The Illusion of Respect

We’re trained to give respect to others at a young age.  We’re told to respect our elders, teachers, preachers, experts, authority figures, and people of a higher class even if they harm others or give us false beliefs.  We train children to respect the false self when we’re naturally hard-wired to respect only the True Self.  This is what flips our emotions so they no longer keep us on track.  To get free, we have to reverse this training.   It isn’t easy.  We have to give up wanting false respect and stop giving undeserved respect to others.  When we don’t follow society’s rules of respect, however, people see us as bad or wrong.

Normal respect happens when someone expresses their True Self.  They love us unconditionally or see who we really are.  They do something creative or demonstrate an amazing talent.  It’s like applause or appreciation.  It’s a temporary nod of thanks for sharing something beautiful, true, or pure with us.  But even those experiences should only generate temporary respect.

False respect is a robot-like response based on mental programming.  False respect is defined by illusory social standards, qualifications, or rules.  False respect is often considered permanent once we qualify for it.  If we have been given the magic wand of false respect, we can be a jerk and people will still have to listen to us and believe us.  This is how dictators get so much power.

Unnatural Respect

We can’t worship two masters.  We can’t live as a True Self while worshipping or believing false selves.  What we do on the outside mirrors what we’re doing on the inside.  If we’re listening to false selves outside of us, we also respect our own false self.  We disrespecting our True Self and God.

Unnatural respect is all about one thing and one thing only.  It serves to keep people in the masculine role who don’t deserve it.  We don’t question them or their beliefs.  We shut down our discrimination.  We give them the same power in our mind that we’d naturally give our True Self: but unfortunately, they don’t deserve that position.

Level Confusion

Sadly, we have infused respect with level confusion.  Ideally, our True Self would inspire all of our actions.  Other people might give us ideas or teach us things, but our choices would come from inside of us.  When choices come from our True Self, they’re always win-win for all; the True Self never harms or diminishes another.

However, when someone plays their “respect me” card, we don’t believe that we can say, “No,” because the authority figure has a pedigree, knowledge, or a role.  They didn’t earn our respect.  This is often hard to see.  We confuse the knowledgeable or privileged false self with the wise, omnipotent True Self.  We believe their authority is earned, but it isn’t.  Often the people with the most rules and beliefs are placed in positions of authority.  Unnatural respect slams us into the feminine role underneath false leaders.  Then we feel powerless to reclaim what’s rightfully ours.

FEAR…FEAR…and more FEAR

When we recognize that people who said they loved us were operating from win-lose beliefs, we naturally lose our false respect for them.  That makes sense.  We feel bad because we want to respect everyone.  But false selves don’t deserve respect.  If we look below the urge to obey them, we’ll find the fear, the beliefs, and the rules that need to go.

As we let go, we hear the voices of the people who have controlled our mind.  We must stand firm and discriminate, but our automatic reaction is usually to just obey or try to keep the peace.  We must do our best to only give respect to our own True Self, and that means disrespecting false selves no matter how much they scare or threaten us.  We have to let them go.  When we completely let the false voices within go, the people without lose their power as well.  It’s like we become invisible to them.

Finally, we’ve cleared out our OWN mind; we now deserve natural respect.  We no longer judge.  We think in win-win ways.  We’ve lost our fear.  We love our mind.  But the people around us don’t give us natural respect.  They’re still listening to and respecting false selves because they’re afraid not to.  This can be the worst stage of all.  We’ve worked so hard to reconnect with our wisdom and truth, and people think we’re full of shit because we aren’t saying what the false selves say.  It’s tempting to turn back, and I suspect many do.  Some get stuck in anger at this stage when people in their lives ask them to prove themselves; the people should ask their false authorities for justification but they’re afraid of their false authorities.

In these moments, we’re facing the earliest moments in childhood when we accepted the illusion because we believed we had no choice.  We couldn’t go off on our own; we were too young.  We’re remembering being small and yet knowing the truth, but no one understood or heard us.  Maybe we couldn’t even talk yet, but we felt emotion when something was false.  We cried.  For some, that was pretty much all the time.  Why didn’t they feel the same emotions?  Why did they demand our respect?  Why were we seen as bad or wrong?

If you allow this  sadness, powerlessness, and despair to erupt and listen as your beliefs arise, you’ll realize that you accepted beliefs about the world, yourself, and other people that weren’t true.  Listen, as your beliefs rise into your mind.  Realize they all generate strong emotion so they’re false; notice that they aren’t win-win for everyone.  Let them go.  You’re no longer a powerless child.  You did nothing wrong.  You were just an innocent True Self.  People who didn’t remember who they were saw you as flawed.  They were wrong.  You can let their error go now and be free.