Journey to Ixtlan

American acceptance of same sex marriage topped 60% of the polled population. With this is an inferred acceptance of LGBTQ people. How did this happen? A decade ago the percentage of same sex marriage acceptance was 39%. My personal theory focuses on walls being broken down when a person knows somebody who is LGBTQ. These close relationships put a human face to the differences. Prejudices of any stripe are difficult to maintain when faced with shared humanity. The poem “Heart Released” has the very loose theme of rainbow. The rainbow is a bridge between people. I’ve met rainbow people in my life, and it is my fondest hope that I can do the same for others.


Heart Released
Poem for Day 182 – 20150701

Bridge between the worlds,
the intercessor to a heart constrained,
you've worked magic here,
opening the eyes of one who could not see.
Allow me to share
the person I used to be before I met you.
It is a sad tale
of the one who was once lost before I met you.

Life was askew,
fear was my companion when I went abroad.
Strangers faces
were all I met when I walked in the world.
Just slipping away,
my life meant less than nothing to me.
Sorrow filled the space
where soul connections were meant to be.

Misunderstandings,
their cultural norms were foreign to me.
I was distrusting,
fearful of anything new to cloistered me.
Society's hates,
distilled over the many generations,
drip dropped in
to taint that place where good should be.

Once separated,
the gulf between was filled with ignorance.
Only differences,
no commonalities bound you to me.
Disparate groupings,
me and mine separate from you and yours.
I’ve broken from them,
you’re the important difference that drives me.

Now I’ve met you,
the world a better place when you're next to me.
Similarities
discovered in celebration of the person I am now.
A common world held
in this bridge between the you and the me.
A most happy tale
now that that my heart has been released.

© 2015, Sean Green. All Rights Reserved.

Have you ever wondered how you can know what makes other people “tick”? What makes people do things? What factors are at play? I have an unconventional answer for you to consider. You may not agree, and that’s OK. My answer is really only terribly philosophical. So, on with the fun!

The groundwork for my answer includes the precept that fully understanding other people is very difficult. Do you want to know with 100% confidence why a person does a thing? As Deep Thought said (paraphrased!) in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, “Tricky... yes, I can do it, but I'll have to think about it”. It was only going to take Deep Thought seven and a half million years. What is the difficulty? Other people have their own experiences and they react to life based on those experiences. Nature and nurture are thrown in to the mix. People become a puzzlement wrapped in an enigma. Is there any hope? There is an answer that taps into a combination of our holographic existence and Eastern theories of over soul connections.

You must know what makes you tick so you can know what makes other people tick. What? Figure out why you do things, the factors that influence your decisions, and you’ll have the rest of the world understood. WOW. That is far out there. Allow me to explain. I believe that everyone is connected in such a way that an acceptable level of understanding is possible, even easy. There are only so many motivations in the world. Understanding still eludes us because our interpretations of people’s behaviors are tainted. Either we confess to not understanding or our understanding is all wrong. Knowing yourself removes the road blocks to understanding people.

Learning about road blocks sounds intriguing, but I’d like to first cover what is learned when you REALLY understand yourself. Understanding leads to being honest about your place in the world. Delusions and illusions are stripped away. Falsehoods of speech are acknowledged. You are capable of no longer embracing victim roles. You recognize that assumptions are unhelpful. Lastly, you know when you can do your best most of the time. Do these sound familiar? They are paraphrased expressions of Don Miguel Ruiz’s Codes of Life taken from the book “The Four Agreements”. Understanding gets “you” out of the way when you attempt to understand others.

There are classic roadblocks that self-understanding deconstructs. The big ones are victimhood, fault projection, and biased assumptions (aka prejudice). The underlying outcome of these roadblocks is a fear of others. The fear is an immense wall that blocks understanding others. The roadblocks put us in a reactive mode instead of a more healthy proactive mode. Reactive people are affected by their environment. They are affected by others. Proactive people can anticipate others, not perfectly perhaps, but it is enough to understand what makes them tick.

Self-understanding strips away the barriers that separate us from others. Deep down at the soul level, at a holographic level, we are all very similar. You will understand me and everyone around you when you understand yourself. This understanding comes in many forms. You will understand the physical and emotional motivations of people. You will understand the selfish underpinnings of our lives. In a nutshell, when you understand yourself, your projections and hang-ups, you will not get in the way when you attempt to understand others. To go to spiritual type talk, you will see the divinity in people while acknowledging the human restrictions. Judgment is replaced with discernment. Fear is replaced with awareness. Most importantly, victimhood is replaced with loving connection. Self-understanding does not change others, but you do change, and thus your view of the world of others is transformed.