causal awareness

I struggle every day with a human phenomenon known as blame, and I know others do, too, so I'm going to go through a thought process with a list. Some of the list applies to me or other people I know in real life, others I know across social medias, and still others I've read on blogs or in articles. I'll make this simple.

YOU did not cause your cancer. You might live in a body that is genetically and environmentally more prone to cancers, but your actions are not to blame for you being born in that body. There are plenty of people who never get cancers even though they do all the things that can contribute to cancers, and there are people who get cancers even though they do everything right to avoid them. We cannot see our body coding and the actual factors that actually trigger a group of cells to start skewing into madness, so how can YOU be to blame? That being said, yes, there are things we can do to limit the possibilities of aggravating cancer eruptions, and there are more things we can do to heal and restrict them. But never for a second believe that YOU caused your cancer.

YOU did not cause your arthritic condition. Choose one, there are so many kinds of inflammatory arthritic conditions on this earth. You might live in a body that responds incorrectly to information feedback, and it hurts, but you are not to blame for that pain you live with, the pain that makes everything hard, the pain that no one else understands. There are lots of people around us who can be as active as they want with their bodies and never elicit a self defeating inflammatory response. Good for them! But we cannot recode our bodies to stop responding incorrectly, so how can that be your fault? That being said, yes, there are things we can do to hold that response down, to stay functional, and to manage pain. But never for a second believe YOU caused or deserve your fibromyalgia, your achy joints, your severe spinal pain, your nasty headaches. NO ONE deserves pain like that, and you are fantastically brave living through it.

YOU did not cause your diabetes. A family could be genetically riddled with it, and one person gets skipped and can eat bags of candy without ever having a glucose spike. So hard not to be jealous of that, especially on holidays and other get togethers where people eat whatever they want without a care in the world. Logically, if we could cause our own diabetes, the entire human population would probably have died off by now, right? Our choices are not what causes an epic fail in our digestive system to process a major portion of our food. That being said, yes, you can make it worse by ignoring it, you can make it better by paying attention to it, and you can learn to live a long healthy life with it. And then there are some people who do everything right and still have a horrible time with it. NEVER feel guilty for having diabetes. Diabetes is no one's fault.

YOU did not cause your child's genetic defect. Spina bifida, cystic fibrosis, Down's, cerebral palsy, insert long list of genetic problems at birth with a variety of reasons for happening. Scientists find out why, medical experts look for ways to avoid them, but you did not bring that on your child through any fault of your own. We are innocent to the mysteries of the universe, and we do our best with who we are and what we have, and ironically, it might not even matter if you come from poverty or wealth for these things to happen. They simply happen, and we learn a great deal about ourselves learning to love and help special people with extra needs. That being said, we can now ask- Where would we be without this compassion in the world, and I daresay the extra drive to find out how our bodies function and thrive? Others who proclaim judgment being expressed are much further away from learning compassion and will take longer to understand what is missing from their lives. Simply nixing the problem has a way of backfiring, as we can see through history. People become harder and meaner when they weed out the weak, which casts long shadows on notions of spirituality. Some even suggest the weak are here for us to learn to be better. NEVER believe your child (or you, if you are an adult living with a genetic defect), is your fault.

YOU did not cause your mental illness. Brain chemicals are much more complex frontier than digestive chemicals, and neural synapses and miles of nerve pathways are more intricate than nearly anything else that is scientifically studied. This mystery of consciousness and awareness being possible on a physical plane is still so overwhelming that we still don't know what to do with it, so it's easier to make slots for behaviors, like a fishing tackle box. This goes here, that goes there, and if you don't fit a slot, then woe be to ye. We are finding out it doesn't work that way. Everyone's consciousness swims through a sea of chemical interactions, and some wade through sludges that make getting through a day very hard. Who in the world even wants that? And then the medical experiments- we haven't come that far from institutions and lobotomies, and now controversies over raising generations of medicated children. No, you didn't cause any of it. We're all swimming in this chemical sea, and so much is easily masked with drugs and alcohol in attempts to deal with something we still don't understand is happening. That being said, yes, opening our eyes to learning new cognitive concepts is the first step, and choosing to learn how to live better with our chemical imbalances is sometimes preferable to self doubt, self loathing, and self harm, but YOU didn't bring this upon yourself.

YOU did not cause the bad weather happening to you and your people. Droughts, hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding, fires, meteor hit, lightning strikes, hail damage, tornadoes, wind sheer, avalanches, and all the resulting illnesses, crop failures, transportation problems, famines, injuries, deaths- all are just part of living on this planet. You are not to blame for where you live and your behavior didn't cause a deity to mass torment everyone around you. Sooner or later one area or another will go through a massive tragedy, and that is when we find out how kind and generous the rest of the world can be. That being said, yes, we can take steps to make surviving catastrophic events more probable. We are working on early warning systems, better travel in some places, programs to help those in need of rescue, and for those who can afford it, insurance plans to hopefully make rebuilding easier. NEVER EVER *EVER* think the world is terrible for everyone because a handful of people deserve punishment, because it doesn't make sense for any God who is rooting for humans even slightly to be meaner than we are, seriously.

I could go on in many other ways. I'm not even going to touch being born into religions, political regions, skin colors, and especially orientations (which I personally think are as varied as everything else we live with in our bodies), but you can see how none of us cause our own circumstances that we are born into. There is no reason to blame ourselves for what we must live with, and no reason to hate others for what they cannot help and didn't choose. NONE OF US GOT TO CHOOSE WHO WE ARE. Anyone who thinks they can judge another from where they sit very simply just wasn't born into a different body, different family, different place on this earth.

There is this thing that happens inside of people when other people judge. We turn it into self loathing and self harm and then feel frustrated and angry back at the world for our self blame. We don't mean to make things worse, but hating ourselves and other people based on what other people say or think doesn't help ANY of us at all. Fear and sadness drive us into dark places, and allowing ourselves to be driven into ways of thinking that we abhor is super fail. We can believe what we want to.

I believe we live on a really tough planet in fragile bodies and most of us are really really scared because bad things keep happening and we feel like there's no hope sometimes. Yes, but that's only one side of the coin we call awareness. I also believe we live on the most beautiful planet in our galaxy in awesome bodies that teach us what being real heroes is all about, and WE are the hope we are looking for.

Be excellent to each other, never give up (never surrender!), and go be awesome. I love you guys.