What To Do About Terrible People

Amulet-level protection for the 21st century

Imagine a life where you’re born into total happiness and nothing bad ever happens to you. You are loved without question everywhere you go (home, school, work, leisure), and you love everyone back. You live your whole life without hurting anyone, or being hurt, or feeling like you’re a terrible person. Have you ever met anyone like that?

Or have you hurt someone’s feelings? Said something in anger or thoughtlessness, without considering how it would land? Made a mistake that was costly for someone else? Gossiped about someone? Told a lie? Stolen something? Hit someone?

We are all terrible people.

Don’t click away. I know these are not the ‘terrible people’ you were reading for. The ones you want to know what to do about. Don’t worry. I will get to them. But let’s start with us. Let’s start by admitting that sometimes, we, too, are terrible people.

Sometimes I am a terrible person.

Earlier this week, the thought ‘I am a terrible person’ even woke me up, as black and insistent as a raven tapping at the window pane.

Yet, in being a terrible person, I am also a completely successful person because this is what being a person is. I wish it weren’t so, we all do, but a significant portion of being a person is fucking up. Quite often, that fucking up hurts other people, and unless we are psychopaths, it hurts us too. But only by being a terrible person can we learn and grow. Yeah, for sure, we can learn and grow by working through self-development practices. But I’m not sure if we would bother doing those things if we hadn’t first realised we were terrible people (i.e. really good at being people) and thus in need of development. I didn’t get into self-development until after I had crashed my life into a wall, with monumental damage to some people I really loved.

Of course, there are people who will insist they are not terrible, and on the scale of terrible people, they are the worst. There are very few women I know who aren’t this week haunted by the case going on in France. I’ll not delve into the details since I’m determined to keep this a positive and news-free space, and this is the stuff that makes you wonder if there is really any hope for humanity. The connectivity of the internet brings like-minded people together, which sounds like such a great thing until you realise “like-minded people” includes men whose minds have been so distorted by porn that they don’t regard women as human.

Humanity isn’t going to evolve into Humans 2.0 while male supremacy is still a thing. Until the vast majority of men and boys treat women and girls as different-but-equal, rather than inferior support animals (domestic servants, sex providers and breeders), the existential threat to humanity will remain. Male aggression (as demonstrated on an individual and international level) will only be tempered by women’s liberation. For most of my life, we seemed to be on track for this improvement to be realised within a few decades.

What an optimist I was! (Still am, if not about the timescale). The acceleration of misogyny in the last ten years has been frightening to behold and is having knock-on effects. More women, feeling unsafe and disrespected, are withdrawing from the dating pool. Crimes against women are getting both more prevalent and more extreme (I will not link to another of this week’s horror shows). More sexually unsatisfied men are getting angry and violent and blaming women rather than looking at their own attitudes as the cause. The birth rate is dropping, with economic and practical consequences.

What can we do, as consciously terrible people who would like to be less terrible and most definitely less terrified? The answer, as always, is relieve our own suffering. We cannot alter anyone else. We cannot stop certain men (more men than we ever imagined) despising women. We cannot legislate disturbing behaviour out of existence. Indeed, in the UK, the prisons are so full that 40% of sex offenders walk free from court and they are releasing perpetrators of domestic violence back onto the streets after the tiniest rap on the wrists. Prison sentences clearly aren’t reducing crime, but women feel less safe when these men aren’t locked up. And less safe again when, as the Pelicot case has demonstrated, far too many men in your immediate neighbourhood would rape you if they thought they could get away with it.

It is vital not to be fearful about these developments. Focusing on anything will attract it towards you. This is a quantum effect (thus non-local in nature) but has practical, local consequences. Predators ‘sense’ who will make easy prey. Fearful thoughts can betray you through body language, which is why women are advised to walk confidently at night (another reason not to get drunk). But this is also where updated theories of consciousness can give you a practical advantage.

To keep yourself safe, feel safe. I’m aware that sounds difficult. But recall that we are transmitter-receiver units. Our thoughts don’t stop at our skulls. Brainwaves aren’t stopped by bone any more than radio waves are. Essentially, this is the same stuff: subtle energetic transmissions. Our instruments are not sufficiently sensitive to detect our ‘transmissions’ at a distance, but other humans are.

You’ll have experienced this yourself. Walking into a roomful of people feeling confident leads to different consequences than walking into a roomful of people feeling small. People cannot necessarily read your thoughts, but they can read your “energy”, that wordless transmission that you can alter through changing them.

I learned this twenty-three years ago in a workshop in Costa Rica that reeled me in with the bait of learning how to have extraordinary sex. Yes, Tantra, you wicked beastie, promising physical bliss but delivering it through terrifying intimacy and weird energy experiments. When I booked this two week Tantric sex retreat with the proceeeds of my divorce settlement I did not, not by any measure, believe in “energy” beyond the kind that gas and electricity companies bill you for.

Then — in a room with no glass in the windows, and howler monkeys calling from the rainforest, and the boom of Atlantic waves on a black sand beach — me, my “no strings” lover and a bunch of American strangers did some practical experiments with “looks of love” and “looks of hate”, walking through the space where those looks were targeted, with eyes closed. And yes. You could definitely feel which of those you were walking through.

As a scientist by training, this piqued my interest, and since then, I have explored this phenomenon further, including running a number of my own experiments in real-life situations. One of which, I believe, prevented me from being sexually assaulted.

It was late at night. Perhaps 11pm. Usually my husband does the late night dog walk, for obvious reasons. (Obvious to women; perhaps not always obvious to men). But this was in the height of his fatigue, on a night he was more broken than usual. I said I would do it. I would walk the dog.

This is my good husband, by the way. Not the first husband who made me ill. This one, I made ill. Kidding. Sorta. Anyway.

Throughout the worst of his illness, I sometimes had to do this: walk the dog. I’d tie back my hair, pull a hood over my head, and wear walking boots and my most unisex clothes. Try to walk in a confident, masculine way. If I had to call the dog away from a sniff I’d adopt the deepest voice in my arsenal but it sounded like a woman pretending to be a man (because it was) so rather than draw attention to myself, I learned just to stay quiet and tug the lead.

The lawns were empty. I kept vigilant but seemingly there was no one. Then, ten minutes into the walk, a figure some two hundred yards away untangled themselves from the shadow of a bench where they had been sitting, camouflaged by the dark. A man.

He began to cross the lawns towards me. Not on the path but diagonally over the grass. This is not a neutral act when you’re a woman. We know how it goes. It might not go straight to assault; it might start with a conversation, got the time, got a light? But you know it isn’t safe when you’re targeted. From there it can go anywhere. If you’re on your own, that place is nowhere good.

My first response was fear. What else would it be? But immediately, blessedly, I remembered: fear draws towards you the thing you fear. A predator delights in receiving that signal; will bear down on it as sharks bear down on blood. He was beelining towards me. I was the target. He had already halved the distance between us.

I knew fear wasn’t helping me. What I needed was its opposite. So, keeping my stride, I made the switch. I conjured love. The feeling of being loved, and of loving.

I intensified that feeling in my heart. I envisaged it glowing with a bright gold light. I sent that light up through the top of my head, curving around and down in all directions to a point at my feet, so that I was walking in a big, glowing, golden 3D heart, completely surrounded and protected. And even though this was only an act of imagination, the man, like a snooker ball hit by another ball, suddenly turned and ricocheted off at an angle, still walking in a straight line, but away from me, leaving the park, and disappearing up a side street.

Think whatever you like about that. But for me it was clear. The man changed his mind as soon as I changed mine. Give science a few decades to explain it if you like but some of us can use this stuff right now.

You can’t stop other people being terrible, because that is the human condition. Plus right now a proportion of humanity is plunging towards the Mariana Trench of terrible, because they have a lot of growing to do. But by not surrendering to terror, I contend, you can stop them being terrible to you. And if you fuck up on this too? You can clear the damage to prevent its reoccurrence. Embracing self-forgiveness. Recognising that an essential facet of human life (and how we grow) is fallibility.

Can we stop being terrible people? Do I believe in transcendence? Can we clear out all the glitches and damage we have picked up through our lives and create a pure connection with the inner core of us, which is, I have come to believe, nothing but love?

Who knows what is possible for each of us. But let us continue to cultivate it. Because against a darkening world, the most vital response is to turn up the light.

++ Turn up the light by lighting up the heart so others can find this post ++

Bonus below the paywall. Thank you for being here. Have a good week!

Talk to me:

·      Do you feel like a terrible person for any reason?

·      Do you have an effective method for self-forgiveness?

·      Have you ever had a strange ‘energetic’ experience?