The topic got a lot of traction on FB today. Maybe I exhausted it. People like to be offended. This is the gas that fuels Social Media. Being offended breeds opinions that are thrown like rocks. Being offended feels like a wound, like being cut. What’s ironic is that being wounded on facebook feels like you body is cut, but it’s just words, little ants clicking across a white field. Reading these ants is a mental process; you and the ants are one mind, and you body is sitting in a safe room, yet you feel cut. These words reached out with this knife and cut you. Now we have to get rid of the cause of that cut, which were the words that offended me. Do we need to be offended?
If I don’t need to be offended, then why do I subject myself the to pain of being offended when there is no one in the room but me and the computer. It’s as if I enter this intermediate zone where these other people and I meet, in the no existence zone between his room and my room, and in this Intermediate zone I’m offended. And If I don’t do something to restore justice and balance—I now feel the victim of these ants that crawl across the white field—I create a monologue in my head like a hamsters wheel where I say what I didn’t say, when I heal my mind by my own thoughts after the fact.
But we never can. Thinking can’t heal my mind, not can thinking remove the offense. Thinking creates the offense! I think, therefore I’m offended.
What do you do when the offensive arrow comes? You take the hit, right in the gut. It’s just a feeling. It’s just a feeling, so don’t add a story that frames you as the innocent victim. It’s just a feeling. Leave it as Just This.
When you have absorbed the toxins, without reacting, then you can respond or not. Then you are free.
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