Inside Out
Whether you’ve heard it in a passive conversation, a proverb, a horoscope, a self-help book, etc. The universal lesson of ‘being the change you want to see’ doesn’t get the deeper psychological explanation it deserves. Let’s start by considering the characters fabricated of a basic story: the characters are simply divided into those who are good and those who are evil. By contrast, a more sophisticated story will put the divide inside the characters, so that each person becomes the locus of the eternal struggle between light and darkness where we, as the observer, witness both the struggles and changes of conflict resolution along a more realistic spectrum of experiences. The reason why this is so much more compelling is because we as humans are not perfect, nor should you see the world as a me-versus-you or us-versus-them society. The opposition that lies within each and every one of us is a much more daunting task that feels ever-expanding the more you explore its depths.
Such division of the world as the devils around, as opposed to the devils within (self-examination) justifies the idea of self-righteousness - necessitated by the morality of an ideological system. This is a misguided snare that once the sources of evil have been identified, it becomes the duty of the righteous to eradicate it. This is an invitation to both paranoia and persecution. A world where only you and people who think like you are good is also a world where you are surrounded by enemies hell-bent on your destruction, who must be fixed, persecuted or eliminated. Morally, it is safer to look at yourself for the errors of the world. In doing so, you are much more clear minded about what is what and who is who and where blame lies once you contemplate “the desert in your own eye, rather than the speck of sand in your neighbor’s.” It is probable that your own imperfections are evident and plentiful, and could profitably be addressed, as step one in your redeeming quest to improve the world.
Every being in existence can trace it’s origins back to the very beginning at a singular source of creation, yet millions of years later, after unfathomable odds, we are graced with life. Perhaps to our own fault, the faded clarity of centuries past and lost truths of generations before have allowed us to become a state of divisive and individualistic rulers of our own domains, absent-minded of one another’s relations to the other as an individual life determined solely by the ego and its opinions and social factors, rather than by a transcendent and universal authority.
-Busy Brain