I think this one might ruffle some feathers, but if you do what Erik suggests and extrapolate this to all aggressive, angry and even violent people, it might make more sense. I really wanted to focus on the terrorists themselves instead of learning about it from a general aspect so when Erik didn’t comply completely, I got really aggravated. He’s going to the Heavenly time-out chair when I get there.

Me: Hi Erik!

Erik: Hi Mom.

Me: Let’s talk about ISIS and this whole threat of spreading terrorism. It just seems to be getting worse and worse. I’m scared.

Robert: I have never seen Erik with a cigar before!

Me: Yeah, he dabbled in them for a while.

Robert: He smoked cigars?

Me: Yeah, every once in a while. They made him feel big and important.

Robert: Yeah, because that’s what he was doing. He’s sitting in a chair crossing his legs so that he has his ankle on his knee and he’s leaning back with a cigar in his mouth.

Me: That’s exactly the position he was in when we were on vacation in Destin sitting around a table. He had just gotten into cigars and was sharing information like he was an aficionado. That was all he talked about at the time.

Robert (laughing): Well this is a cigar moment, apparently.

Erik: So ISIS. For one thing, don’t worry about all of this stuff.

Me: Why?

Easier said than done.

Erik: Here’s the thing about that. When we constantly focus on things like that, Mom, we give it attention, and sometimes that attention can feed into the situation. Here’s what I mean by attention. When you give something that you perceive as negative attention—you’re perceiving it as negative in the first place because you’re afraid of it. That attention is spiritual attention. Then it starts to grow, not necessarily in the real world but in your own mind. It’ll torture you. A lot of people are worried about this, but if you’ve noticed, anytime we start getting paranoid, we take action that sometimes makes the very thing we’re paranoid about happen. It becomes self-fulfilling like a worst-case scenario. I’m speaking in general terms but I can give you a specific example.

Me: Okay.

Erik: Anita Morjani was extremely afraid of ever getting cancer because she saw a friend die of it.

Me: Oh, wow!

Erik: So she obsessed over cancer all the time, and what the fuck happened? She got cancer, and she almost died. In fact she should have died. It also became, in her mind, the very thing that set her free of her fears, so that’s an example of how your fears sometimes can set you free.

Me: Well how did that happen in her case?

Erik: It was her experience of crossing over–

Me: She crossed over?

Erik: And she learned that there’s nothing to be afraid of.

I repeat myself.

Me: So she crossed over?

Erik: Yeah. She had a near death experience. She met one woman over here—and she met other people too—that let her know that there’s nothing to fear. When we focus on our fears, we get drawn to them to try to see that they have no power over us.

Me: Wait, so that’s why we’re drawn to them?

I’m so confused.

Erik: For some people that’s exactly what happens. It depends on your life, right? The life that you’re living and stuff.

Me: So in this case with ISIS, people are so afraid. How can they let go of their fears?

Erik: You have a couple of options. You can obsess over it and allow it to get bigger and bigger in your own mind or in reality until you get to the root of why you were afraid in the first place and how your fear perpetuated the spread of it. It all goes back to your own insecurities. So it starts there. You start addressing why that happened in the first place and in the case of terrorists that’s because those who provoke your fear are in pain. They feel like they don’t “have.” With that understanding, you’ll become more centered in your own power, you’ll no longer feel insecure. I’m telling you this in a broad, big picture kind of a way.

Me: Sure.

Erik: When you reach that point, you never want to take from someone else. You never want to think, “Oh, I don’t have enough for me so I got to make sure I save it all and nobody else gets it.” Once that happens on a larger scale, other people are allowed to get what they need in order to survive so they don’t have a reason to pursue through aggression. Aggression is about someone feeling powerless. It’s usually somebody who has a low self-esteem. They don’t have a lot of confidence so they over compensate by being aggressive. That’s one example. Another example would be that they feel like they’ve been treated unjustly like something’s, not just material resources, been taken from them that the other people don’t have permission to take. They feel like they’ve been robbed of their own power. It could be feeling like their ideology is being trivialized when others don’t follow it. Then they use aggression to try to force that ideology down people’s throats.

Me: Right.

Erik: Like someone crossed a boundary. ISIS is no different than any other scenario where something is labeled as terrorism or extremism. I don’t want to say that one size fits all, but in a lot of these cases—I’m in the process of learning about this, too, so this is what I know so far.

Me: Okay.

Robert: He’s showing me this long line of people that goes on forever.

Erik: It represents generations and generations and every single person in that line has had something that caused them to feel disempowered. Disempowerment can come in the form of the beliefs you’ve been taught. When they’re stuffed down your throat, that takes your power away to form your own beliefs. Those beliefs can make you get stuck in certain roles that you don’t know how to change. And like I said, disempowerment can also be where you don’t get what you need. So all of this is taught from one generation to the next to the next. The person that does the teaching might have all of this unexpressed anger that is intertwined with those lessons, those elements of disempowerment, and that anger gets passed along to the next person.

Me: So it’s a belief structure that gets passed down the line.

Erik: Right, and the emotions get passed down, too. I’m still talking in broad terms so that you’ll understand what we feel –and this is tied in to the example of Anita Morjani—how what we feel, emotionally, can spread to other people. The way it gets spread and the reason why it even gets there in the first place is because of all those things that bring it up within us. Feeling disempowered. Ultimately, it’s about that. If someone takes something from you that removes your ability to feed your kids or to make choices for yourself, that’s disempowerment and then you get all pissed off and angry about it.

Me: Okay. In what way have the terrorists felt disempowered? In what way?

(Long pause)

Me: I’m sure there are many ways.

Erik: Let me put it this way so you can get into the minds of one of these people. They’re not necessarily going to recognize these things I brought up and why their acting the way they are. They’re just going to see it as, “I want power!” Very simple. “I want power and I want to express that power in a way that allows me to put my boot on somebody’s neck. I want to take away someone else’s power so I can feel more powerful.”

Me: Ah!

Erik: It doesn’t matter if you’re a terrorist or someone abusing someone else emotionally or physically. It’s a power struggle.

Me: Mm. Well these terrorists, why are they so angry at the United States aside from the fact that we support Israel and all that. They’re so against the Western culture for our materialism and stuff. Why should that bother them? We’re not inflicting all that on their society, their culture. We’re influencing other countries but we’re not forcing them to embrace our ideals.

I don’t think so, anyway.

(Long pause)

Robert: He’s trying to find a way to say it so you won’t feel nervous about posting it.

Me: Okay.

Robert: This is the kind of thing I’ve noticed in Erik. He’s changing to be more thoughtful and not just blurt out whatever he wants.

Me: Oh, that’s good!

Robert: I don’t know if Jamie’s noticed that, but I have.

Me: Yeah, he has definitely evolved.

Robert: Yes, he has. It’s like he’s putting on his—

Me: Big boy panties.

Robert (laughing): His intellectual panties.

We both laugh.

Robert: So what was the question?

I repeat it.

Erik: When people come into your country, and you don’t know the reasons why they’re there other than the fact that you see that they are, they might see it as imposing their will. That doesn’t mean that’s the truth.

Robert: He’s bringing up Zionism.

Erik: That whole thing is related to that.

Is he talking about the Israelites taking land from the Palestinians?

Erik: It doesn’t have to be just terrorists or people in the Middle East. People tend to believe what they’re told without investigating the evidence behind it. That’s the way the human mind works. You become conditioned to have a certain belief and you don’t even question it. That’s not only happening with ISIS. It’s happening in a lot of groups. Again, it’s all about feeling like you have no power. Then you want someone to blame. You want someone you can take your aggression out on.

Me: So what does that have to do with them being pissed off at Western culture and all of its attributes?

Erik: I can’t speak for every person who’s involved in violent activity, but—

Robert: He’s stopping now because somebody else came in and said that they perceive our culture as decadent. They think that in being decadent, we’re taking from others to have more for ourselves.

Me: Back to disempowerment.

Erik: What I’m trying to do is not make someone like blog members or even you, Mom, hate somebody for the actions that they take or be afraid of them because that doesn’t solve anything. All it does is create more misunderstanding among each other so that nothing ever works itself out in a way that maybe could have been more peaceful.

Me: So what do you do instead of hating and fearing them?

Erik: I’ll tell you. This is so hard for people to get when they see violence, but I don’t want to say it like—I gotta say it in my own words. I can’t sound all Jesus-like or Gandhi-like.

No threat of that.

Erik: But, fuck, if what they say is honestly true, you gotta look at those people—anybody who’s doing that—they’re doing it because there’s some kind of pain going on. What does someone need when they’re in pain? You can’t get close to them and give them a big-ass hug, but you can feel compassion.

Me: Yeah, we don’t want to hug a suicide bomber with bombs strapped to his chest and say, “Do you need some love?”

Erik: Yeah, you don’t want to love them to death.

We laugh.

Me: That’s a good one.

Erik: You don’t have to direct it at the person in ISIS or whatever. Just direct that shit, that love all throughout the world. Then it’ll sprinkle itself all over everybody.

Me: So how do you do that?

Erik: Mom, you know what love feels like.

Me: What do you do, go, “Yay, I love everybody!”

Erik: That’s not always fucking easy to do, is it, Mom? It just depends on the moment. You can’t force yourself to do it when you’re not feeling it, but there are times when you’re in a really comfortable place. You feel good. Your energy, your vibration is high. That’s the moment when you do it.