The Insult

Never insult an alligator until after you have crossed the river.
-Cordell Hull (Brainy Quotes)

I love this little quote and so see the obvious wisdom in it.  Eckhart Tolle in The Nature of Ego and Identity,  tells his audience that we should not insult people who are still very much unconscious, especially if they are bigger than us. Like the alligator they are likely to "snap" back and sometimes that snapping can result in physical harm. Ouch!

Seriously though...insult often leads to more insult, does it not? The quote applies to everyday human relating. Insults come in many forms during our interactions: verbal, nonverbal, mental or behavioural.  They come from the mouth of others and they come form the voices in our own head. Sometimes they are intentional, meant to hurt and other times they aren't.

We are all alligators to some extent.   We have a tendency to snap back when we hurt don't we and when we do we might be pretty vicious.  As human beings we insult and we are insulted. We play an ego against ego game where no one wins. The river, then, could represent the space of distance between little "me" and the greater Self we have to cross.  Until we are conscious and free of ego identification, we do not want to insult other egos.

Say what, crazy lady?

"Weirdo!"  "You are stupid!" "Lazy!" "You are just not good enough!" "You are not as pretty as she is or as strong as he is."

How do you feel when someone lays one of those babies on you?  I guess, if you are like the majority of us who are not quite fully awakened, you won't feel very good when insulted. You may not initially be aware of how you feel because, as is human nature,  we automatically and so quickly fly off into a counter reaction of some kind when it happens.  The attack-defense-attack all happens so fast we are often  not  even  aware of what is happening internally.

 If we took the time, however, to slow the "Thought-feeling-behaviour" reaction down, we would see that we are feeling very "diminished."  It is almost as if those words just stripped away  all that was valuable about us and left us small, and weak and so, so "less than" everyone else.   Insults sting big time and they lead to a whole chain of so called problematic behavior.

What's happening?

A winding down of the process backwards from the time our palm made contact with the other person's cheek or  the even more damaging counter insult fell from our lips, reveals that a series of things occur inside of us in response to the insult or our comparison to others.

• Someone outside of us or inside of us  (don't forget we often carry around a host of inner critics who love to insult us by comparing us to others) verbalizes, in one way or another, a judgment, an opinion, an idea about who or what we are.
• Our mind quickly owns it and tries to make sense of it with thought. 
• Thought dependent ego gets involved. As is the case for most of us, Shamer ego is standing in the corner of our psyches rubbing its greedy little  hands together in earnest anticipation  for such a comment to be fed to the mind.  It  leaps out and grabs it shouting, "This is what I need to show you (and Redeemer ego)  just how 'unworthy' you are. You are weirder, stupider, lazier, uglier, weaker than everyone else and just not good enough."
• We hear it!    We believe it!!!  We own it as truth! We decide we have fallen short in the comparison game. All that so called positive self-esteem we may have had crumbles and we fall thumping down the ladder rungs one at a time.
• Then we begin to feel pretty crappy.  We feel diminished and ashamed. Shamer ego is in heaven because it seems to have control of us and our experience.  We are not in the moment...we are in our head...stuck on that insult.  It will be all we will hear and the resulting feeling of shame will be all  we will know about Life for a period of time.
• The mind tries to restore it sense of self.  Redeemer ego steps in to rebuild this sense of self or to at least stop the mind and body from experiencing these nasty emotions.  It decides to "do" something about it. (Redeemer is a doer.) It needs to defend or attack to restore the now fragile and broken sense of self.
• We react behaviourally. We strike out in one way or another in an attempt to rid ourselves of this awful shame feeling and to further protect self. We say something even meaner back to the person who insulted us or if the insult came from another body we may even strike the other person . If the voice came from inside we may strike out at the person our mind is comparing us to with some insult.  We may also strike out at our own  body...pushing it harder, making it do more to restore itself-to be more than the other or we may numb in an unhealthy way. Our goal is to take the focus off our defectiveness by making the other person more defective than us in one way or another.  We project any sense of 'insult' away from self.
• We hurt because we were hurt. We defend and attack.

All this happens so fast, like a knee-jerk reaction.  We hear the insult and we react!

Does it have to be this way though?

No, when we begin to  wake up things will change.  When we become more conscious...we will not "react" to the insult.  We will see that it is ego that reacts, not who we really are.  We will see that it is ego that insults, not who we really are.  It is ego that insults and ego that reacts.   Ego against ego cause nothing but unnecessary suffering. 

We will also see when we wake up, that we are not our ego.  We are not this fragile sense of self we have become overly identified with that is at the mercy of Shamer and Redeemer's antics; that gets offended so easily.

We will see that we are not thought and thought cannot determine who or what we really are. We will see that mind has created "an idea" of us that is too limited to be us.

Eventually, eventually after much practice and waking up we will see that we are the spaciousness, the consciousness, and the awareness that watches the ego game at play.  From here we respond, rather than react.

So what  can we do when we get insulted?

When that insult comes our way...and it will someday from some source or another...we do not need to react, we do not have to play along. We can respond from a higher place.

• We work to be more aware in most of our moments so when the insult comes we are already there and prepared to deal with it in a healthy, conscious way. We stay present, stay conscious.
• If we are just awakening, and feeling that need to react, we remind ourselves that there is a better way to handle it. We can use the mantra, "I choose peace, other than this."
• We recognize the ego in the other person and we recognize the ego in us.  As soon as we see the insult and its request for reaction as an ego thing, we can withdraw from it and choose not to partake in a battle of senseless ego drama.
• We allow the insult and the internal feelings. We decide  not to struggle against it.
• We can use a tiny bit of thought, but I don't believe we have to, to see if there is some truth in the insult that we can learn from and grow from. 
• Instead of asking, "Is it true, am I really stupider than that person?" We ask..."Is my ego still trying to control me by getting me to compare or fall into the comparison game? Do I still have a desire to react and does part of me want to hurt that person or myself because of it?"
• Be aware of a tendency to want to project outward, to numb from the shame we are feeling, or to hurt the other person or ourselves.  Be aware of any remaining tendency to defend or attack.
• We stay aware and seek to be forgiving both of the other person and ourselves for not yet being where we want to be.
• Instead of reacting with ego, we can make a choice to respond with spirit. Spirit takes us above thought, not below it.  We can be open to the other person's pain and suffering (as well as our own) that lead to the insult and our internal response.  Just be aware of it and be compassionate
• That doesn't mean we own the insult or that  we allow ourselves to be abused...we just see, understand and walk away
• We decide to sit with the feelings generated by the insult instead of doing something about it.  (That includes to decide not to numb or harm self)
• We look beyond the reactivity of the other person to any pain that might be there and we forgive and remain compassionate.  (Pretty challenging when you feel like someone has just slapped you across the face, I know.)
• We remind ourselves that the real attack is not from the other but from our own minds and this need to protect this identification we have with the conceptual self most of us are stuck on.
• We remind ourselves that we are not this little image we have of ourselves ...we are so much more.  The other person is not what they are portraying to us in that moment...they are so much more.
• We are One. The other person may never realize that.  What is important, is that we do.

Insult me if you like lol. All is well in my world..

References

Tolle, Eckhart (Jan 2019) The Nature of ego and Identity. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEEb84yCQU0