I am
reading this book called "As a Man Thinketh" by James
Allen. (Free Book or YouTube) Its premise, as I understand it, is
that your circumstances are a reflection of your thoughts. To some
extent I can understand this. I understand self sabotage. I
understand that if you don't think you deserve to succeed you
probably won't. I understand that clearing out the demons of your
past will allow you to focus on getting to your future goals.
But I am
not sure I am convinced that "good thoughts equal good
circumstances and bad thoughts equal bad circumstances" is an
immutable law of the Universe.
Mr.
Allen wrote:
It
has been usual for men to think and to say, "Many men are slaves
because one is an oppressor; let us hate the oppressor." Now,
however, there is amongst an increasing few a tendency to reverse this
judgment, and to say, "One man is an oppressor because many are
slaves; let us despise the slaves."
The
truth is that oppressor and slave are co-operators in ignorance, and
while seeming to afflict each other, are in reality afflicting
themselves. A perfect Knowledge perceives the action of law in the
weakness of the oppressed and the misapplied power of the oppressor;
a perfect Love, seeing the suffering, which both states entail,
condemns neither; a perfect Compassion embraces both oppressor and
oppressed.
OK.
Obviously, I'm black, female, and Jewish; as are the scenarios that
flashed through my mind:
- a black person living in Africa during the 17th century, who ended up working in the hell of a sugar plantation in Jamaica, with a life expectancy of 9 years at best.
- a young woman, almost anywhere in the world today unfortunately, abducted, drugged into addiction, tortured into submission and forced into prostitution.
- a Rabbi in Germany during the 2nd World War, suffering in the camp and dying in the gas chambers at Sobibor.
Each of
the above with thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of others.
Of
course I have no way to know, but what if these people were moral in
their thinking before their circumstances changed? What if they even
managed moral thoughts afterward?
Or does
what happened to them, to all the "thems" it happened to,
mean that they were all weak, immoral thinkers?
This is
what I am struggling with.
It seems
to me that there must be circumstances beyond anyone's
control. I am not saying there are not choices a person may have
about how they deal with their circumstances, but I am having trouble
wrapping my mind around the idea that an ordinary person, going about
their lives on an ordinary day, who ends up the next week, enslaved,
prostituted, or dead had this happen to them because of their
disordered thinking.
The only
people I can think of who deserve the fates of the people above, are
the ones who did it to them. Despite what Mr. Allen says to the
contrary, I have no sympathy for the perpetrators. Perhaps that is a
flaw in my thinking.
The book
was written in 1902. In England. And near the height of the
British Empire. So maybe that is where this type of thinking comes
from. As we might say today "first world" thinking. From
the rulers. I wonder if those they ruled thought the same things.
I'm not
even sure why this bothers me so much. Except that some of the book
seems to make sense and some of it seems so fundamentally wrong.
I'm
wondering, perhaps hoping, that I'm misunderstanding.
But right now what I really most want is to stop thinking about this. Maybe my thinking really is flawed.