Everything you are is good.

Everything that you are, every way that you think, every feeling surging in you is good; Everything that occurs in your brain is there by design. Every aspect of you was developed over long periods of time through the lives and deaths of your ancestors, resulting in a better you. So since everything about you evolved for a specific purpose, then nothing about you is bad.  In this context, there isn’t even any such thing as bad. Your family tree is an organism evolving through the generations, and you are the most evolved strain. A superior product of all that came before you. It’s helpful in all aspects of life to realize this, and especially encouraging when you’re feeling down on yourself. 

Yes, even when you have thoughts of things that are considered bad, naughty, downright evil, even illegal. Thoughts themselves are not bad or evil. They are just thoughts, creative brainstorms of viable solutions.  There is no need to feel guilty, or that you are a bad person. You are hard wired to think that way by design.

I state this because the idea runs counter to what many people are taught growing up, especially if they grew up in a religious family. In the Christian paradigm you are automatically a member of a “fallen race”.  Because of the “original sin” of Adam and Eve you are born of sinful nature.

Let me put this into perspective: Hundreds of millions, if not billions of people, were indoctrinated with the paradigm that: Everything you are is bad, and you can only find redemption by (drinking the Kool Aid and joining the hive mind of the zombie collective) accepting the Lord as your savior. These people believe bad things about themselves and their “sinful nature”, and commonly lead a life in emotional bondage and they project it upon everyone they have discussions with. They were taught that they were born faulty and will always be carrying a piece of that faultiness, even when forgiven for it by the almighty. They see other people as inherently faulty, and either write them off as a sinner who is only good enough to fuel the fires of hell, or they implore the sinner to accept god’s forgiveness for being so faulty. Oh, we are not worthy, we are not worthy… Ha! What a terrible way to think! They are slaves to guilt. They are psychologically shackled by their religious masters. This paradigm is such a destructive deception, it is nothing less than a psychological disease.  If you have suffered from this paradigm, know that it is false and not good for you. Consider yourself freed from it now and forever more, as you assimilate a new paradigm.

To know where you came from, is to know what you are, and there are two ways to learn about your origins. Either through the large body of science that is available today or through cultural stories, and they paint two very different pictures. Scientific knowledge is widely available today, unlike most of the span of humanity where all people had were the cultural stories. Stories are mostly what religion is and it bonds a community together by showing people that they’ve been through it all together. They have each other’s trust and support. Telling stories from generation to generation is what people have always done, it’s the human way.  So since it’s our nature to, no wonder that so many people still tend to go with bible stories instead of gathering huge amounts of accurate information through modern science. Even though the stories were written by people long ago that didn’t have any scientific insights. Surely the stories became more and more emotionally evocative as they were refined through the generations. No doubt the tales became taller as they matured. They could be complete works of fiction and no one would know the difference. The older generations could say they were inspired by god, and the younger generations would never question that. And so the stories spin and spin, propelled into our modern world.

We’re tempted to say pain is bad, but we know pain is very important. The body is stating in no uncertain terms how to avoid damage. If we didn’t feel pain, we’d bump and scrape our body into oblivion. We’d fall apart. And many aspects of ourselves may seem bad, but are very important and good. Some people get confused about it.  For example, the fallen race club might say it is sinful to get very angry, but that is foolish.  Anger rises in us when our brain perceives a threat, identifying that it must override our normally complacent behavior and take authority over the problem. Without anger, you’d remain docile and could get badly taken advantage of, hurt, or even killed. The fallen race club may also say that it is sinful to hate, that only the sinful nature of a fallen race would produce such a feeling  as hate. Wrong again. Hate is the long term awareness of a physical or psychological threat that your anger didn’t take authority over. Anger is a momentary thing. It flares up quickly, and when there is no immediate threat it cools down as quickly. You could simply run from the threat and your anger would subside.  However the threat is still out there, and it could come back to get you over and over.  Enter hate and loathing.  That is how the brain prompts you to take care of a long term problem. If you don’t listen to that, it could progress into depression. If someone pushes down their anger, hate, and depression, it will continue to fester. They may take communion at church and supposedly receive absolution of their “sin”, but what they’re really doing is creating suppressed feelings and worsening their state. They could do much better for themselves by listening to and acting on these queues instead of labeling them sinful or bad.

We often hear the adage “Face your fears”. This may be a life changing good thing for certain individuals, but don’t be fooled into making a blanket statement that fear is bad. Fear is learned through experience, and it protects us from harm. Recent scientific studies have shown that the phobias of mice–that they developed in their lifetime–are passed to their offspring. This is amazing. It shows us that evolution goes beyond that slow process of elimination that we’ve been taught.  It makes a direct change from one generation to the next. And it makes sense. How are you supposed to pass on a fear of something to your offspring if that thing kills you before you can have offspring?

Also, consider the beauty of tropical birds. There are so many eye poppingly gorgeous birds of spectacular color and design. How did this breathtaking beauty come into being? Some people might say, god was feeling creative that day. Or, nature is just so amazing. But come on, those aren’t explanations. As soon as we accept that there is no god–feeling creative or otherwise–and that nature is not a personified entity we can look for a better explanation. Suppose we went way back in time, and we find some birds that weren’t quite so amazing as they are today. They still would have been the most eye catching birds of the day. Then new birds would be born, and in order to find a mate they would have to up the ante and find an edge over the mass of other birds. The line of bird that was most able to attract a mate would have to be a little more enticing than the rest. And little by little, birds would come into being that were more and more beautiful, more intricate in color and design because those were the ones chosen by a mate to progenerate that DNA. They would do amazing dances or “mating rituals” that we’ve seen in Planet Earth type documentaries. People most often think of “survival of the fittest” as simply the development of a species by avoiding death. Either being stronger in a fight so as to prevail, more able to avoid infection, or the classic example of the giraffe developing longer necks to eat leaves higher in the trees to avoid starvation. But how much more influential is it to be the one who attracts the mate versus the ones that didn’t. Those are the individuals that create offspring and further their family organism. It’s a jungle out there, and you’ve got to bring your game. So to answer the question, who created birds so intricately beautiful is this: The birds created themselves. That’s right, it wasn’t god, it wasn’t mother nature, and most of all it wasn’t random. It was the birds. They made themselves.

These ideas begin to illustrate how everything you are is good. We have become what we are now because of what it takes to survive in the world, the choices our ancestors made in the past, and for other reasons we’re just starting to understand. We needed an edge, there was something we wanted, we had an idea of what we wanted to be, and so we became. What we are is what we decided is the best way to be.

Understanding that is only the first step to understanding ourselves. One has to wonder, if we are so perfect, why  is there so much turmoil in the world? Why are so many people depressed? Why are people disgruntled, unsatisfied, so often self destructive?

I’d like to dedicate another post to answer those questions. But I will say now, as perfect as we’ve made ourselves we didn’t make ourselves for the modern world we now live in. The world we made ourselves for wasn’t anywhere nearly as populated as the one we live in now.  That primitive world was comprised of thousands of small isolated communities scattered across the planet, whereas today we are upon the threshold of a global community. It didn’t have much technology beyond handheld tools, and you know what we’ve got today. It didn’t have any governments beyond respective tribal cultures, and an occasional holy book. The world has changed completely with the boom of population and technology in the last thousand years. The result is a myriad of complications for a whole world of previously perfect people.

These complications manifest on a personal level in addiction. The world we evolved in did not have drugs, video games, Internet porn, money, gambling, giant 3D flat screens or an endless supply of groceries and consumables. Gad zukes, is it any wonder there are so many people with screwed up lives? We have nearly endless resources of our every desire, that we didn’t evolve with. We’re not prepared for this scenario. We don’t have an internal switch to turn off the desire to consume all the things we have today, and so we can barely (if ever) stop ourselves once we get started with them. We hurt ourselves by being out of control.

It is a comfort knowing that everything we are is good, but caught in the insanity of the world today, we have to learn to keep things in balance. And we all need to find a way to coexist with everyone else.