People as Means/People as Ends

How do you view people? How do people view you?

It's very easy to view people as a means to an end. We're nice to our boss in hopes of getting a promotion or keeping a job, not because we actual like our boss. Some people view their significant other as nothing more than an object for getting sex, not a separate and individual person.

When we view people this way, as what we can get from them instead of actual people with their own needs and desires and personalities, we diminish ourselves. People are not objects to be manipulated as we desire, they are individuals and of the Divine. When we see them as objects, we lose our own ability to connect with that Divine, to grow in their presence and let them grow in ours.

Every time we see someone as a means, we say that piece of the Divine doesn't matter. We deny reality in favor of control, putting ourselves in the center of a world that doesn't match reality. We set ourselves up as petty gods, denying even the humanity of the person we're dealing with. And, in the long run, we damage our own world, because people don't like being treated as objects.

Questions:
Who do you treat as a means? Why? What do you hope to gain?
Do you let other people treat you as a means? Why?
How do you see people you don't have a real connection with (shop clerks, people on trains, etc.)? Do you think there's a difference if they're strangers you're unlikely to see again?

Prejudice and Postjudice

There are a lot of questions about judging. About what are appropriate and inappropriate things to judge on, about what judgment even means. While I don’t have cosmic answers, I do have some insights into the question.

The biggest question that I see is the difference between pre-judging and judging based on actual information. Pre-judging involves things like skin color, sex, clothing, and other things. Of those, I think the only ones one has any right to judge on are those that are clearly chosen (like clothing) and even there one must be careful. While someone choosing to pick a certain clothing outlook may well want to be seen a certain way, that doesn’t make that perception accurate.

Judging based on actual information, however, is not only acceptable but necessary. We cannot simply claim to not judge and walk through life with our head in blinders. For one thing, it is a lie no matter how much we claim to value being non-judgmental. It is impossible to not judge as we go, to not evaluate the worth of the people around us and what we think of their choices, their actions. For another, it is actively harmful to ourselves and those we care for when we don’t evaluate the people around us to make accurate decisions.

So what do we do? We do our best to make certain our judgment criteria are worthwhile ones, that what we worry about are things that are meaningful instead of superficial. It’s perfectly reasonable to worry about what people are doing around you and how that effects you. We judge if the person is someone we want to spend any time around, if this person is someone safe to associate with, if this is even someone we enjoy the company of. When we don’t do this, we find ourselves spending a lot of time with people we don’t like.

Prejudice simply blinds ourselves to the possibilities that exist, and belittles people into superficial categories. True judgment frees us to treat people as they are instead of as generic groups.

Questions:
Why do we judge? When shouldn’t we?
What do you think are appropriate things to judge on?
In what way do you want to be judged? What characteristics do you want people to see? What ones offend you when you’re judged on them?

Death and Life

We are born only to die, only to cease to exist as we are. Knowledge of that ending, of a time to come without us, is terrifying to many people. So we search for immortality, guarantees, anything to predict what will come when, and how to plan for or against it. But our daily life offers no guarantees, no promises of the future except that it will come. Promises of the future can only come from faith.

How we handle the knowledge of mortality defines us in many ways. We spend our lives striving for immortality, hoping for survival against all reality. Yet in truth many of us desire certainty even more than immortality, desire to know the date and time of our death, and to know how it will happen and how to pass painlessly and with grace. Such knowledge cannot exist, of course, because even if we knew our own body's original time limit, we constantly do things to change that and shorten and lengthen our timeframe.

This uncertainty and brevity of life, far from the apparent curse people see it as, is actually a great blessing in disguise. Only because we do not know the time of our death can we risk it, always in the hopes that it won't be this time, won't be us. We strive and struggle against the unknown, to learn, and grow, and become better than we were. This drive for immortality, not in the body, but in the minds of others, drives both the best and the worst of human behavior. We seek the immortality of opinion, of remembrance, and that seeking can guide us in many directions of life.

We exist, and strive, for a reason. As part of the Divine, we are separately-willed individuals that work to improve ourselves and the Universe around us when we are at our best. These drives to strive, to grow, to change and improve ourselves and others, push us only because we have a time limit, because we cannot put these desires off indefinitely, but must work at them from a young age if we hope to achieve them.

All words, however, are cold comfort when faced with mortality and the mortality of our loved ones. The Divine can seem cold and uncaring compared to personal pain and hardship. Yet, the Divine suffers, as we do, with each death, and rejoices with us in each life. Our Flame is that of the Divine, never lost or forgotten, even when we leave our bodies and cease to be separate, and are again one with the Universe.

The loss of ourselves, of our individuality, is scary to many people. We value our identities, our separateness from each other, even as we bemoan it. Anything that threatens our separateness, our knowledge of self, is a potential threat even as it is a potential gift. And so we fear death, knowing that we will no longer be ourselves when we do not wear our bodies, and fearing what we might be without them. We try to find ways to save our individuality even beyond death, beyond all knowledge into the realm of hope and faith.

But the Universe does not conform to our will and desires, much as we wish it did. Our lives end, but we are never forgotten or lost, but instead returned to the greater Universe.

Questions:
What do you do in fear of death? Does it help? Hurt?
What blessing has mortality brought to your life?
How can you live without certainty? Would life be better if we knew of how we would die?

Life and Cycles

Life moves in cycles and in a continuum. We are part of rippling history, created by what has come before and constantly creating what will come. The universe is not created once and done, but a constant process of creation that flows through us. We create our future through our actions, and we create the futures of those around us as they create ours.

This does not mean we create everything in our reality. Some things we cannot help, because someone or something else has already made that choice. Not everything is changeable. But we are still responsible for dealing with the reality that is presented to us and for creating a future we want to live in.

We are part of a continuum, not simply individuals. And we cannot live solely as individuals, either. What we do ripples throughout time, sometimes small ripples, sometimes big ones. We are the Universe made manifest, we are the eyes and hands of the Divine. What we do, how we perceive things, these things have effects. We cannot see ourselves as an end point, our lives beginning the Universe, our deaths ending it. Life is circular and flowing, births and deaths and beginnings and endings all flowing into the greater whole, each affecting each other.

We owe it to ourselves and to the Universe to be mindful of our future as well as our past, to see the continuum and to look to a better future rather than a worse. We see this most clearly in our children, our genetic and mental replication, pieces of ourselves replicated generation after generation. How we raise our children, how we replicate ourselves, replicates for as long as our descendants continue to replicate. What we do with our thoughts and minds ripples out faster and replicates even more, in ways we can never see. We are responsible for the beginnings of both.

When we see our lives as cycles, we realize how our lives affect each other and see more clearly how our lives should be. When we are our own futures, what we do clearly affects everything we care about coming into existence. Nothing else creates our future but ourselves and those we live with. We do not create the world as it is. We create the world that is to come.

Questions:
What does the concept of creating one’s world mean to you? How do you think your previous choices have shaped your present and will shape your future?
What cycles are you enmeshed in? Did you choose them? Would you choose them now?
How are we individuals? How are we part of a greater whole? What happens when those two views get confused?