We had a panel discussion the other day about the kind of troubled kids depicted in my book Stolen Boy and the film Alpha Dog. Somebody spoke about all the youth-related violence, and someone else wanted to know what we could do to stop it. And, of course, the first thing that came to my mind was the idea that love and compassion would be great places to begin, two of the greatest ways ever of staying out of harm’s way.
You see life’s philosophy is key when it comes to paving the way to our realities. If we believe we can make a difference in our lives-and to those around us-then we begin to put our energies into those difference-making decisions that we create. If we don’t believe we can change the course of our reality, then we tend to not concern ourselves with the repercussions of our actions, negative, or otherwise. We just act, believing that there is no relation to our ill actions and our negative reality in life.
A discussion then took place that labeled these people who populated our stories as psychopathic in nature. I had to disagree. To me, the main characteristic of a psychopath is one who has no conscience. I disagreed with the laboratory analysis that all these participants, parents included, were psychopaths. Because they cared about what they were doing. They were devastated at the results. And they realized their lives would never be the same as a result thereof.
Does the fact that someone makes the horrible decision to take another’s life as an effort to protect one’s self and his family make him a psychopath who does not care about another human’s life? Probably not. But it does mean that this person has put his energies and consciousness into the wrong things. He could have changed the result by plugging different, more positive energies, into the equation. And he can do that at any time.
We can avoid violence just as easily as we can avoid the hatred, animosity, and the misery that afflicts so many of us. All we have to do is become something else. When we live through fear, as these kids did (fear of being hurt, fear of family being hurt, fear of going to prison for the rest of their lives), and we try to mask that fear with alcohol and drugs, we tend to attract into our lives what it is that we are fearing. We do this because we are manipulating the energies around us to coincide with the vibrations of our negative emotions.
But when we begin to tune out the violence and the fear of violence and the other negative aspects of our lives the process of reprogramming ourselves has begun. The key is to actually believe it. To believe that by not putting any energy into the violence or negative aspects of our lives, by not putting any thought whatsoever into them, then we begin to see our energy bucket fill with what it is that we want. But the key is to keep doing that. To keep visualizing the positive aspects that we want to become. To think and believe and expect the wonderful things that life has to offer. Only then will we begin to realize them.
We must keep telling ourselves what it is that we want to become. If we want love in our lives-and that’s a decision that we have to make-then we become love. Our daily mantra becomes “I am love.” “I am peace.” “I am happiness.” “I am everything that is beautiful under the universe.” And we start to train ourselves to bridge the path to greater effects in our lives.
But it all starts with us. Others can label us how they want. But that’s their labels, not ours. We do not have to live with their labels. We need to create our own. By becoming very peaceful, loving, tolerant, and compassionate creatures we begin to create beauty around us to replace the violence. And isn’t this what we’re all really striving for in the first place?
