Petty Tyrants

Consciousness

Nov 23

Every individual has their so-called petty-tyrants in their life.

For some of you, the petty-tyrants in your life are family members.

For others, the petty-tyrants in your life are outside of your family, associated with work or other circumstances.

You, in fact, maybe a petty-tyrant in someone’s life because of your behavior or how you treat the other person. I do not know the source of my next comments and don’t take credit for them, but this is a description and breakdown of the petty tyrants in your life.

The tyrant: the primal source of energy, and the one and only ruler of the universe; compared to the source of everything, all other kinds of tyrants are infinitely below this category.

Petty tyrants: tyrannical rulers or authoritarians who actually wield power over the life and death of others.

“Minor petty tyrants are tormentors who can be fearsome and inflict misery, but who do not hold any real power over the life and death of others. There are two subcategories: little petty tyrants. These are further divided into four categories, according to the means they use to torment others:

· Those who use violence and cruelty.

· Those who create unbearable apprehension through deviousness.

· Those who oppress with sadness.

· Those who provoke rage.

Teensy-weensy or small-fry petty tyrants: tormentors who are just exasperating, bothersome to no end, and annoy to distraction.”

Not only is that a pretty good description, but probably by now, some particular names have come to your mind. The worst petty tyrants that the world has to deal with are narcissists, psychopaths, and sociopaths, particularly when they acquire power. But these people may also exist in your individual life.

The petty tyrant can also be a lingering, addictive thought that causes you to relive a situation, and in doing so, you relieve the pain, suffering, and unresolved issues that were part of the event. For many people, it becomes a chronic and ongoing battle that is never won. The petty tyrant can also be institutions, bureaucracies, and government functionings or external conditions that you have to deal with that can be the source of the petty tyrant in your life. The daily exposure to global political and economic pathologies can create worldwide dysfunction in efforts to combat those pathologies. Everyone, in dealing with a petty tyrant, can feel so defeated and disempowered.

The petty tyrant is the thing that owns you. This why every human feels imprisoned in some way. In the developmental process and the search for meaning and knowledge, the seeker is constantly confronted with these barriers, with these tyrants.

It’s important to remember several principles regarding your mind and how it deals with these issues, with these tyrants:

The mind cannot not respond. It cannot not remember. The event has been recorded and there the recording remains in your mind until you gain the skills and ability to see the event differently.
There is no such thing as a psychological condition without an accompanying physiological response. As it is in your mind, so it is in your body. But there is also no physiological condition that did not first begin in the mind. To believe that the physiological condition exists all on its own, produced by the body, is inaccurate.
Resistance to the thought through denial, attack, projection, or any form of escape such as drugs, alcohol, etc. will result in a like response by the mind.
Analyzing the event that is recorded in your mind by the very mind that produced its version of the event never ends in reconciliation or completion.
Only being able to access knowledge that lies outside the mind will allow you to bring the chain reaction of mind, body, and emotion to an end.
And the last one, the level of knowledge to which you have access is governed by your level of consciousness that changes when your being changes. When your level of being changes, the level of knowing, the level of knowledge also changes, so the problem is not the prison cell but the designer of the prison cell which is you.

Now, the interesting thing about petty tyrants is that throughout many writings and spiritual texts, the seeker is advised to consciously confront the tyrant for it is only then that you will learn mastery. You’ve got to be able to hold your own against them without being derailed, without self-sabotaging, without collapsing under the weight of the confrontation.

So, as you look back over the history of the world, you find numerous prominent examples of humans who consciously sought out the difficulty of facing the tyrant. Instead of existing, instead of hiding, they stood up. This skill, this ability to confront these mental barriers, I assure you, is in your wheelhouse, in your skillset…but it does take practice. It all begins with addressing your mind and the petty tyrants that reside there …maybe you’re lucky and there’s only one.

The work of Carlos Castenada and his relationship with Don Juan is widely known. Castenada was the author of 15 books, his first being A Separate Reality. Born in Peru in 1925, he was an American anthropologist who played an influential role in the emerging spirituality models of the 1970s.

In his relationship with Don Juan, Don Juan explains to him that in dealing with petty tyrants, it calls for four qualities of warriorship: control, discipline, forbearance, and timing. If you fail to defeat the petty tyrant, he says, it usually results in anger and rage, and in those results, you become a petty tyrant yourself.

The point is very clear: And I quote from my unknown source: How do you toil without complaining under the supervision of a brute given to excess and violence and doing so without fear or resentment, simply biding one's time certainly develops control over impulses, rids one of excess self-importance or vanity. Deliberately irritating the supervisor by reacting in an unexpected manner, being pious and exemplary, and gaining favor constitutes stalking, where Don Juan effectively drives his quarry, the slave driver, to higher and higher levels of irritation and thoughtlessness, eventually leading up to him losing control of himself and running to his death.

The final act is an example of perfect timing, recognizing and seizing the opportunity. Doing all this in a deliberate manner, biding one's time until the right moment, all the while adapting to the situation cultivates patience and forbearance. Don Juan takes refuge in a 'higher law' by not engaging the slave driver at his own level in a fight and by doing all in broad daylight, eventually leading to the exposure and demise of the slave driver.

In Castaneda's book, The Fire from Within, Don Juan even says that if one does not have a petty tyrant to begin with, you must go seek one out. But you must know that some cannot be confronted directly and you can’t ignore them and this is going to require living by a greater knowledge than that your mental and emotional impulses and reactions.

This ability to confront these mental barriers is in your wheelhouse, in your skillset, but it does take practice. It all begins with addressing your mind and the petty tyrants that reside there.

If this seems strange to you, the same advice is given in Durckheim’s book, The Way of Transformation, when he says,

“The man who, being really on the Way, falls upon hard times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him refuge and comfort and encourages his old self to survive. Rather, he will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him to risk himself, so that he may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it, thus making of it a "raft that leads to the far shore".
Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him. In this lies the dignity of daring. Thus, the aim of practice should teach him to let himself be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted, broken and battered... that is to say, it should enable him to dare to let go his futile hankering after harmony, surcease from pain, and a comfortable life in order that he may discover, in doing battle with the forces that oppose him, that which awaits him beyond the world of opposites.
The first necessity is that we should have the courage to face life, and to encounter all that is most perilous in the world. When this is possible, meditation itself becomes the means by which we accept and welcome the demons which arise from the unconscious.
Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation can our contact with Divine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable. The more a man learns whole-heartedly to confront the world that threatens him with isolation, the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed and the possibilities of new life and Becoming opened.”

This has been thoroughly exemplified by the lives of many great masters who sought out the uncomfortableness, the fear, the tyranny, in order to experience the power within. The stances, as recommended by Don Juan, of control, discipline, forbearance, and timing speak for themselves.

I have shared my experience in a previous message of confronting the petty tyrants in my life in which I knew that if I followed through with my plan there would without question be a death involved. I would not be able to go to battle without experiencing loss.

On the other hand, if I chose not to confront, I would not be able to live with myself, for I knew that my fear and cowardice would have been the forces to which I had succumbed. It was an easy choice to make, but a nightmare to live through.

So, I speak of petty tyrants with a vast amount of experience but also knowing that I have not mastered this process yet. I have sometimes said that I don’t start boxing very well until the 6th round. So I know how difficult this can be.

However, if you choose not to deal with the petty tyrants in your life, you will be self-subjecting your Self to suffering. In other words, the very idea of petty tyrants suggests that they reside outside of you and that they are doing something to you but you must train your mind to see and understand that you drew these circumstances to your Self in order to learn and grow and evolve.

If you adopt, which most people do, the belief that there are mean and bad people in the world and they should be punished for the things they do, then you learn that no matter how much punishment is applied, the punishment, the revenge will not free your mind of the negativity and suffering…so, there must be something else going on.

In a workshop one time of about 20 people, I asked the question, how many of you have ever wanted to kill someone. All 20 raised their hand. I then asked, how many of you have ever been betrayed. All 20 raised their hands. I then asked, how many of you have ever betrayed another person? All 20 raised their hands. Do you see the problem?

To address the petty tyrants in your life, address yourself first. You will see that the source of your rage and anger in dealing with them is that you, for whatever reason, have been prevented from doing to them what they have done to you. They won and it pisses you off but don’t not see the brute, the killer that lies inside of you, your willingness to cause suffering to another because you think they deserve it.

If you want to find out if you are a petty tyrant, ask.

Ask your loved ones, ask your children, your partner, your employees, and if you find out you are, stop.

Shut up, stop explaining, justifying, and be quiet.

If you don’t choose to stop, then it’s because you’re addicted to being a petty tyrant. Once you get that squared away, and you are involved in dealing with a petty tyrant in your life, it is essential, as best you can, you absolutely must move from the periphery and drama of these events to your center where you, to the best of your ability, seek clarity, perseverance, patience and absolute certainty in knowing that everything is going to be OK.

To speak personally, when I was involved with the petty tyrants of my life around 1991-1996, it was intense, dangerous and I knew that if I ended up at the wrong place and wrong time in the presence of either of them, that bad things could happen. And why? Because I wanted to hurt them for what they had done to me. Over those 5 more years, it would take me to the edge of what I was capable of facing and handling. That’s the role of the petty tyrant. To prepare you. To grow you. To evolve you. And you can tell similar stories.

But confront your petty tyrants you must but from the most evolved, most powerful, most evolved part of yourself that you can. And that takes knowledge and that takes us back to consciousness, and that takes us back to the need for a deliberate and conscious effort to rise above your mind, to begin an ascent to greater knowledge. Wisdom is nothing more than applied knowledge.

But the greater the level of consciousness, the greater the challenges. So, the petty tyrants in your life will be proportional to the skill you have to deal with your petty tyrants but admittedly, it may take every ounce of that skill to accomplish that. But the situation will not exceed your skills.

I continue to stress that behavior is not the issue, that behavior is a descendant of the perception that created the behavior and that is where you must start…at the level of perception. So, the control, discipline, forbearance, and timing to which Don Juan refers in speaking with Castenada must be founded upon a change in perception. For you have drawn this petty tyrant into your life. The question is not why is the petty tyrant treating you the way he or she does, the question is what did you do to cause the petty tyrant to treat you that way? Look carefully…you’ll see more than you’ve allowed yourself to see up to this point.

Start at the level of perception. Do the best you can to create a space in which even a thought at a time, you not only perceive the petty tyrant differently but you begin to perceive yourself differently. As hurtful as it may feel, remember that you are not threatenable. See beyond the situation and know and I stress the word know…know that everything will be OK, know that however the situation works out, that is working out for your benefit…maybe not short-term but absolutely in the long-term. Know that the tyrant has no control over you whatsoever. Be calm, be patient, be at the center as best you can.

If you have listened to my comments on surrender, once you have done everything you can do in dealing with your petty tyrant, turn it over to the divine and let it go. Let truth consciousness handle it for it knows the needs of each thing.

Be calm, be patient, be at the center as best you can.

But most importantly, it is important to understand that stillness and quiet will dissolve the negative vibrations that are always part of dealing with a petty tyrant. It is in the practice of inner stillness that you gain control and control in dealing with a petty tyrant is characterized by not responding, not reacting. This goes much deeper than concepts of self-control.

The main problem with the emotional responses in dealing with petty tyrants is that your emotions falsely identify themselves with every negative thing that happens…my pain, look what they did to me, my injustice, my depression, my loss. In quiet, you can release your attachments to those addictive patterns. In the truest sense, your petty tyrants are measuring sticks, giving you a chance to evaluate your Self and the level of mastery you have obtained in life.

For what has not been overcome in the past will come back time and again, each time with a slightly different appearance, but basically always representing your knot that has to be untied.