Acceptance releases the power that your life circumstances have over you. When things don't go your way, you don't become paralyzed by negative emotions such as anger, fear, resentment, or regret.
Acceptance nullifies judgement. By choosing acceptance, you remind yourself that what's happening in your life is not good or bad, fair or unfair. It just is.
This is something I never really stuck the idea or concept to the actual word when I was younger. But I do remember speaking to a few people that it was weird that I didn't see things as good or bad--I only saw the magnitude of the effects of a person's actions from what was considered as the norm. It's like being able to measure the amplitude from the equilibrium but without the positive or negative status UNLESS I apply what society believes to be the "right" vs the "wrong".
I do remember that my biggest confusion was when I noticed a "moral compass" that I suddenly had that I didn't before. What was confusing to me was that I noticed that some people's "right" was other people's "wrong" and they were completely unaware of their own or other people's positions and it started to confuse me. I never thought about it in the past, but almost everyone around me at the time is pretty much conditioned to believe that "Good" is better than "Evil" therefore biased and unable to give me feedback on what it is that I was observing.
What made it worse was that I was always with someone who had a lot of hope. Hope is very positive and a good thing. But blind optimism is not and is very dangerous that this person got taken advantage of a lot. Whether he was conscious of it or not, I saw things he wasn't able to and on a business perspective, just wasn't very efficient of his resources. Overall, his excellent resiliency and steadfast efforts makes him a very "successful" person, just wasn't very efficient at it imo. His definition and expectations of what makes a person "successful" is vastly different than mine.
When we are born in this world, money is of no meaning to us. I was good with money, but I didn't really give a crap about it personally other than what it could mean to help others if I donate it. But at some point, I started giving a crap about how much I made and it was never enough even though I never really spent a majority of it. That's when I became aware of the love of money, The love of money is where greed starts and I started seeing it everywhere. In finance, in healthcare, in business, everywhere.. America is a consumerist society and it is unaware of it. Unfortunately, the business mentors I had capitalized on this and increased the overall greed instead of increasing awareness to cure this toxic mentality. Materialism was prevalent and the world got more and more confusing to me since I couldn't understand how these "adults" and "experts" can be so blind to what's going on. Everyone was an expert on his or her own field of a "human construct" but completely misses out on what is in front of them. I've talked to numerous people with degrees that are experts on their field but has no idea on what life really is. Psychologists and psychiatrists are the worst, i've only talked a very few that really gets the big picture. So many of them try to diagnose people based on outdated theories and practices that it completely segregates outliers who "do not fall" into what they were taught thus either labeled as "crazy" or someone that needs "help"--not realizing of the possibility that they and society are the ones that needs help.
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A little soul talked to God and said, "I want to experience being good and to be forgiving, what is that feeling?". God replied, "For you to experience the good, you'd have to experience the bad as well, but there's on thing you should know."
"What is it?" the little soul sighed.
"There is no one to forgive." God said.
Then a beautiful angel came down and said to the little soul, "I will help you."
"How will you help me?" the little soul asked.
"I will do something so unspeakable and unimaginable of so that you can forgive me." the angel answered.
"But why? Why would you do such evil things. You, who are a Being of such utter perfection! You, who vibrate with such a speed that it creates a Light so bright that I can hardly gaze upon you! What could cause you to want to slow down your vibration to such a speed that your bright Light would become dark and dense? What could cause you ~ who are so light that you dance upon the stars and move through the Kingdom with the speed of your thought--to come into my life and make yourself so heavy that you could do this bad thing?"
"Simple," the angel said. "I would do it because I love you-- But I have to ask something in return."
"What is it?" the Little Soul asked. "What can I do for you?"
"In the moment that I strike you and smite you," the angel replied, "in the moment that I do the worst to you that you could possibly imagine ~ in that very moment..."
"Yes?" the Little soul interrupted, "yes...?"
"Remember Who I Really Am." the angel said.
"Oh, I will!" cried the Little Soul, "I promise! I will always remember you as I see you right here, right now!"
"Good," said the angel, "because, you see, I will have been pretending so hard, I will have forgotten myself. And if you do not remember me as I really am, I may not be able to remember for a very long time. And if I forget Who I Am, you may even forget Who You Are, and we will both be lost. Then we will need another soul to come along and remind us both of Who We Are."
by Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God
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** How I feel about religions especially Catholicism **
[Socrates:] "Since the beautiful is opposite of the ugly, they are two."
[Glaucon:] "Of course."
"And since they are two, each is one?"
"I grant that also."
"And the same account is true of the just and unjust, the good and the bad, and all the forms. Each of them is itself one, but because they manifest themselves everywhere in association with actions, bodies, and one another, each of them appears to be many."
"That's right."
"So, I draw this distinction: On one side are those you just now called lovers of sights, lovers of crafts, and practical people; on the other side are those we are now arguing about and whom one would alone call philosophers."
"How do you mean?"
"The lovers of sights and sounds like beautiful sounds, colors, shapes, and everything fashioned out of them, but their thought is unable to see and embrace the nature of the beautiful itself."
"That's for sure."
"In fact, there are very few people who would be able to reach the beautiful itself and see it by itself. Isn't that so?"
"Certainly."
"What about someone who believes in beautiful things, but doesn't believe in the beautiful itself and isn't able to follow anyone who could lead him to the knowledge of it? Don't you think he is living in a dream rather than a wakened state? Isn't this dreaming: whether asleep or awake, to think that a likeness is not a likeness but rather the thing itself that it is like?"
"I certainly think that someone who does that is dreaming."
"But someone who, to take the opposite case, believes in the beautiful itself, can see both it and the things that participate in it and doesn't believe that the participants are it or that it itself is the participants--is he living in a dream or is he awake?
"He's very much awake."
(Republic by Plato, Bk. V, 475e-476d, translation G.M.A Grube)
** How can one thing be two things at once? **
