I can’t bring myself to feel regret for what I did, but I do feel regret both for losing my temper, and later last night allowing myself to get drunk.
Still, as often happens, latent and deep feelings emerged this morning that I am processing.
I felt contempt for that guy. I felt contempt for his fear, and for his obsessive rule following, even to the point of ridiculousness.
But I REACTED to him. It was emotional. He triggered me. And this means that my contempt for him was and is in some measure something I feel for myself. I don’t respect myself.
This is a useful insight. Because seeing it means that it has become possible that I COULD respect myself.
What I feel is that the spiritual task is learning to swim in social realms without rules. You should not be triggered by anyone, even if all people create both practical problems and opportunities. And all of them have Spirit in them.
If you look at the world as a machine, the task is to learn to navigate without using the rules of the machine. There really are no Laws in this universe. Everything is possible that is possible (you can quote me on that).
This doesn’t mean murder should be allowed. What it means is that our morality should not consist in a series of conditioned reactions of the sort we see in squirrels. If your nervous system will not even ALLOW you to contemplate certain things, can it really be said you made a choice to avoid them?
All of reality is an illusion. If we believe the mystics, this is literally true, but it is also true that our social realities, likewise, are illusions. Learning to see this is the task. Learning to LIBERATE ourselves from this is the task.
I won’t go back to that place–it’s in any event not really my sort of place–but this guy accidentally taught me something. And I may have helped the next guy or gal who is feeling the same way as me. That guy may just keep his mouth shut. We were literally discussing ten feet in a restaurant filled with people sitting at tables without masks. Violence definitely causes social renegotiations. It’s a bad tactic, but sometimes a necessary one.