The behaviour of normal people is rarely appropriate. How could it be! Because normal behaviour is generated automatically – you don’t have to give it any thought, you just react – by your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is highly efficient at enabling you react – it is this ability that has got us so far as the ‘superior’ species. But, as I said, normal behaviour is rarely appropriate – because that same subconscious mind is permanently focused in the past – your formative years – and it uses this out-of-date ‘stored knowledge’ to dictate today’s automatic behaviour. With information that is so far out of date being used to enable you react, how could today’s behaviour be appropriate to what is actually happening now?
How could it be right and proper when you consider that the normal person is permanently on automatic pilot? Unfortunately, it’s just the way we’re built. If you’re having a good day, your behaviour may be mildly effective – that’s in comparison to how effective you could really and truly be had you taken the trouble to pay attention and act, rather than react. But even then, normal people only have good days now and again. It’s the normal not-too-bad days that have consigned your life to that repetitive, mundane, not-so-bad life – you know, the one where good stuff almost never happens, the one where you don’t like your job or the one where your relationship has gone flat – the ordinary stuff of everyday life. And on those normal not-too-bad days, your behaviour can be anything from basically in-effective through inappropriate to completely outrageous. People losing their cool with the morning rush hour, people bullying their subordinates at work or playing with their workers’ lives. Husbands who beat wives, wives who beat husbands – or just the everyday not-so-bad apathy of ‘I wish I was somewhere else’ and all the stress that comes with that feeling.
Our problem is that we confuse our behaviour with ourselves – a fatal mistake that leads us into recrimination, guilt, frustration, anxiety and even more inappropriate behaviour. You are not your behaviour. How could you be? Your behaviour is dictated by your personality – all the crap of ‘stored knowledge’ in your subconscious mind. Your personality has certainly little or nothing to do with you – there’s a wealth of psychological evidence amassed over the last seventy years to prove this conclusively.
So here’s the deal. You can only take really appropriate action (rather than normal reaction) by consciously side-stepping your ego or personality – this is the essence of personal development (as distinct from personality development). However, you cannot do that until you come to terms with the absolute fact that every single inappropriate action comes from your illusionary personality. What’s done is done – if damage was done, go and sort the damage out. But if the only damage was to your own self-image, then, get forget it, it’s past, you need to get on with your life – starting right now.