When you evaluate your relationships as a more aware person, you need to evaluate: “Does this help me grow, or does this hinder my growth? Will this help me fulfill my Life plan, will it hinder my Life plan?” These are the overarching questions for a more aware person who is intent on achieving the maximum growth in this lifetime.
This of course applies not only to your relationships, but to all aspects of your life, but let us focus on how this can help you in your relationships. If you look at many relationships on earth, and this is not here simply talking about husband and wife, but all other relationships, you will see that there are many games that people play in relationships but there is one game that is very, very dominant on earth. And it is the game of trying to always be right or the other side of it, trying to prove other people wrong.
Now, you may say, why is this such a dominant game on earth? Well, the more aware people can take what is given about manipulators, and you can see that from the moment they went into separation and duality, they were engaged in this game of trying to prove themselves right by proving first other people, then the beings of higher awareness, and ultimately God wrong.
Everybody is wrong but them and they are right in an ultimate sense. You could say that this is the original game of the manipulators. They have of course brought it with them as they came to earth. They have managed to disguise it in various disguises. This can range from having the ultimate ideology, to sports games, to knowing more in a trivia contest than anybody else knows. But it has a very powerful expression in personal relationships where so many people are locked in this pattern, where almost anything that happens becomes the source of some disagreement, which then goes through various stages that ultimately is aimed at getting to a point where one person has proven himself or herself right by proving the other person wrong. It is so common, it is seen in so many aspects of life.
You see husband and wife doing this to each other, often over trivial things that really have no importance whatsoever. You will see siblings who start doing this to each other at a very early age. You see parents who do it to children, children who do it to parents. You see bosses doing it to their employees and the other way around. You see politicians doing it to each other, business people doing it to each other and you see it in virtually every aspect of life.
Now you may say, how can this be so important to people? The reality is, it is not that important to human beings, it is very important to the manipulators. Of course, the manipulators and those people who got pulled into the game have over time created some very powerful collective entities that are seeking to get the people to engage in these arguments over who is right and who is wrong. But it is not important to these entities in the sense that it is important to people, or to manipulators because the entities are not self-aware. What is important to them is to get energy and they are not even consciously aware of how they are trying to get people to argue. It is just a pattern they are mindlessly repeating like a computer running a piece of software. It is not important to the entities and it really is not that important to human beings either. But it is only important to the manipulators.
Naturally, you as a student of higher awareness, you can see that you do not want to be caught in this game that is created by the manipulators and it is really only important to them. What can you do? Well, if you are serious about freeing yourself from these patterns, you need to look at your immediate personal relationships. You need to see if you have been pulled into a pattern of arguing with people on a regular basis, based on this consciousness, this dualistic consciousness that there is a right and there is a wrong and somebody must be right and somebody else must be wrong. You may look at whether you have in yourself this self that never wants you to be wrong so that you are always trying to prove the other person wrong. Or you may look at if you have this opposite polarity, the self that never wants to force or impose upon others, never wants to prove them wrong but therefore, in many cases, you take a passive approach. Either do not want to argue or you agree with the other people even though you know that they actually not correct in what they are saying.
If you see these patterns you can of course use tools to resolve them and you will often find that this goes back to a past life interaction with manipulators. The manipulators tried to prove you wrong. You were wrong for coming to earth, but you are simply wrong for being who you are.
This of course makes you realize that it is very important to work on this issue and to resolve it so that you can come to this point where it does not have any pull on you. First of all, you of course do not want to give your energy to these collective matrices because it is a black hole, you can never fill it, you will only deplete your energy. But the real issue is that many of you who are more aware people, you have gone through a very long process, partly before you came to earth but especially after, of trying to make sense of why the earth is the way it is. Why conditions are the way they are.
You have taken the approach, which is a necessary approach at a certain stage, of trying to understand. It is again this: You see an effect, if you understand the cause you think you can change the cause and thereby change the effect. You look at the earth, you look at the dysfunction that is here on this earth and you are saying, “What is the cause? I need to understand the cause.” When you first come to earth you come with the best of intentions, you have no aggressive intent. You may not have a full understanding of free will, a full understanding what is happening on earth but you do not have the intent to force others, you do not have the intent to put other people down, to make them wrong.
But now you are exposed to the manipulators who very aggressively want you to feel that you were wrong, and you went into most likely one of two reactions. Either you refuse to accept that you were wrong and instead try to prove the manipulators wrong or you accepted that you were wrong and have then taken on yourself this burden of guilt and doubt and fear about whether you made the wrong decision for coming to earth. But what you have experienced yourself is that you came with the best of intentions, you did not intend to put down anyone on earth including the manipulators, but you experienced that they very aggressively tried to put you down, to make you wrong.
After this has happened to you, you become very sensitive to this. Now, you begin to notice that this is also happening to other people because the manipulators have created a certain culture of wanting to prove other people wrong by proving yourself right in some ultimate way. You become very aware of this and this means that you often go through this process of coming to the conclusion that one of the big problems on earth is that there are these beings, whether you call them manipulators or not, but you observe that there are these beings who are very aggressively trying to prove other people wrong and always elevate themselves to being right. You come to see this as one of the major problems on earth, one of the major sources of conflict. You come to see how arrogant these people are, how prideful they are, how gleeful they are when they can prove others wrong and how much it means to them that they are proven right.
After some time of having been on earth and observing the manipulators, you often begin to see certain patterns. You may not fully understand everything about the duality consciousness and how you can prove anything right or anything wrong in the duality consciousness. But you begin to see that the manipulators have this way of always controlling a debate so that the outcome is assured, and so that they are proven right and others are proven wrong. You also begin to see that in many cases this is not really consistent, this is not really logical or reasonable, and it is based on a very selective view of the situation. Furthermore, you come to see that many of these manipulators are actually hypocrites, they have a double standard, one standard that they apply to themselves so they can never be wrong, one standard they apply to other people so they are always wrong.
You come to see that the manipulators, again you may not call them that, but you see that there are certain beings who are constantly in a state of denial. They basically have the attitude that “I cannot be wrong” and therefore anything that implies that they are wrong, they just deny it, they go into denial about it, and therefore they can brush it aside, they can ignore it, or they can refute it to their own satisfaction even though it is not to your satisfaction.
What unfortunately happens to many people is that they make this determination, “I will never allow these beings to put me down again to prove me wrong.” And that means you will never allow them to prove themselves right and you will seek to prove them wrong. Many of the more aware people have for a period of time, sometimes many lifetimes, gone into this pattern of embodying in close proximity with manipulators because you think that you can find some ultimate argument that will prove them wrong, and that will force them to see what they are doing and how wrong it is and how illogical it is and how they are not really proving anything, even though they think they are. You think you can force them to come to see their denial so they will snap out of it and stop doing this.
The earth is a reality simulator. You are allowed to have any experience you want for as long as you want, until you’ve had enough of it and you do not want it anymore. There is however, a difference between what you can see while you are inside a physical body and the four lower bodies and what you can see while you are in between embodiments. If you are among the people who have decided before coming into this embodiment that you want to make it part of your Life plan to make your ascension after this lifetime, then you are also one of the people who in past lives have come to the point where you have had enough of trying to prove the manipulators wrong.
You have had that experience for so long that you have decided “I do not want this anymore.” But if you have been engaged in this pattern for a long time, then you need to have some final test of whether you really are willing to break free of the pattern and this means that many of you have decided that in this lifetime you wanted to embody with one or even more manipulators who are very much trapped in this pattern of proving themselves right and proving other people wrong. You are going to come into embodiment without the awareness of your previous determination that you have had enough of this experience, because you want to prove to yourself that you can go into a situation where you are in close proximity to these manipulators, you can be affected by the situation, but you can pull yourself out of it.
If you have decided to come into embodiment without this awareness, and then free yourself from this tendency to argue with the manipulators, it is lawful for higher awareness to remind you of what you have decided before coming into embodiment, what you have put in your Life plan. The fact that you come into a relationship with the manipulators without the awareness that you have already had enough of the experience, does not mean that it is unlawful for higher awareness to remind you of the determination you have made.
For many, being reminded of this can be the impetus that then helps you free yourself from the pattern. Being reminded of this does not mean that you have instantly overcome the pattern. Many of you still have a decision to make, a willful decision to make. And what is that decision? Well the decision is that you will stop engaging with this manipulator in terms of proving them right or proving them wrong or proving yourself right and proving them wrong. You will stop engaging in the pattern.
What does this mean? It means that you will have to allow them to feel that they had proven themselves right and proven you wrong. You will have to allow them to have that conviction in their minds, where they are absolutely convinced that they are right and you are wrong. And you must look at this and say, “I will not attempt to change their mind, I will just let it go.” What this will require some of you to do, is to re-experience not the full force, but at least have a powerful surge of this pain from your original birth trauma. If you have not resolved it, and you will not have when you come into this embodiment, you will re-experience the pain that you were proven wrong by the manipulators.
Some of you have had or will have the experience where someone tries to prove you wrong in a very public way on the internet. It might be very painful for you to be accused of things that are not factual, just simply made up and that you cannot defend yourself. But by not engaging in it, even though it is painful, it nevertheless helps you work through this psychology to the point where you can say, “But what is it in my psychology that I need to overcome? What is it that makes me want to do this?” And you can then realize several things, first of all that you are trying to protect a wound in yourself.
You are trying to protect your birth trauma by not being in a situation that reactivates the pain because you are proven wrong. Therefore, you often engage in this, we might say, obsessive-compulsive desire to not be proven wrong in order to avoid retouching the pain. You can realize this and work on this with the tools you have, including the tools about the separate selves and the birth trauma. You can work through it until you realize that you actually have a desire to change other people. It is not a malicious desire, it is not born out of control, but you still think that the earth is a messed up planet. But it is not the planet that messes itself up, it is people who are messing it up so the way to overcome the mess is to change people so they are free of the things in their psychology.
There is also this desire to prove that you were not wrong for coming to earth. You came here because you thought you could affect positive change. You realized that in order to affect positive change on the planet you had to help people change. You thought the way to change the planet is to change other people and you did not want to feel that it was wrong of you to come here, or it was wrong to change other people so therefore, you are trying to change other people.
And if people are very sure that they are right, you are trying to shake their assuredness and make them open to looking at the possibility that they need to change—not done maliciously but nevertheless, you are doing it—you want to change other people. This is one of the major things keeping you on earth. According to the teachings of the Buddha, the key to spiritual growth is to overcome your attachments. The key to Buddhahood is non-attachment. There is the story of the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree being confronted by the demons of Mara. The real meaning of the story is that the demons of Mara were trying to get the Buddha to react in any way to anything on earth, and if there was anything on earth that could make the Buddha react, he had an attachment and therefore he was not free to go into Nirvana, or ascend, however you want to portray it.
If you want to be free of earth, you have to strive for a point where you have no attachment to earth and that means you can have no desires, you can have nothing you want to do on earth. When you realize that you have a desire to change other people, then you can acknowledge that in order to qualify for your ascension you have to overcome this desire to change others. You simply have to find a way to let it go.
You can then, without engaging with the people who are accusing you, work on your own psychology until you come to a point where you no longer desire to change this person’s opinions or viewpoints about you or anything else for that matter. In other words, you have no desire to change the other person, to change the other person’s opinions and viewpoints. You really have nothing to say to that person. It is only by coming to this point where you have nothing to say, because there is nothing you want to change, that you are free. Not simply of this other person but free of the pattern in your own psychology and therefore you are free to move on.
This is a goal that many of you need to strive for and that you can all do. You can all work on these things, use the tools for finding these separate selves that are programmed with wanting to change other people, wanting to prove something. And you can then use this knowledge to look at your relationships, identify the people in your lives who have pulled you into this pattern where they want to prove themselves right by proving you wrong, and you do not want to be proven wrong so you are trying to prove them wrong, at least that they are wrong about you.
Many of you will see that you are not really trying to prove that other people are wrong, but they are wrong in saying that you are wrong. They are wrong about what they are accusing you of. You are defending yourself without directly attacking others, although you are indirectly attacking them as part of defending yourself. It is not enough not to be aggressive in attacking others, you cannot be defensive either, you cannot defend yourself. You cannot have any desire to influence these people, their state of mind or the way they look at you.
You must strive gradually to come to that point where you have let those separate selves die, where you can look at such a person and say to yourself: “I have nothing to say. I do not want to change your mind.” Then you are free of these people but more importantly, you are free of the pattern that has probably kept you tied to the manipulators for many, many, many lifetimes.
There is no one who has ascended to higher awareness who has not gone through this initiation in their last lifetime. Jesus had to confront certain manipulators. Ultimately, at his trial, when he was accused, he did not defend himself and thereby he passed that initiation that he had nothing to say to the manipulators.
He had no desire to change their view of him and you may think that you can set this up as an ideal that you strive for, and you can discipline your mind in an outer way so that you no longer feel the desire. But that is not what this is about. It is about resolving the pattern to the point where this is immaterial to you. It does not matter to you what the manipulators think or say or do concerning you. You can look at it, you can be non-attached to it because you know they have no power to influence the way you look at yourself. You will know who you are. You are who you are and you have a right to be who you are here on earth and their opinion of you does not matter whatsoever. This is a great freedom to have.
Now, many people will look at those who have achieved this freedom, as many people have, as many spiritual masters have, and they will find that these people are very impersonal. You can take many of the known spiritual masters such as Yogananda and other masters that are known in your age, you can take many from the past, and there will be people who accused them of being very impersonal. The reason was simple.
When you have this non-attachment, nobody can pull you into any of these games that people play. Here, you have a person who is used to being able to pull everybody else into a certain game. Now they meet this master, he cannot be pulled into the game or she cannot be pulled into the game and suddenly, the person now feels: “Oh, he is not a master. He’s so impersonal. How can he be a master when he is so impersonal?” But the master must simply be non-attached to this.
Being a master on earth is not a popularity contest. Achieving spiritual maturity, spiritual freedom is not a popularity contest. You will not be popular among the broad population. The more you grow, the less popular you will be because people will not have anything in you, the prince of this world will not have anything in you, whereby people can pull you into these reactionary patterns that so many relationships are based on.
If you look at the majority of people on earth, their relationships are almost completely based on reactionary patterns. They rarely make any free choices. They rarely have any deeper connection with other people because it is all following these established patterns that are often taken over by these personal and collective entities that have been built in families and cultures so that people are not actually having a relationship with each other. There are people who might have known each other for a lifetime but they have never actually had a genuine, truly personal conversation. They never really connected, they had never really interacted personally because all of their interactions have not been between two self-aware human beings but between a variety of entities of separate selves and of collective matrices.
What you will find is that when you start rising above this, so that people do not have anything in you that they can pull on, you will have various negative reactions from people—hostile reactions. They will accuse you of being impersonal, not caring about them, not loving them. You are not a loving person. Some will become very angry at you, some will become very insistent on trying to pull you in to the same patterns they could pull you in before and others will accuse you of various things but you need to be unattached to this. You need to look at it and say: “What is that to me? I will follow higher awareness towards my freedom.” And it really needs to come to that point where it is nothing to you. It does not mean you do not care about other people. It actually means you do care, but not in a way most people see it because for them caring is actually driven by these patterns in the culture, by these personal and collective matrices so that people think that if you react with anger, or guilt, or any other negative feeling, this shows that you care about them but if they cannot pull you into this pattern, then it is because you do not care. You do not even care enough to be angry.
Well, this you have to be willing to endure as a student on the higher levels of the path, and how can you endure it? Well, of course you can work on overcoming these separate selves that make you attached to other people’s opinion and make you want to be popular and so forth. But ultimately, there comes a point where you have to make a decision. You have to make a conscious decision and it is not just one decision. It is a series of decisions. You may start at a more superficial aspect of the mind where with the outer mind you make a decision: “I see this is what I need to do so I do not want to be attached to other people’s reactions.” And it is valuable enough to make this decision but there comes a point where you have worked on resolving the separate selves where now there is a deeper decision that is not deliberately made with the conscious mind but it comes spontaneously from the heart, from the depth of your being.
You have to start by making the outer decision and reinforcing it, and looking at it from different angles, and feeling different situations that come up where you can make the choice: “No, I will not react to this. I will be non-attached to this. I will not talk back. I will not defend myself. I will not attack that other person.” You make many of these decisions with the outer mind and then there comes that point where now the final decision comes from within and then you know you are free, because you feel that something lifts—a burden is lifted, and you look at the situation and you can look at how you used to take this very seriously, how you used to be very disturbed by this, how you used to really want to change that other person’s opinion.
And now you see, or you feel there is nothing engaging you, nothing is pulling you to do this, to engage the situation. This does not mean that you stop talking to people, but you can talk to them in a different way where it comes more from the heart, is more of a sincere personal conversation, you are actually aware of yourself as a human being and you are treating other people as if they were also human beings who are aware of themselves and not driven by these entities or separate selves or collective beasts.
You are actually treating people better than they have ever been treated and you can be non-attached to how they react to it. Some will react positively. They will suddenly start responding in a more genuine way because they have never had anybody talk to them like this before. But others will still be hostile, they will still accuse you of this and that and then you come to that point where you can decide: “How much time, how much attention do I want to give to this person. I am obviously not helping them. Is there possibly other people that I could help or other things I could put my attention and energy upon, given that I have limited amounts of both.” This frees you up! Not only is that an important initiation to pass but it frees up your attention, your energy, to focus on other aspects of your Life plan and how you might have a positive contribution to make to some aspect of life instead of being engaged in these endless games with other people.
There was, many years ago, a book that was somewhat known, written by a psychologist, called Games People Play. This is not necessarily recommending that you go out and find it because it is quite old but the point is that many psychologists have for a long time been aware of how people play these games and how they can play them endlessly and it never leads anywhere. Many psychologists have been looking for ways to help their clients overcome such patterns. They have for that matter been looking for how to overcome it themselves. “Physician, heal thyself.” They have identified many of the games that people play but they have not identified all of them because they do not have a wide enough perspective. They do not have the perspective of reincarnation that people can have reinforced these games over many lifetimes. It is not something you can explain by looking at what happened to them in this lifetime because some people are born with games that their parents and family do not have, but these people obviously have them from birth.
Again, there is a potential that the psychological field can have a breakthrough and become more aware of this, especially this game of wanting to be right, wanting to prove other people wrong. This can open up for a new awareness in the field of how to help people overcome this and how important it is to help people overcome this. This can even lead some of the more progressive, creative people in the field to consider the whole concept of right and wrong because they obviously see how relative it is and how relatively it is being applied by different people, even in different situations by the same people. They see how the concept of right and wrong is being used as a weapon against other people and this might lead some to question more than they have done so far, this entire concept that something has to be right and something has to be wrong.
They can even question the Aristotelian logic, the binary logic that there is only right and wrong and nothing in between because after all, when you look at the complexity of human psychology, does it really make sense to apply this binary logic that something has to be right and something has to be wrong and there are no shades in between? Many psychologists are aware that when it comes to human psychology, well, there is nothing but shades. There is really no black and white. There is really no right and wrong, it is all shades. It is all relative.
This can lead to a recognition that really, when it comes to human opinions, human beliefs and even human psychology everything is relative. This then begs the question: “Well, how do you then help people overcome this miasma, this jungle of relativity?” Well, you must have a frame of reference from outside the relative aspect of the mind. Is there an aspect of the human mind that is not relative that is beyond duality? And this is of course what can open up the profession to realizing that there is such an aspect. It hasn’t been recognized by modern science primarily because of the materialist ideology, but it has been recognized for thousands of years by spiritual teachers and gurus who have talked about it in various ways and with various language.
What they have talked about is that there is some aspect of human psychology that is not bound by this relativity, this dualism. This can then open up for people to realize that if you are to really help people overcome this relativity and all of these games, you must help them have an experience of this depth, this core of their own being. We can call it the Conscious You but it does not matter what you call it, there is simply that experience,. There is something in my mind that is beyond the outer mind, the emotional mind, the mental mind, the identity mind. There is a part of me that is beyond even my sense of identity. It is what can be called pure awareness. Again, you can call it something else, but it is simply there. It is the inner sense, unchanging, compared to the relative which is constantly moving around from one extreme to another. It is that core that you can rely on, that pure being that several philosophers have talked about. Even Western philosophers have talked about “the ground of being” as some have called it.
There is a core of human psychology and if we are to really help people master their psychology, we need to help them experience this because it gives them a different frame of reference. It can also help relationships because what is one of the most common problems in relationships? It is that two people are looking to get something from each other but they are never getting it. What is it they are seeking to get? That experience of something beyond their present state of mind. Yet that experience can only come from within and when you have that experience you have a different foundation, a different frame of reference for evaluating your relationships, for dealing with your relationships and for freeing yourself from these patterns.
So if you have two people that both have that experience, they have a much better probability of working out their relationship than if you take two people who do not have that experience and therefore do not realize there is anything unchanging, there is anything solid in their minds. Therefore, they are looking for fulfillment or wholeness outside themselves, which means they can only fall into the old pattern of blaming their partner when they are not getting from their partner what they can only get inside themselves.