When someone abuses us or are mean to us it’s not because they are bad people or we did something wrong, it’s because of the conditions and the circumstances around them that lead them to behave that way.
We are all conditioned by our environment, by our thoughts, by our upbringing, by our level of awareness, by our education, by our experiences, by the way in that we see the world, by the way, we see ourselves and by some other variables.
If we understand this we can see it’s not actually their fault but there are always many factors in play.
If we are still stuck with the fault-finding mind, we could rearrange the facts to fit our personal views, for example, we could use their upbringing as an excuse to blame their parents, friends or teachers, we could blame the government by saying they shouldn’t allow people to behave that way, we could blame their environment or society as a whole and say they acted that way because of social conditioning and that way we could blame tv, advertisements, the economy, the media, the politicians or anything we don’t like for all the problems in our lives and in the world.
But Once we start to understand how conditioning really works we can see past this fault-finding mentality and we can understand why people are and act in certain ways that create suffering and inconveniences to people around them.
And it’s much easier to understand and forgive them if they offended us in some way and understand and forgive ourselves as well for some mistakes we may have made in the past.
If we want to take it a step further we could use also try to understand the idea of the non-self, that there is nothing inside us besides those things that are a product of causes and conditions.
And going even further we could detach from the self and the fault-finding mind, train ourselves and reflect on this in a way that through understanding we can apply these ideas to create a powerful positive effect that will improve our lives and the lives of those around us.
Thank you for reading.