The Technology of Kindness

“People do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. They prefer to live under some else’s idea of truth, to obey rather than think, to blame rather than act. The real battle is not between good and evil but between cowardice and courage – between those who dare to think for themselves and those who choose to the comfort of chains.”

 – Fyodor Dostoevsky

I have found that freedom is man’s greatest existential fear. Because real freedom ultimately comes with the unknown, and the unknown is anathema to survival. Our ego is simply a fear-based survival program that yearns for predictability and repetition. Lock me in a prison cell, tell me the rules and make sure my basic needs are met. That is the ego paradise, metaphorically of course.  Decorate your prison cell as grandly as you can but make sure the bars are solid and the door is locked. Dostoevsky brilliantly adds to this by pointing out that the ego doesn’t even want to take responsibility for locking itself up. It wants to blame.

People don’t really protest authoritarianism or tyranny, what they protest is taking responsibility for their own imprisonment and the possibility of freedom. Because that is what fear does. It leads you to fight for your life to stay in your cell and to demand yet more rules to keep you safe.  Fear demands that you find a villain to blame and a “side” to protest. You convince yourself you are in a fight of good versus evil and right versus wrong, but you fail to realize that you are just fighting someone else running from the same fear. Everyone thinks they are on the side of good and on the right side of history. Because the enemy doesn’t exist. It is just your fear of freedom.

The true battle that has gone on since the dawn of time, is between cowardice and courage. Cowardice is acting from a place of fear and courage is facing your fear with only Faith.  Either way, fear is the primordial energy that is at the middle of this battle and fear cannot be overcome with anger, blame, hate, righteousness and intolerance. Surprisingly, even endless rants on social media and labelling “the bad guys” with a variety of pejoratives also does work in overcoming fear. Only love can conquer fear because fear cannot exist in the presence of love.

I don’t want you to fear freedom and I don’t want you to live in fear, so I ask Love for the answer. “Love, what would you do?” and Kindness was Love’s answer. Kindness is not an answer your ego will like, and it will resist and bargain against it. But Kindness will be medicine for your soul, and it will bring you to Love.

A Call To Action – A Call To Love.

For just one day can you show kindness to everyone and everything? Not just in your actions, and your words, but in EVERY THOUGHT. Kindness for the people that have different opinions to you, that support different causes, have different beliefs, that see the world through a totally different lens than you. Can you be kind to all of them? Can you do this for just one day and feel how that feels to the soul? Can you find out if that brings you closer to love and further away from fear? What is there to lose? If it doesn’t work then I will refund all of your misery with no questions asked.

In Kindness – The Way