Radical Acceptance

Radical acceptance means accepting every person as they are, no matter what they do or have done, no matter who they are or what they believe. Radical acceptance means having compassion for all people.

Radical acceptance does not mean condoning someone's actions, being passive in our response, or not taking action. Radical acceptance also accepts our own needs as legitimate.

The difference is in attitude. Whenever we live in judgment of another person, we cause a separation between ourselves and them. We believe we are somehow better than, more worthy than, and that they can be treated with contempt. When we cast judgment on ourselves, we likewise believe we are less then, are not worthy, and do not deserve what others do. Both of these are illusion. The spiritual reality behind what we see is that we are all one, that the divine lives in each of us, that the separation and divisions between us are illusion - they are illusion in the sense that when you look at the causes of division more closely, you will find at their core a commonality of need.

It is often said, love the person, and hate the action. Even that is not true acceptance. If someone breaks into my house and steals, I may have a reaction of anger, even hatred. Hating an action is equivalent to hating the actor. One option is to go into the desire for revenge, hatred, bitterness, and seek to get even - to bring the thief to justice because I want revenge, because I want to make him suffer to pay for my pain. To live this way and condone this attitude is to choose to live with hatred and revenge as basic values. Choosing not to seek revenge does not mean not taking action. I may still go to court to get repayment for my damages without an attitude of hatred, motivated more out of love for myself and family than out of a desire to hurt the thief.

It is possible to live a life of compassion and love without being a wimp. Defending what we love can take the form of violence, yet still be an act of love. The question is if we are going to live in the illusion that people are evil.

If it is possible that people are truly evil, then several figures may come to mind - usually world leaders who have killed and tortured large numbers of people. We may ask, how can someone commit such evil in the world if they are not fundamentally different than us, if they are not themselves evil? But if it is possible for them to be evil, then what saves me from that fate? How do I view myself when I catch myself acting selfishly, or have the desire for revenge, or find ourselves hurting someone out of anger? We either must rationalize it away, so that we can see ourselves as different than really evil people, or we will draw the horrible conclusion that something is wrong with us. We don't understand why we sometimes do things that are "bad". We want to hide that fact from ourselves and others. But inside, we may wonder if we are also evil. The belief in evil will always ultimately come back to us, causing us to separate from others, either because we are better than or worse than.

If you watch an infant, you will see a lot of characteristics which we would call bad if displayed by an adult - demanding of others without any regard of their feelings, total self-centeredness, uncontrolled anger accompanied with attempts to hurt others or destroy property, expecting others to anticipate and take care of his every need. Somehow, with an infant, we can just smile and say, it's okay, that's what babies do. By the time we are adults, we expect each other to have gained control over these basic drives and to have learned new behavior more compatible to living with others.

But these primitive drives don't go away - they simply come under the domain of our will, where we have true choice over our actions, and we can find ways of satisfying our basic needs while not sabotaging our adult requirements. The childish desire to hurt someone who has hurt you, or to control others so you can be superior, is still within us as a potential, but when we are aware of the desire, we can find adult ways of responding to situations so that we meet our true needs.

The problem comes when we are ashamed of our primitive drives, rather than acknowledge and accept them as part of us. The shame causes us to pretend we don't have them, and we "put them in the shadow" - we get to a point where we are no longer conscious that we have those drives. At that point, we have not gotten rid of the drives, we have simply removed them from the dominion of our will, and placed them in a place where they wander freely without our knowledge or permission. Our desire to dominate someone, for example, may come out in hidden ways, what we call passive-agressive, so that our true intent is hidden, at least to us.

If we are truly aware of the primitive drive in us to dominate others, then we will be more able to have compassion when we see someone acting that out, because we recognize the desire in ourselves. When we fool ourselves into thinking we are never angry, never selfish, never fearful, never agressive, never weak, then we cannot help looking down on others who display those characteristics, since we believe we are different than them by not having those characteristics.

We are one. We all have primitive drives, and we all are drawn towards Spirit and compassion. Cutting ourselves off from others through judgment is the same as cutting ourselves off from ourselves.