Victim Consciousness

Anytime we believe that we have been put upon, inconvenienced or are pessimistic we may be under the influence of victim consciousness. It is a way of looking at life negatively if it does not work obviously or immediately to our advantage according to our expectations. It is a predisposition to look first to what is wrong and to continue to feel that way even if things later turn out to be beneficial. The most prominent emotions associated with it are self-righteousness, self-pity and depression.

Victim consciousness is an outgrowth both of the survival instinct and social conditioning. It is more than a habit; it is a perceptual filter that reviews information about the world in terms of scarcity, threat, competitiveness and potential loss, and sharpens the bad and dulls the good before letting it through to our conscious minds. It subtly influences us to look for peril at the gate, the wolf at the door, and danger around the corner. It involves feeling trapped and alienated by our experiences; it says that life is not to be completely trusted; it hints that we do not really belong here; and it warns that we will be exploited if we are not careful.

It is important to realize that victim consciousness is more prevalent than we know: it pervades what we read, see, hear, talk and think about. It is in a child’s claim that his sibling’s cookie is bigger than his own, a neighbor’s accusation that the government does not give a damn about the common citizen, and in many other charges we make of advantage-taking, betrayal, or abandonment.

Most of our expressions of victim consciousness, such as complaints about the weather or a long line at the checkout, are relatively innocuous. The problem is that because they habitually make up part of our everyday thought and conversation, without our knowing it they help maintain a negative frame of reference toward life. In this way a victim-perspective can become a self-fulfilling, self-reinforcing cycle, making real peace hard to find. 

Every time we complain or make a negative comment or support this in someone else, we might want to look closely to see what our expressions represent. We may be innocently and unwittingly supporting the view of victim consciousness.

Taking Responsibility

Personal growth requires that we take responsibility for our feelings

and actions. 

This is not simply a matter of being conventionally moral or virtuous, 

and it has nothing to do with the concepts of taking blame, being 

honest with others about what we have done, or being willing to 

accept our punishment. It is a high level learning that liberates us 

from much of the limitation of unconscious living by recognizing a 

fundamental truth, which is that our feelings and actions are 

centered within, and that we are the only ones who really have

control over them.

What is so important about this is that it is only when we locate

the center of our reactions within us that we have any hope of healing

them and moving beyond them. Once we realize that no one else can 

really make us do or feel anything, we can begin to take charge

of ourselves in a new way, and to manage our energy consciously

rather than have it at the mercy of untold influences. 

This takes commitment and mindfulness, because our inclination is 

to place the responsibility for what we do not like in ourselves outside 

of us. But this is our energy and we want to have as much of that 

available to us as possible. Therefore, we need to transform it, not 

dismiss it.

Looking inside as the source of our feelings and actions is also a

path to peace and happiness. This is for two reasons. One is that we

have such little practical control over what goes on around us. It is

hard to predict what others might do, or what the environmental

conditions are going to be, so by not relying on them for our 

happiness, we are less likely to be disappointed and frustrated when 

they prove naturally changeable.

Even good people will do things that we do not like, and they

can thereby easily let us down if they do not meet our 

expectations. The economy and the weather are essentially 

unpredictable, so that if our happiness depends on how our 

investments are doing, or if the ball game gets played, we have 

a problem. The fact is that most of the universe functions 

outside of our awareness, direction and control, which is reason 

enough to go inside rather than outside for satisfaction.

The other reason is that peace and happiness have to do more

with how we personally interpret and regard what happens than

with what actually happens. This is why two people can ostensibly

experience the same event and have such different reactions. For

example, one of us might feel liberated by winning a fortune

because we believe it will simplify life, while another may see it as

complicating rather than simplifying life, and therefore never even

play a lottery game.

Peace and happiness are lived from the inside out, which means

that if they do not begin within, they do not occur at all. The occasional

sense of them that happens when interpersonal and environmental

conditions meet our desires is not the real thing, regardless of what we 

have been led to believe. 

Once we have gone within and found them, we forever know the difference, 

and we add to them by no longer hoping people or conditions will meet our 

needs, or trying to manipulate them to do so. We prefer inner control to that 

of controlling others or the conditions around us. It is the only way to feel 

that we are free of external forces.

A New Look at Anniversaries

    Buddha did not want his followers to celebrate his birthday after he was gone. This was ostensibly because he was not going to be reborn again, and because finishing life for good was more valued than any birth. He wanted people to think in terms of ending the serial birth and death cycle altogether. So, the admonition not to celebrate his birth makes sense.

   But, there is another way to think about Buddha’s admonition. With attachment, and restricted movement in mind, we might generalize from birthdays to all cyclical celebrations if they harbor static thoughts and images and re-kindle old emotional reactions.

   It may seem excessive to examine annual celebrations as potential targets of change. We are quite fond of them, after all, and they provide both structure to the year and a format of sorts for interacting with loved ones, friends and others. The major ones give us a sense of connectedness with people worldwide. And, they have been part of our cultural experience forever, which gives them a sacred or hallowed aura.

   However, in the spirit of releasing the flow of consciousness at every opportunity, which means identifying all instances where there are strictures in it, we will want to assess how much emotional energy is invested in religious and national holidays, Mother’s and Father’s days, Valentine’s Day, and all similar anniversaries.

   Each one of these celebrations has the potential of focusing consciousness inefficiently, sometimes well in advance of the actual day. Many people prepare for Christmas for months, puzzle over just the right card or gift for Valentine’s and Mother’s Day, and feel a sense of dread if they have no one to celebrate these annual days with and imagine themselves being alone on them. Each of the celebrations tends to carry a pool of images and emotions with them. Sometimes these are manifest in clear memories. Sometimes they are represented by un-identifiable emotions. Regardless, their content is static rather than flowing, and that is the only point.

     Even though we realize that the evolution of consciousness is not entirely linear, we want it to be as uninhibited in its progression as possible. Becoming as aware as we are able to be of our attachments is our way of contributing to the smooth flow of the process. Being true to the process of always moving forward requires that we not encourage the continuation of any forms of behavior that might get in the way.

    Keep in mind that, although we may yearn for the good old days, there really was no such thing as a golden age. That yearning and all nostalgia is our conservative nature at work maintaining the sense of an existing self. Everything Ego hints that we will find there we soon can recognize for its illusory quality once we observe it without reacting in the old ways and decide to bid all of it easy passage.

    Because allowing all energy to flow is in concert with our highest development, no longer being captivated by an anniversary or holiday is more rewarding than any feeling that full engagement in those celebrations can provide. We have been in the practice of looking forward to going backward, after all, which cannot be in the interest of real progress. The feeling of liberation that follows consciously reducing involvement in or exiting old cycles is better than what any celebration can offer.

    Satisfaction in re-cycling through old places is always temporary: the cycle always has to be repeated to keep the feeling of satisfaction fresh. Investing, or more accurately, re-investing energy in these “boosters” or “fixes” that keep that feeling of fulfillment current is inefficient and ultimately a drag on progress. Temporary satisfactions need temporal-based, static consciousness. They are part of what maintains the status quo.

    In the end it is not that we have to obsessively ignore or avoid such things as birth dates and solstice celebrations. Aversion, after all, can be just as energy-wasting as any other form of attachment. We can join in the fun if we do it with the same aim as we have for everything else in our conscious lives, which is to quietly pay attention to any emotional reactions we might have and to gently let them pass.

    If the idea of letting holidays and other anniversary-oriented activities pass without involvement makes you queasy, you may not be ready for that particular piece of work. People do wonder about how they will fill that time if not in celebration. They also feel odd at not joining in with others in what everyone has become used to thinking of as natural and necessary if we are to feel like we belong and to be happy.


    All temporal things pass, and if they are attachments in your consciousness, even though they may provide some feeling of well-being for a while, that will change. It has to, as time is going to pass and they will end. Taking a gently proactive, conscious approach to de-investing emotionally in them will, in the long run, be more likely to provide what you hope to find in the celebratory activities themselves. 

Learning and Enlightened Living

           Cycling has a prominent role in human social adaptation. It is the fundamental tool employed to assure the attachment of information that each culture provides its children though formal and informal education. When important things like customary points of view do not stick in a child’s mind the first time they are heard, they almost certainly will with enough exposures. 

            For example, think about how children learn the alphabet or multiplication tables. Repetition is the most reliable avenue to the rote learning these require. The alphabet is taught as a song that is performed for proud parents and adoring grandparents. Cards with multiplication data are “flashed” by teachers, tutors and parents until the information they hold is ensconced in the brain. 

What attaches is rewarded and additionally affixed by favorable adult reactions, the feeling of competence that results from performing well on quizzes and tests and competing successfully with peers, and the very natural sense of personal satisfaction that comes with attaining and possessing new knowledge, all of which bolster one’s identity. This basic accumulation then facilitates the attachment of similar cycling material, resulting over time in the masses we know as language and mathematics specifically, and a pool of knowledge more generally. 

This same process helps instill our attitudes, preconceptions and biases. As impressionable youngsters we hear adults making comments while watching the news or at the supper table and unconsciously take note. When similar comments are repeated by influential others, they begin to take on a conceptual structure that gets caught in the net of all of our other social learning. We then repeat these ourselves in conversations with our age mates, thereby strengthening their hold on our thinking. 

Being part of a group that shares similar ideas provides the sense of belonging that we as social beings all require. In order to gain affirmation and acceptance, we may even agree with things that do not resonate with the rest of our experience. This new learning, together with all attendant emotions, becomes the filter through which is unconsciously decided what is allowed in afterwards and what is rejected. It helps inform our perspectives on others and the world and becomes the bedrock of our cultural identities. Having become entrenched, it is often impossible to erase. 

It is the cycling of family, community, social, sub-cultural and cultural perspectives that results in beliefs and attitudes that persons outside of any of these social structures find hard to imagine because of their own programming. People might accuse others of having been “brainwashed” only because of their own contrary indoctrination. 

Once having adopted a point of view, it is hard to test if it is realistic, valid or accurate. This is because we measure it against what we know, which in a particular setting has been influenced in a circular way by what most others have agreed is realistic, valid or accurate. 

Knowing this, we do not have to first examine our knowledge stores for ideas that may or may not be true. In terms of the kind of progress we wish to make, shaking off old beliefs and notions and replacing them with new ones is not primarily what we are out to do. 

Remembering that enlightenment means subtraction, not addition, our work is to allow all of these things their place, but more as if they are historical artifacts or documents in a traveling museum, and not what we reference ever again as part of our conscious awareness. 

Just sit quietly and watch all thoughts and their attendant emotional reactions as they cycle through awareness again and again without trying to change anything. This is enlightened learning.

The "Real" Self

Self is the sense we all have of being separate and unique among all other human beings, and is what causes us to see all of the rest of the universe as background.

You are you and I am me, and we experience everything around us as simply the backdrop that helps us stand out. 

One of the really interesting things about the self is that we experience it as real; but, where is it? There is nothing solid to point to or hold on to, and yet we have as much certainty about its existence as we do about anything material in this world.

To add to the confusion, there is a tradition in Eastern philosophy that talks about the self as an illusion; a point of view that says that the self does not exist and that it is useless to spend any time attending to it.

However, in the West, we pay lots of attention to the self, talking in terms of self-esteem, self-worth, self-image, self-love, healing the self, the higher self, and finally, personal growth, which implies the forward movement of the self.

One of the more caring things we can say when parting is, “take care of yourself.”

The self exists. It is not just a concept or an idea; it is an actual structure. Only it is a mental rather than a physical structure. But we sense it to be substantial in the same way that we think of anything physical as substantial. 

What makes perceiving this non-material self the same as any physical structure is that the self has all of physical evolution behind it. All physical developments are the platform of mental evolution.

The self followed billions of years of the universe generating matter and then coalescing matter into form, and all of the time it took the earth to become capable of sustaining life. 

The human brain took many millions of years after that to become what resides in our head today and gives us our ability to experience separateness and existence.

(Nothing else has our ability to see our separateness from everything else, which is the requirement for perceiving existence.) 

After evolution generated the material world, which culminated in the development of the human brain, a second creation occurred to generate the new mental world.

With the development of this world of abstract thought and imagination, a fundamental shift occurred in the relative importance of the physical and mental realms in determining what was “real.”

While the physical manifestations of consciousness remained intact as a base, the mental expressions of consciousness began to dominate awareness.

An easy way to see this, for example, is in the fact that the brain and central nervous system have evolved to react in just the same ways to threats that are imagined as to real physical danger. We are capable of being traumatized from fear and worry without actually having to have an experience to set off.

The mental world trumps the physical world in terms of our perception of what is real. And, in evolutionary terms, that is entirely appropriate.

Remember, the end point of evolution is our ability to be aware. In order to be aware and to be able to trust what we are aware of as real, we have to have the same sense of “substance” about our awareness as we do everything material that came before it.

And we do. 

More on Karma

A karmic perspective can help with a more peaceful adaptation in the world through its effect on how we view the attitudes, behavior and experiences of others. When we consider life experiences in terms of contexts for learning, we are less likely to be judgmental, to compare other people with ourselves, or to intervene in their lives prematurely and inappropriately. 

In truth, regardless of what we might believe or what values we might hold, we really have no idea what contexts other people require for their development. This includes our own children and other loved ones. 

The very idea that we all are here to grow should help us leave everyone alone to do what has to be done. Of course, our own experiences in the very same developmental process should season our observations with compassion, and guide us as to when an intervention is warranted. Too much protectiveness, bailing people out of the troubles they have caused and need to learn from, and thinking that we can walk another’s rightful path might only enable repetitive growth-inhibiting behavior  and encourage another cycle of suffering. 

Living life fully is necessary to get the full benefit of the contexts that we are in, and this includes the difficult experiences as well. Thus, if we ever question why we are going through all that we do, or looking back, why we behaved as we did, karma provides the answer. All of it is for our later use; all of it is meant to moves us along.  

On this basis, we may want to reconsider any negative connotations the law of karma might have in our minds. Many of us are used to thinking in terms of sin and punishment for behavior that does not meet certain standards. Plus, we have an inclination to superstition in our make-up and easily slip into false conclusions about unpleasant consequences to our choices of behavior. 

The fact of the matter is that contexts are learning devices, not punishments. When we misuse one, or misidentify it as something other than it is, we get to revisit it with the possibility that this time we will be ready to absorb its benefits. Like remedial classes or summer school, the developmental urge of consciousness provides us with the chance to learn the material and earn the credits for it that we had passed on before. 

Once we catch on to the karmic process by way of our growing conscious awareness, we will use the possibility of consequences and of having to go through another round of the same “stuff” in the future to motivate us to get things right this time. After all, if we did not enjoy it the first time around, we are not going to like it any better in lives to come. 

Besides, having already tasted the light-ness of higher consciousness, we will want to avoid any future slowing of our further progress in that direction. The bottom line in karma is to work efficiently now so no energy will have to be expended on remediation. 

So, recognizing karma as a matter of missed or misused opportunities is conducive to lightening the future load. From this point of view, we are able to become quickly aware of what we have done or not done and see how approaching it differently at this juncture could keep that particular karmic cycle from happening again, or at least minimize its later effect. And as a sort of bonus, when we recognize that we have done it better now than we might have in the past we find that we are more at one with life than ever.

Living Like a Window

     There are several ways of describing and prescribing escaping the pull of Ego and the self that have been popular over the years. One that we use to epitomize gracefully letting life take its course is “going with the flow.” To go with the flow means not fighting the inevitable and always attempting to be at peace with the way things happen to be. 

     Thus, when you encounter someone who seems to be just living life without overly planning it or trying to control the outcome of a lot of it, you might describe him or her as “going with the flow.” 

     A somewhat more religious version of this attitude is “let go and let God.” This phrase suggests eliminating any attempts at controlling circumstances by allowing a more powerful being to take over. Since you cannot literally hand your cares to anyone, this phrase mainly requires just what the previous one does, which is to relax your conscious grip on things that seem beyond you and trust that you will be cared for. 

     A comparable popular Asian expression of the letting-go sentiment that is fairly unfamiliar to westerners is “wei wu wei,” which translates as “doing not-doing.” This phrase refers to the practice of being so elegantly at-one with whatever it is you are involved with that it seems as effortless as just laying back and being still. As with going with the flow or turning things over to a higher power, the serenity implied in such a way of being is compelling.  

     One more way of describing mentally stepping away from trying to be in control that may sum up what the effect of all such efforts might look like is the reflection “deeds are done, yet no doer can be found.”  With this, the actor disappears in the action so that the outcome appears to have achieved itself. Such an experience is one that a participant may be aware of afterward as if coming out of a trance to discover that a certain feat has been accomplished and asking, “Was that me doing that?”  

     In a sense, even if none of them actually recognize it, each of these phrases represents a prescription for disconnecting with Ego and suspending the self so that the evolutionary progression of awareness is unhindered. As all of them have great appeal to anyone who seeks a more peaceful way to go, any of them would make a great bumper sticker or would rate a place on the refrigerator door as a daily reminder of changing one’s approach to life. 

     But, in truth, even with the best of intentions, for most of us a concept such as really letting go or doing not-doing represents an elusive ideal. There are two important reasons for this. One is that, like sound bites, they all contain an important truth in a compressed and manageable form which makes it seem familiar and eminently accessible. 

     However, regardless of being able to handily bounce them around in our minds or in conversations about becoming mellower, they are not so readily transferred into action. As with most popular prescriptions, there are no instructions included. While it may seem as natural as falling asleep, if you really stop to consider it, there is nothing easy about visualizing the merger of deed and doer much less really turning our lives over to another being to sort out. 

     The second reason is that an instruction such as “just let go” is basically at odds with Ego, and is therefore the target of all manner of resistance. Ego’s job is affirming and perpetuating the existence of the self. Therefore, it is only comfortable when it is running the whole show. If it had a slogan it would certainly be “let go and let Ego,” which means that, until we are really conscious of its workings, we are more likely to be in its control while thinking that we have control. 

     There is something called the “wing-walkers’ axiom” that cautions: do not let go of what you are holding onto until you are holding onto something else. This is how Ego normally works.  It just seems naturally unwise for us to not try to have control. So, when we do try to just give things over our minds fill with distracting thoughts and fears and what-ifs, and we find that as soon as we try to back away from one concern, we seem to latch onto another. 

     Therefore, we find it hard not to watch the news, or check the weather. We keep praying that we receive help and release. We light candles and say incantations. We feel eerily superstitious about maintaining rituals and routines. We check and recheck, plan and go over the plans again. We resist delegating even when it would be more efficient. 

     In the end, the basic functioning of the self makes truly letting go the most demanding of tasks. And there is a hidden irony, which is that the act of letting go keeps control where it has always been: we are the ones who control giving up control. 

     We are in charge of the “letting” in the letting go. Even doing not-doing suggests the action of engaging in a process. And as we have seen, any supernatural being that we imagine who might take charge is also a function of Ego. We are trying to make something happen that really needs to just happen all on its own. 

     The instruction to “live like a window” is a step up from all of these approaches. A window is simply an opening through which things flow. With glass in place, light, color, and all other visual phenomena pass. With glass removed, potentially anything can pass. Whatever might be present will just go by on its own. 

     Living like a window is perfectly attuned to the evolution of consciousness. It allows the practitioner to separate from the grip of Ego in a manner that does not set off its alarms or cause it to automatically institute countermeasures. This is because there is no direct assault on Ego; in fact, there is no potentially disturbing activity of any kind at all. 

     Being window-like allows the self to continue completely unchanged. It uses the self and Ego as contextual elements to play off of as a means to further growth. 

     Window-ness suggests continuous, unimpeded movement; what happens to come our way is free to transit through. To live like a window means allowing the “flow” to pass through you. No having to let go; no turning things over to anyone; no doing anything. You are just an opening through which all things stream.

     The practitioner is free to participate fully in life while his or her conscious awareness remains independent of all activity. 

     (Adapted from “Live Like a Window, Work Like a MIrror: Enlightenment and the Practice of Eternity Consciousness”)