People will always let you down...

My buddy Liam (aka:celtcub on LiveJournal) recently made a post about how "people will ALWAYS let you down".

I am right there with him in that belief, but at the same time I accept that the let down is just an extension of my own Expectations (the root of all Evil).

If hate is the opposite side of the same coin as Love (hate simply being love beyond our ability to control), then Shame is just the other side of the same coin as Expectation.

Suffering is therefore just the juggling act of keeping these coins in motion such that there can be no Hate without Love, and there can be no Shame without Expectation.

But what happens to this juggling act when society builds a resistance to one "attribute" that is not in sync with the behavior of the others?

In today's culture, there is an ever building resistance to Shame. While intellectually I can see that this is ultimately a good thing; emotionally my internal coping mechanisms are built on the interaction between all of these attributes; so when society develops a resistance to a given attribute then my coping mechanisms become anachronistic, meaning behaviors that would have moderated my suffering in "the past paradigm", actually INCREASE my suffering today.

What makes this so unbearable is the lack of compassion that followers of the current paradigm give to those of us stuck in a previous paradigm.

Intellectually I can understand this is in large part due to the vehemence with which followers of an old paradigm resist change, and thus there is an inevitable need to "punish" when the new paradigm becomes the given worldview. I mean, I really do get it.

I just wish "getting it" was the same as being immune to the pain of it.