(This is Part 16 of a series. Go back to Part 15.)
7. Cultivation of resentment (the seventh source)
A seventh major source of suffering is the cultivation of resentment. We all have events happen to us where we feel that we lost something valuable or that injustice was done or that we were not treated well. Such events are virtually inevitable in a human life.
The problem arises when we hold on to those events by retelling ourselves stories about them. We have a story in which we are victimized in some way and we keep on repeating that storyline to ourself, over and over. As time goes on, our emotions of resentment, dislike, irritation, anger, hatred and so on strengthen and grow.
"They shouldn't have done that". "I was tricked". "He/she shouldn't have let that happen." "It wasn't fair". We've all had experiences of loss and picked up storylines to match, such as the ones above and countless others.
But that's not all. Not only do we repeat these stories to ourselves and others, but we tend to enlarge them and then generalise them: "Men are brutes". "Women can't be trusted". "Corporations will betray you". "Europeans are cynical". "Life is unfair". On and on it goes.
Whether these statements and others are "true" or not is, I'm sorry to say, beside the point—because repeating these stories to ourselves will simply make us more and more unhappy. And making ourselves unhappy doesn't help anyone or anything, least of all ourselves. Yet it's a remarkable fact that, although we all desire happiness, we all do things that tend to increase our unhappiness.
As Werner Erhard once said, "You can either be right, or you can have a good relationship: choose". No matter how "justified" we feel we are, repeating our stories—of how this or that shouldn't have happened, etc.—won't help us. It just cultivates resentment and makes us feel bad.
Closely related to the cultivation of resentment is the
complaint mode. In complaint mode our minds are constantly looking for—and finding—"what's wrong".
Now here's the interesting thing: It's always possible to find "what's wrong". There is no situation whatsoever for which the mind cannot find fault, cannot find things that it would like to be different. If we focus on those things, our world becomes one—in the background, and perhaps the foreground—of dark, heavy feelings of dissatisfaction.
One of the most important principles of reality, as far as I can tell, is that whatever we focus on expands. If we focus on what's wrong, on our story of injustice and feelings of dissatisfaction and discontent, that is what we'll get. This is what our life will look like. Furthermore, we'll collect more and more evidence that we're right, because we will see and experience everything through that prism.
What we feed our attention on every day is extremely crucial. For instance, if we read a certain type of material every day for years we'll almost certainly form a world-view in accordance with that material.
For instance, in his formative years (in Vienna) Hitler gorged himself on violently anti-Semitic pamphlets and periodicals. It's not a surprise that he would then strongly believe and act upon that point of view in his subsequent career—and even reinforce it by continually thinking and speaking about it.
What we continually think about becomes our reality.
This phenomenon, of course, is just as true of families, organizations, nations, movements and so on as it is of individuals. Whatever an entity continually "feeds upon" in its mental process will determine its outlook, its actions and its sense of collective happiness or unhappiness.
And too, sometimes those feelings of dissatisfaction and suffering—anger, fear, irritation, dislike, hatred, etc.—will act out in the external world in the form of slights, blaming, accusing, scapegoats, physical violence and so on—the whole spectrum. At that point, even if we delude ourselves that we're well-intentioned, we're just adding to the suffering in the world.
(This is the end of Part 16. Go to Part 17.)
—jim sloman, 12.19.05
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