Bad Dog

Humans do what they do for identifiable reasons. We are "caused" to behave the way we do. We also make choices, but we often (always?) make choices based on "information" which is unclear, biased, incomplete, etc. So that, even when we make choices to the best of our ability, we can make "wrong" choices; i.e., mistakes. Making mistakes is a very normal, sometimes helpful, other times harmful, and exceptionally common aspect of human existence.

I want to say something like: whatever I do, I tried my best to do the right thing, the good thing. But what if I am "willfully bad?" I.e., what if I consciously choose to do something "bad?" Part of me thinks that I simply wouldn't do this "in full consciousness." I.e., if I had time to sit and sense my own feelings and thoughts around a given choice, and if I had time to work out a reasonably true understanding of these aspects of myself, that I wouldn't do something intentionally "bad." Another way to say this is that even someone who appears to be doing bad or evil things doesn't think he/she is doing the wrong thing at that moment...?

In the heat of the moment, I will certainly make choices that I wouldn't make if I had more time. There's nothing bad about this. I can only do my best.... Or maybe, I can only do what I do. Or maybe, I only do what I do. I do what I do.

What if I decide to go hit someone "for no reason." Why would I do that? Where is the "badness" in me that would make me do something like that? What I mean is, I can't identify a "source of badness" (or of goodness) in me. There's no "badness injecting component," like the classic devil on the shoulder. There _is_ humanness: feelings, unconscious motives, logic, etc. A complex combination of these things in a person are what lead to behaviour. This is how I am. All of these things which go into making a human behave, these are NEITHER BAD NOR GOOD. They are only what they are. A feeling of anger. An perception of threat. The thought (feeling) to run.

So, I am neither bad nor good, but only what I am, which is emotion and memory and humanness, etc.

I am responsible for my actions, so that when I do something "wrong," I feel bad.

Telling myself (believing) that I am bad, fucked up, wrong, a failure, etc. This does me no good. It doesn't help me at all. It doesn't make me happy, or make me a better person. It certainly hurts me. It's what I learned to believe about myself. I don't believe it because I think it will help to counteract bad behaviour. I believe it because that's how I felt: I felt that when I did the wrong thing (or even nothing!), I was (passively or actively)abandoned, and that is-was all my fault, so that I must be _very_ bad. I was also sometimes told (indirectly) that the "wrong" things I did meant that I was "wrong."

Everything is one thing, and I am part of that thing. Or, non-dualistically, I am it. All of this seems to point to: no being can be bad or good. Events and actions can be bad or good, but not beings.

Feeling Wrong

What's that familiar feeling of the self? I'm just sitting here, doing this. What does that feel like? A lot of times, it doesn't seem to feel like anything. I have physical sensations, my upper back is hurting....

When I was very young, I felt like I was the center of the world, the center of the universe, the center of everything. I thought that everything that happened had something to do with me, that my mere presence affected everything that I perceived.

Because of this, whenever anything went wrong, I thought it was my fault. Of course, things often went wrong, and so I got the sense that I was very bad, fundamentally problematic. And, no one told me differently. In fact sometimes, people told me that I was a failure.

I didn't know exactly how I was bad, because it wasn't one thing or another that seemed to be my fault; it could've been anything. And so that general sense of wrongness within me grew. I couldn't think well enough to make sense of it...I was just too young, and my mind still hadn't developed much of an ability to reason.