TonytheRainbowHealer

So one of my favorite ways of studying religion and spirituality, is to examine and look for the Universal truths that can be found in any given religious or spiritual path.  Humans spend so much time bickering and going to war over what religion is best or who’s spirituality is better.  It really is quite ridiculous, and humans are missing the point.  All the paths offer something new.  All the paths have some truths and some not so truths in them.  The reason the Universe has given us so many paths to choose from is that every soul is unique.  Every individual needs something different to help them along their spiritual journey and to gain the growth they need to expand their soul.  What works for one person, doesn’t necessarily work for another.  However there are some things that work for everyone and that are, in fact, mentioned in most, if not every religious and spiritual path on the table for our choosing.  I term these items “Universal Truths,” and I look for these little nuggets of gold wherever I can find them.  The one I would like to discuss today is the so called “golden rule.”

The golden rule basically states something like this:  “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.”  It can also be expressed in the negative as the so called silver rule:  “One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated.”  The golden rule appears in almost every religious and spiritual text on the planet.  I found an awesome comprehensive list online here if you are curious, but every religious and spiritual path from Christianity to Buddhism, from Hinduism to Wicca, from Scientology to Islam mentions it as well as multitudes of different philosophers.  If I could sum up the entire way to live your life into one simple phrase, I would pretty much state this rule.  In fact, if I was allowed to only pick one thing that would make the world a better place regardless of one’s own spiritual inclination, this would be it.  The path to world peace really just boils down to treating others with love and respect.

Why the hell is this so freaking hard?  It is amazing how cruel people are to each other on this planet, and it is no wonder people get depressed and driven towards suicide.  To experience this, all you need to do is to watch the news (which I don’t recommend unless you want to be bombarded with propaganda and fear porn), troll the internet (try reading the comments section on a blog or news website, scrolling through social media sites, or go to a chat forum), or attend a school and witness the bullying that occurs daily to students in schools all over the world.  Unfortunately, if one looks back throughout history, we can pretty much see a steady stream of insanity has tormented humans, animals, and plants since the dawn of time.  While it might sometimes seem we are living in darker times, there is always light and love to be found, and one just needs to focus on the positive and those who are emitting light and love in their daily lives to find it.  In fact by focusing on those amazing people, you will draw the amazing people into your life, and the not so amazing toxic and negative people will fall away.

So what is causing people to be so mean?  There are many reasons.  This planet is a battleground between the light and the dark.  It is the place where both ends of the spectrum of positive and negative come to battle out that eternal battle that seems to never end.  There are unseen forces, both dark and light, that influence us and our surroundings.  This is also a place we decide to be born into just so we can experience the battle and also to test ourselves as spiritual beings.  We are given the gift of free will to make choices, and it is through making choices that we learn.  There are great lessons in learning and experiencing both the light and the dark, endless lessons really, and those lessons drive us towards our ultimate goal of wisdom, enlightenment, soul growth, and expansion.  The physical earth realm provides us with the ultimate testing ground, and we are able to evolve faster here than in any other realm.  Every soul is at a different point on their path towards enlightenment so some souls have lived many lives and have had much more experience in learning lessons.  These are the “old souls” if you will.  Many more are middle-aged souls while others are younger or even brand-spanking-new-first-life-out-of-the-driveway souls.  I am of course referring to reincarnation and not simply human age during one life span.  The younger the soul, the more inexperienced (or less wise, and I really don’t mean that in a derogatory way), which means the more likely they are to make a massive blunder during their current incarnation.  Every soul has done the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things during some or several of our incarnations.  We just choose to forget about these things when we agree to come here again or it could get in the way of us completing our missions for our current incarnation.

Another huge cause of why people are mean has to do with the human ego and the fact that the ego state is currently so strong on this planet both collectively and individually.  I will talk more extensively about that in the near future.

Apparently the golden rule can also be tricky for some people.  Due to a slight misinterpretation, the golden rule can become not quite so golden.  In 1903, George Bernard Shaw stated, “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”  Author and freethinker Ali Sina comments:  “A much more accurate definition of the Golden Rule is: Treat others with the same consideration and respect that you wish to be treated.  It does not mean do to others exactly what you like to be done to you. For example, if you like peanut butter, it does not mean you should feed it to someone who is allergic to it, which can kill him.  It does not mean you should take your wife who likes concerts, to a basketball game because you like basketball or invite your Hindu friend to a barbeque because you are a meat lover when you know he is vegetarian” (Source – www.religioustolerance.org which by the way is a great site filled with tons of fantastic religious and spiritual information).  The golden rule is not forcing your own ego and personality desires onto someone else whether they like it or not.  History has been littered with instances of people “treating others the way they would want to be treated” because it is “for their own good” or “what is right for society.”  This often happens when one person’s religion or moral compass dictates what should be right for everyone whether it is true or not.  Another spiritual teacher of mine always says “Don’t should on me, and I won’t should on you.”  Unless you are under the age of 18 and your parent is trying to prevent you from physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually maiming or killing yourself or other people, nobody should be telling you anything that you should or should not do.  People have used religion to justify everything from racism to homophobia, from misogyny to social inequality.  Some of the worst atrocities that have happened on this planet were done “for the good of the whole” or because “God says so.”  These include things such as the inquisition, the holocaust, child abuse, conversion therapy for gays and lesbians, mental institutions, and the list goes on and on and will probably end up in a horror movie near you soon.  The road to hell was paved with what…?  Clearly the golden rule should have an addendum that states “please do not throw your own ego and heap your own judgments and opinions of what is right and wrong into the rule.  The rule doesn’t need your help to make it better, thank you very much.”  And clearly in these instances the entire well-being, be it physical, emotional, mental or spiritual, of the individual (every individual) is not being considered.  When we use the golden rule it is imperative that we see that we are really helping someone rather than harming them.  This requires wisdom, some of which we may not be enlightened enough to realize at a given time.

Finally, another way of looking at this rule is in the reverse.  Do unto yourself as you would do unto others.  You also are a beautiful soul and you deserve kindness, love, compassion, and respect.  It does us no good to treat everyone else wonderfully, but then to treat ourselves like shit.  What we do to others we do to ourselves, and what we do to ourselves we do to others.  We are all one and connected through our energy/spirit/souls which are all a part of God, so there can be no separation.  

Another way of stating the golden rule is LOVE others as you would LOVE yourself.   If everyone would stop and remember this concept for a split second before they say, do, feel, and think things in life (and yes thoughts and feelings are made of energy so even feeling and thinking mean feelings and thoughts about others is creating and transmitting that energy), we would sure be a whole lot closer to making heaven a place on earth.  In the end, love is ALL that matters.  How much love did you give to yourself and share with others is the ultimate point of life and what we come here to learn.  The love we cultivate in our lives is all we can take with us in the end.  Live your life through LOVE, and you will ace your final exam when you crossover.