One of the confusions we can sometimes have is ‘how could this person behave like this?’ – when the ‘good’ people in our life turn out to be harmful to us in some way.

This I’ve mentioned before – there are two kinds of ‘good’ people – those who are good because they genuinely care, and those who are good because they’re afraid to be bad – and almost all ‘good’ people fall under the second category. And this is the key when we get hurt by the good people in our lives, and also when we end up hurting people.

Why are the good people good and the bad people bad? It is simply conditioning, their core is both the same. The ‘good’ people learned as children that they can use people better by being nice to them, by smiling, by being kind and polite. This pattern is reinforced a lot more strongly if being sweet was a way to escape punishment or abuse. ‘Bad’ people are simply those who got their way and escape some level of abuse through a display of aggression. So we’re all just slaves to our patterns – this is why bad people find it hard to be good – because as a child when they were good, they got punished for it, and good people find it hard to be bad (as in, be aggressive in the right circumstances, stand up for themselves, etc) because that was punished and is still scary. Do you see now how we’re all exactly the same?

You’re different if your emotions don’t sway you. Look at your biggest weakness – If you feel hatred but don’t act on that hatred (and feel that hatred instead of suppressing, of course), if you get angry but choose not to act on your anger, if you feel afraid but speak up for yourself regardless… THEN you have progressed. Otherwise we are barely different from the ‘bad’ people we know.

Anyhow the insight was… we have our patterns, and we seek out people who accommodate and feed those patterns in a way that makes us comfortable. What we actually end up doing is choosing the ‘good’ people who are good due to fear. We assume goodness here, but really it’s just disguised selfishness, because the person will turn, for sure, when there is a conflict of interest. (We’re the same that’s why we attract them, no need to judge them for this). If we want to get out of this, there are two steps –

1) Learn to love ourselves more deeply. This means standing up for ourselves, and doing whatever is needed for our physical, mental and spiritual upkeep and maintenance. When we love ourselves more, we can love others more sincerely.

2) Learning to identify fear-based goodness from love-based goodness within ourselves – this helps us discern it better in others too.

I hope this also clarifies why so many teachers including Eckhart Tolle say that the ‘bad’ people are more likely to make progress on the spiritual pathway because they have more incentive to disassociate from their crap personality. The ‘good’ people love who they are and represent, so much less incentive here.