Sidestep into lateral thinking and take a
different perspective on your problems. As an alternative to dealing with sorrow, pain,
anger and fear as enemies, treat them as behaviors based on assumptions held by people,
rather than personified things that you have to fight. You aren't really going to
encounter any sorrow, pain, anger or fear. You will encounter sorrowful, angry, and
fearful people as well as people in pain. Then what you need are tools to help you deal
with such people, or tools to help them change.
Let's go out further on a lateral limb and divide all
human responses into passive and active modes of love and fear. Then we could say that the
passive and active modes of love are peace and play, and that their fear-based
counterparts are fight and flight. Flight responses involve passive resistance to change
(personal, social, environmental) and often manifest as pain, sorrow, depression, and
feeling of the like. Anger is a fight response for getting rid of, or destroying, an
unwanted condition, especially the condition of helplessness.
The movement, energy and changes effected give an
illusion of power. But driving it is the fear of powerlessness.
The advantage of accepting these lateral assumptions is
that it leads us to require only one tool to deal with all of it. We can observe that the
core characteristic of a love response is confidence. We can conclude, now, then, to say
that as confidence increases so does love, while at the same time fear decreases, along
with its two less effective responses. From this perspective, confidence is the tool that
is needed -- both for ourselves and for others.
Now, consider this: confidence comes from a belief
in your access to power. The more stable your source of power -- or the more stable you
believe it to be -- the more consistently confident you will be.
Ke Akua Nui, the Spirit of the Universe, is a nice source
to work with, but the most effective source is the one to which you attribute the most
authority or power.
