It seems that our inner lives are often dominated by a strange evaluatory consciousness, which is endlessly busy deciding which results were in our personal favor, or not — who was to blame, and why, and what the ‘right’ thing could, should, or would have been… this ‘right’ thing always being, of course, something that was not perceived to occur or result.

Then, other aspects of ourselves respond to these fictions with reactive fevers of projection, what should be done, vengeance, justice, etc. We may actually visualize carrying out acts which we would never ordinarily engage in, and which we would almost certainly detest post facto.

Our culture actually scripts us to ignore all of this, demonstrating to us endlessly that all this is perfectly natural. Unfortunately it is not really a demonstration. It is an instruction. And it is incredibly momentous. We all learn it, and most of us learn it to our grave and lasting detriment, because every form of addictive and self-harming acting out will spring specifically and generally from the body of this single monster.

To paraphrase the code of the monster:

“You should be offended when something wrong, harsh, or unfair is done or happens to you. And the amplitude of your offense should be (at least) proportionate to the sum of all such offenses done you and that due to the current offense.”

If one pursues this choice, the two inward monsters grow endlessly. They inflict agony, fear, wrath, stress, addiction, delusion, misdirection and disease upon us endlessly. This is all ‘in the name of the bad things done / good things not done (to / with / for) me.’ They are hideous parasites whose tiny useful functions have been catastrophically magnified into demons… and they are powerful enough to consume and destroy every aspect of our lives and relationships.

Moreover, these evaluations are fatuous. They are largely incorrectly connotated and severely hyperbolized for the sake of insuring the ongoing dominance of these two modes of psychoemotional reactivity… the one that demonstrates wrongs done and the other, deciding what appropriate actions comprise ‘justice’. Any reasonable evaluation would require a breadth of temporal and relational perspective that is impossible in a lifetime, nevermind a moment.

We cannot really see deeply into time and relation, and therefore ‘good’ is prone to be somewhat of an invention. In fact, it appears that ‘fortune and misfortune’ are a lot like night and day: they only come as a pair.

We will have perceptions, perspectives and feelings, and it’s useful to attend and explore them. But let us not turn them into facts with which we burn down the integrity of our minds, our hearts, our spirits and our relationships.

Divorce the demons.

The position of merit is uncertainty.