#hareesh

When others express dissatisfaction with your behavior(s), the ego interprets that in terms of a personal failing, but in reality there's no such thing; there's just the fact of how well or how poorly you conform to the invented moral code of your community of humans, which itself is a function of causes and conditions that you didn't choose (like your genes and upbringing).

It’s funny, I’m more out probably to my family; especially my mom.  My dad is very old school, fresh off the boat Indian so he’s not always the most understanding.  I wouldn’t really care if he found out, he’d just give me a hard time about it. But in the community I guess I’m a little bit more conservative about being out.  If somebody I knew came up and asked me about it, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But I don’t go shouting it to the hills because some aspects of being a personality in the dance world I guess, means that some people are more conservative than others so I don’t want to scare those folks away.  But yeah, I’m pretty comfortably out.

Those who are deeply disconnected from their own real nature, and are thus unable to tap into the inexhaustible wellspring of joy, love, and inspiration at their core, will express this inner disconnection and alienation in actions that others find difficult and painful. Furthermore, the disconnected person will evolve a worldview corresponding to their inner experience, one in which happiness is something they have to obtain from outside, something they have to fight for. Being disconnected from themselves, they are likewise disconnected from others, and therefore it seems perfectly logical to such a person to try to obtain wealth and happiness for themselves at any expense to others. Society and religion try to change such people by telling them that they will reap what they sow, that harm to others will come back on them, but such moralizing misses the point: that is not the way disconnected individuals are experiencing reality. They don't feel their connections to all other living things, so such moralizing appears to them as a thinly veiled attempt to control their actions and limit their freedom, and they rebel against it. When we label such people as "evil," we shut down the possibility of understanding their experience, and we shut down the possibility of compassion, which is particularly sad because only acts of compassion and love furnish the compelling counter-evidence to a disconnected person that might begin to change his view. In other words, the only way for this disconnected self-concealment and concomitant misalignment to start to correct itself is for the individual to have an experience that gives him concrete evidence of another way of seeing and understanding reality, a way that demonstrates greater value because it is more effective in meeting his deepest needs. This is why we call love a transcendent principle: it is the appropriate response to both love and hate.