Okay. I messed up. I didn’t put the tail end of yesterday’s post so go back and read it if you want. I think it’s because I’ve been so busy. Our housekeeper of 25 years who is part of the family and helped me raise my kids is having a triple bypass so I’ve been worried about that. Hence one half of my brain is elsewhere. Because of that, I’ve been doing all of the housework: the usual stuff but also things that have been neglected, probably because Maria hasn’t had the strength she used to. So I’m cleaning baseboards, around door knobs and, like I mentioned ;in the previous post, finishing up the shutters. And that’s just a few of my detailed housekeeping duties. Yesterday I fell on my ass while cleaning the last set of shutters, and some of the louvers were almost out of reach. I had to stretch on my tiptoes and lost my balance. Not hurt, just feeling clumsy. So all of this housekeeping takes up the other half of my brain. If I missed some editing or misspelled some words you know why.
Me: Some people feel like they don’t belong. What’s up with that?
Erik: Part of that is about not believing you have a purpose here, not understanding the importance of the human experience. A lot of times this happens in people who are very spiritually connected. They’re immersed in this environment where all of the different facets of love are separated into its different colors. They’re used to being immersed in white light, the totally of love. It feels very foreign to them for that reason, and that’s on an energetic level, but it’s also because of the way people treated them. They don’t understand how a person who is honest and open with themselves yet get bogged down by people who come along and kick them, hurting them in some way because of the way they act. So they condition themselves to not behave the way they naturally would. They don’t understand the contradiction, so they change their behavior so that they don’t act in the way they usually do. Then they think, “Well, maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe I don’t belong here because I’m being so mistreated.” That goes back to not trusting the whole point of life and the purpose of it all. Sometimes the human experience includes learning from or teaching those who we’re at odds with.
Me: So these people who feel like they don’t belong have had to bear the brunt of the other facets of love like hate, resentment or fear. We all know that these are all pieces of love but at the other spectrum of facets like loyalty, forgiveness, etc. The contradiction in how they’re treated or how other people around them are treated throws them off.
Erik: And they don’t see how experiencing hate, anger, jealousy or whatever are experiencing different shades of love. They don’t see the love underneath those. Love makes all those possible in the first place. Love is involved in hate and those other things because it’s teaching us something about ourselves and how we can choose to act with other people. If you see hate and project hate back, that’s like fighting fire with fire. You just create more fire. So it can teach you how to act in ways other than what you’re experienced. If you don’t see that, it can be overwhelming.
Me: Do they then protect themselves, cocoon themselves?
Erik: Yes, and for some people, that makes them feel liked they don’t belong. They shut themselves off from the world, which makes them feel separate from it. They want to belong somewhere, so if they feel like they don’t belong here, they create their own little world they can feel like they can belong in. That leads me into to talk about how you can find ways to belong.
Me: I want to talk about the solution in a minute, but I want to know how hate can be a part of love. That’s so hard to understand.
Erik: Here’s the thing. Love is about unconditional support. So if we experience hate, love is supporting us in our ability to choose whether or not we project the hate or if we project something that’s the opposite of hate. It’s like I just talked about. Love gives us choices. That’s what you do when you support. You give choices, but how you choose is up to you, and love fully supports you in your decision.
I totally don’t understand.
Me: But if love is a spectrum, how is hate a part of that?
Erik: It’s because love is unconditional. It understands that all things have a right to exist. It doesn’t say. “Hate doesn’t have a right to exist,” or “Jealousy doesn’t have a right to exist.” Everything does.
Me> Oh, okay. I don’t know how people are going to understand that.
Erik: If they don’t, then they’re not ready to understand it. It will click with some but not with others. If hate didn’t exist, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to choose between that and something else like some other facet of love like forgiveness or compassion for example.
Me: Erik, you experiences that, where you didn’t feel like you belonged, and one of the things you said after you died was that so many things in your life seemed like a contradiction. Maybe that’s why you didn’t feel a sense of belonging. You didn’t know which side of the contradiction to take as the truth. Is that right?
Erik: Yeah, I saw everything as a contradiction, but it was confusing. Let’s talk in general terms. We have this definition of support as being very limited in that we think of it as only things we label as good, but nothing is good or bad. It just is. I couldn’t get there. I was taught to label things as good or bad so I got limited by those labels. I couldn’t look beyond them to see how everything I experienced was there to begin with and how they were helping me to evolve. No matter what, everything is a powerful instrument to help us evolve and understand ourselves.
Me: What did that have to do with why you felt like you didn’t belong?
Erik: That goes back to the extremes that I felt. When you don’t trust this world or the process of life, you have the extremes like I did that force me into that distrust, so unconsciously, I went into my own little world to find a place to belong. I built my own little kingdom hoping I would belong there.
Me: Well it seems like when you do that, you have even more of a sense of separation. That makes you feel even more like you don’t belong. It’s like a vicious cycle.
Erik: Yes, and it’s a cycle of suffering, and if you keep perpetuation it while not getting the lesson, which is to recognize that that cycle is going on and choose its opposite, you continue to spiral.
Me (solemnly): Which is what you did.
Erik: For some people, that sense of belonging doesn’t come unless they find something to believe in. Then it’s not only finding a belief, it’s also about finding like-minded people who believe the same thing. For example, spirituality is a belief system that you can find a lot of people who share that belief. So you build a community. It’s all about feeling like you belong to a community.
