Vengeance and the Ego

Quick summary: Vengeance is then a tool which creates instability in an attempt to create a stable ego.
Vengeance is a tool used to justify the dichotomy of ‘good or bad’ (in contrast to the dialectic of being both ‘good and bad’).
The ego attaches to dichotomies… ‘either or’ labels serve as judgments used to define permanence…
With vengeance we perpetuate the notion that good and bad exist separately and without relativity. By creating this idea of good and bad we create a construct that we can use to identify the self.
Vengeance is an action governed by the belief “I am good… and they are bad.”
Vengeance is a tool for proving the existence of a constructed identity… by attacking what I choose to label as bad, I prove the existence of my morals…
My morals are a construct I use to prove my existence and to prove the positive nature of that existence.
The irony is that acts of vengeance are usually in contrast to our morals… and by involving ourselves in vengeance we can create confusion concerning our ego… our constructed identity.
We become the moral and the immoral identity at the same time… the coexistence of contradiction wears on the mind… making us confused and fearful…
Vengeance is then a tool which creates instability in an attempt to create a stable ego.
For the following questions, think about a desire for vengeance that you hold or have held in the past

• What is the purpose of your vengeance? What does your vengeance hope to solve?

 

• How will your acts of vengeance lead to your intended goals… your intended outcomes?

 

• What will your acts of vengeance convince you about yourself?

 

• What will be or what are the emotions that you hold surrounding the acts that you participated in, in the name of vengeance.

 

• What justice does your vengeance serve… what injustice might arrive from that same act of vengeance?

 

• What makes this act of vengeance important to who you are?

 

• Are you seeking vengeance for another person’s act of vengeance? Will another person seek vengeance for your act of vengeance? When can you reasonably hope for the cycle of vengeance to stop?

 

• How do you stop the cycle of vengeance?

 

• In thinking about your vengeance, is there a belief that you are definitively right, good or moral while the offender is definitively wrong, bad and immoral?

 

• How does your act of vengeance fit with your perception of who you are?

 

• How does your act of vengeance fit with your defined morals and ethics?

 

• Does your vengeance prove that you are good? Would your vengeance be justified if you could not conclude that you were good and the offender was bad?

 

• How would empathy and compassion affect your desire for vengeance?

 
Vengeance is an action which serves as a distraction for the resolution of your pain and the pain felt by those who offended you.
 
Forgiveness heals the heart… without acceptance and forgiveness you fall into the suffering which arrives from the resistance of the idea that good and bad may not be as mutually exclusive as our ego’s want then to be.
 
Perhaps most things are not good or bad… they are both… infinitely.