Trust and Interbeing
5/22/00
Nobody can really be completely alone. We're all connected. Everybody I've ever known has made me who I am today. Therefore, everybody I've ever known is an integral part of me. Everybody they've ever known is a part of them, and so also a part of me, and so on. We're all in this together. None of us can carry out a truly isolated action. Every moment is part of an infinite whole, and is totally dependent on every other moment.
This is interbeing, and the realization of it should be our chief goal in life. For when we realize we're all part of this whole, and nobody can be separated from it, all suffering will simply dissolve, because there will be no individual separate being to suffer. Unfortunately, separateness is so ingrained in our selfish egos that this realization will be difficult.
Most of us think we are somehow better than other people, whether we realize it or not. Optimists think they're better than pessimists because they're usually happier, pessimists think they're better because they see reality for the supposed hell that it is. Preps think they're better than freaks because they're more popular, freaks think they're better than preps because they're different. However, optimists often hide behind they're happiness to protect themselves from the pain that will invariably arise, pessimists are often blind to the beauty which truly does pervade this world. Preps think transient concepts like popularity are somehow worthwhile, freaks can be just as shallow and mean as everybody else, as far as judging people based on appearance, which they're supposedly rebelling against.
Mattering so somebody else is different from being cared about by somebody else. As I said before, we all matter, because without any one of us everybody else wouldn't be who they are today. Therefore we matter to others whether they know it or not. Caring, on the other hand, is much more dependent on conscious knowledge. If someone else isn't aware of how much you really matter to them, they're unlikely to care about you. If they don't care, they're less likely to treat you with kindness and respect, and lack of compassion is never a good thing. Of course, when you see that somebody doesn't seem to care about you, you're also less likely to give that person a chance to care.
Loneliness is almost always a self-fulfilling emotion. If we think nobody understands our own pain, we'll think that nobody else even has the ability to understand. And if we can't realize that some people would understand, if given the chance, we won't share our deepest thoughts with anybody at all, for fear of getting hurt. Therefore, we are often not given a fair chance to care about some of the people who matter most deeply to us. Even if we do care for these people, it's still unlikely that we can really help them without their willingness to open up.
Sometimes an event happens which we think is trying to teach us not to trust nearly so many people, or anybody at all. I don't think this is the real lesson meant to be learned by this type of event, no matter how painful it may be. People always think that trust is simply an issue of believing you won't go blabbing something to other people, but it goes much deeper than this. There are some things we don't want anybody to know, not because we're necessarily afraid of that person telling other people who have no business knowing, but because we don't feel that person has any business knowing in the first place.
Betrayal of trust can be so much more than simple spreading of private information. Nobody else has to find out for the person to get hurt by it. The reaction of the original person to find out can be painful enough as it is. For example, I have a close friend who shared a fairly deep secret with a few others awhile ago. Nevermind what this secret was, because the specifics aren't important. Anyway, one of the other "friends" who found out about this secret, though she probably wouldn't have told anybody else, caused damage simply by her own reaction. She, without even thinking about the real situation involved in the secret, immediately judged my friend as having made a "bad choice." Being the conservative Christian that she is, this other person will now no doubt will forever believe that my friend is going to Hell for some supposed "choice" that she made.
This is the type of thing people hope to avoid altogether by not telling anybody anything. However, we have to be at least open enough to others to find somebody we can truly trust to be able to deal with this type of information. By saying we can't trust anybody, we'll surely never find the few people who we can trust. Instead of seeing pain as a part of life, we try to protect ourselves from it by keeping everything inside. This can't be the right course of action, because I've never known anybody to be better off by keeping it inside than they would be if they could open up to somebody.
There are things I would love to be able to tell somebody, but when I get ready to say it, or even write it down, it always seems too stupid to mention. I've recently realized that perhaps one of the reasons I've always been drawn to people with "real" problems, apart from the fact that I have a genuine desire to help people, is that I then have an excuse for not sharing my own problems, because they always seem "fake" in comparison. Of course, realizing this doesn't seem to help, because the fact still stands that my problems are so minor, or at least seem that way when compared to other peoples. Therefore, I use other people to help serve my desire to remained closed off from them. This "exploitation," it must be realized, isn't as negative as other forms of "using" people are. I like to think that by simply listening and being there for another person, I've helped in some small way. It is possible that this is also part of the reason I tend towards these peope: I believe that I can help that person more than I could somebody with fewer problems, and we can only help ourselves by helping others.
I guess I'm actually lucky, in a way. I have been able to realize many things about life and pain by sharing in the suffering of others, rather than needing an event in my own life to force me to see these things. Of course, as I said before, all our lives are connected anyway. Therefore when I hear about somebody else's pain, it becomes my own. Any events which have forever changed somebody else's life have also changed my own irreversibly, and are therefore as much a part of my life as of the other person's, even if the details aren't as clear in my mind.
This brings up another possible explanation for why I don't open up to people about my problems. Perhaps it's only because my problems are actually those of somebody else. Sharing them with somebody else would therefore be a betrayal of trust, if I'm not talking to the person whose problem it is, or it would be a discussion of the other person's problems, if I am talking to that person. In the first case, it is truly best for me to keep my mouth shut, because the other person doesn't need to know, and in the second case, I may end up talking about some of my problems, but they seem to be those of the other person, because that person experienced them first.
That's all I really had to say about trust and interbeing, though I was originally going to bring telepathy into it. But I don't think that would have added any significantly new thoughts to either interbeing or trust. However, I have this weird obsession with trying to start each new journal entry at the top of a page, and not only having one or two lines from the beginning or end of any entry on another page. Therefore I'm just doing this to use up space. In fact, I'd be surprised if you're reading this on the computer, because that would mean that I had bothered to actually type this last paragraph, and there wouldn't be any reason for doing that at all, now would there?