to all on this earth.

I pray all shall experience it one day and live as he intended.

Amen

Love And Righteousness

All around us, we see pain and suffering in this world. And we feel it within too, all too often.

What is the answer?

Love and righteousness.

Always, the root cause of this pain and suffering, this hate, comes from us devaluing other human beings. Sometimes perhaps that is because we have been devalued so much in the past. Somehow we can lose our way and see others as worthy of attack, inferior to us, fair game, beyond or not worthy of our love and righteousness. We have many reasons, it’s always “because, because, because”. Colour of their skin? Nationally? Role in society? Personality? What they did? Religion? Difference of opinion?

This is easy to spot. In the end, it comes from the Devil, and we, all of us, are open to his influence. Those that don’t know the Devil exists, even more so. It doesn’t matter how much prayer you’ve done, how much meditation, how much you read the Bible or Quran. In the end, you can spot the Devil within. It’s always about destruction and harm, even in the name or guise of ‘good’ or ‘justice’.

All of us must guard ourselves against this, and as I will come to, God is only only true defence.

It can be on a large scale of course, wars under the guise of the protection of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ which are really ploys to destabilise governments and exploit minerals and oils from overseas territories by the ultra wealthy that really control politics and our armies. Revenge attacks to destroy ‘evil Westerners.’ Wars on Islam, by other Islamic sects and others or wars on Christianity or New Age Spirituality. Wars on a certain ethnicity of people. Wars with actions, or words. Racial hatred, religious hatred, political hatred, national hatred.

From that moment each of us was born, each the same as the next, we have in our time as a human race invented and devised lot of ways and reasons to hate. A whole lot of differences abound. Yet it is really so simple. There are no real differences. All differences exist only on the scope of the very limited human mind. In God’s eyes, there are No Muslims, no Christians, no Americans, Germans, French, no blacks or whites, police or soldiers, protesters or prisoners – just human beings, just his children, a product of this creation.

Of course, all of these ways to hate are in one way sickening. A vile attempt by human beings to devalue or subjugate others to their ways or actions, acts of exploitation or revenge in order to gain some peace and feeling of well being inside. Yet being sickened can soon lead to evil within as well. That sick feeling we get, when we see hate, is better to be used as a reminder to be love, to be righteousness – to all and one. Nothing else is the way.

All human beings, however much they may seem lost, need that love, need righteousness. It’s hard to like all other people, even impossible, but we can give them that love and righteousness. Ultimately, that means just a little love and respect for all as your brother and sister, no matter how different they seem. It means don’t do anything to harm them. Just to extend a little goodwill, even only a millimetre if you can. It’s not complicated, doing it is harder of course. But a little is all you need. And real love, real righteousness, doesn’t expect to see a reaction or a change, to gain something, it is just done. Then you have done what you need to.

And also, we see this pain and suffering on a smaller scale too, which paradoxically can often effect us a lot more, because it involves our daily experiences. Our daily interactions with people, those close to us. So much about others can irk us beyond belief. Unloving ways, unkind words, aggressive, disrespectful, or un-thougthful behaviour for example. And we are guilty of it more than we know too.

How can we deal with all of this?

Well, we must first, in our own way, continue to seek love and righteousness within. To cultivate it. For me I cannot make any bones about it. I have tried many ways for many years, likely a lot more than 99% of people, and the answer is very clear. In it’s greatest and purest form, this love and righteousness comes from God. That divine energy, being, or however you think of it, that is at the source of us all. There is no thing more loving and righteous than God. His love is so tangible, so real, so powerful it is immense.

This love is open to all. As all hate comes from the brain/mind, so does his divine love. The scientific existence of it and many paths ability to produce it, is absolutely clear. You may imagine God doesn’t exist, but imaging that is all you are doing. You’re simply not using your brain in the right way. Each one of our brains has evolved to allow us to connect to God. You just need to learn how to do it. It is the doing it that matters. Books, and others can only be a guide. Then work on that connection each day, prayer, worship, meditation, yoga, reading, whatever does it for you.

When we are tested we should first call on God in that very moment. Point our minds, or brains to him. Rather than let our brains go haywire with our reactions and what we think is the best, and right and deserving way to be, we call on God.

God is a wonderful feeling of uplifting love, he will bring peace.

Then we can respond with the only way that works – to be loving and righteous. We have peace within. We shall do no harm. I would argue either one without the other is impotent. It is possible to do some horrendous things in the name of ‘being loving’ just as much as it easy to act with ‘righteous’ with coldness and harshness.

We stop being puppets to the suffering of others, we stop letting their suffering become ours and we prevent compounding our suffering and theirs further.

We can still be strong. We can still enforce consequences. We can still make choices. We can still stand up for right and wrong. But when we do, we do it with love and righteousness, out of help and support and a genuine desire to add something good into the world, in whatever small or large way we can.

Remember the Devil doesn’t want that, he wants you to hate, and attack others, and for them to do the same to you. No one wins that way, history has already shown us many times, let us wake up planet earth.

Thank you and have a blessed day!