Hello!
David Gerkin is a dear friend. He is a Substack blogger with a considerable following. He is also a steadfast devotee of Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi. And that, I suspect, is why I am so attracted to him and what he says.
I have his permission to share one of his recent blogs.
Read it carefully. The lesson is profound.
Peace!
Use My Driving Experience at a 4-Way Intersection to Help You Grow
It’s about the harm we endure when pressing our ‘rightness.’
Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash
Here goes another in a long line of articles about using life experiences to goose our growth. This one comes from a few days ago when I came to a four way stop sign intersection right near my home.
I put on my blinker to turn left. A car coming the other way got there a second or two before me and drove through the intersection.
I then proceeded to start my left turn but stopped when I saw that the car behind the last one started going through the intersection. That car had clearly gotten there well after I did but barreled through anyway.
I’m sure this has happened to all of us in our driving careers.
A righteous car crash
But it occurred to me: What if I had just continued in my left turn and resolved that I was going to keep going no matter what? In which case the other car would either stop and let me through or we’d crash.
I’d clearly gotten to the intersection first. And if we crashed? Well, I would be in the right and they would be in the wrong…
And I’d have a smashed up car.
What the heck does anything of this have to do with you? How in the heck could this anecdote possibly be helpful?
Here’s how.
Eckhart’s teaching on the right, wrong thing
It’s about the “I’m right, you’re wrong” thing. I’ll never forget many years ago when I first heard Eckhart Tolle say that any time we insist that we’re right and someone else is wrong, that energy comes wholly from the ego.
The ego absolutely loves righteousness. It’s what a massive hunk of steak is to a hungry lion.
I also remember having a hard time swallowing this teaching of Eckhart. I mean, if you’re right you’re right, so what’s so bad about pursuing that?
If someone passionately argues that the Earth is flat, am I supposed to just lie down and agree with them, even though I know I’m right and they’re wrong?
Right, wrong is all about ego
This gets us to the crux of the matter, which is that this has nothing to do with being right or wrong. It has to do with feeding the ego, something that is rarely helpful to our well-being.
Hence why I chose to write about my driving experience a few days ago. Driving into the intersection and getting into a crash was clearly not in my best interest. And the only reason I’d do so would be to feed my hungry ego.
The point of this piece is to show you that this holds true for most situations we find ourselves in where the “I’m right, you’re wrong” scenario arises. Like what?
– At Thanksgiving dinner you get into a heated political discussion with Uncle Harold about Trump deploying national guard troops to Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland. You insist that it’s an illegal deployment because there are no riots or violence rising to the level of needing outside help to keep the peace. He says you need the Guard so ICE can do its job of finding and deporting illegal aliens. He calls you a “libtard” and you point out how rich that is coming from someone with no college degree. He calls you an expletive and storms away from the table. That is crashing your car in furtherance of being right.
– You and your wife are at a cocktail party chatting with some friends. You have a factual disagreement over whether Cleopatra was Macedonian or Egyptian. She says of course she was Egyptian. After some back and forth you, Mr. Know It All, Google it and shove it into her face that she was, indeed, Macedonian. You’ve embarrassed her and pissed her off in front of your friends. You, and your sex life for the next few weeks, just crashed into the car.
– You tell your daughter’s basketball coach that the team is getting destroyed because of bad defense. And because your daughter is the best defender on the team, he should play her more, which would mean less playing time for the coach’s daughter. You’re right about all of it. But it pisses the coach off which is bad for your daughter. You just crashed into the car.
Bottom line: Most of the time we press our case that ‘we’re right and they’re wrong,’ we win the battle but lose the war.
You might be asking, are there times when we should throw caution to the wind and go whole hog to “win” our case?
Yes. We do that when the stakes require it. Like when?
– An obvious example would be if you’re leading a squad of soldiers in war and you are certain that your superior is wrong in sending you into an area that your experience has shown is going to lead to almost certain death for your people. You need to fight like hell to prove that you’re right in that instance.
– You’re a doctor and spot a suspicious looking mole on your husband’s back. He, who hates going to the doctor, insists it’s probably nothing. You know you’re right in telling him to go to the doctor. You don’t take no for an answer with him and force him to go.
You get the drift. We fight hard to prove ourselves right when doing so is truly consequential.
Also, what do those two examples have in common? They aren’t about feeding the ego.
What we should do
Fine. So what should we do when we feel that egoic tug in our stomachs begging us to dive in and fight for our position?
The first thing we do is ask ourselves if this is about feeding our ego, which is most of the time, or if “winning” the argument makes a real difference.
And we have to be smart here, folks. Why? Because the ego is absolutely brilliant at convincing us that every time we’re in one of these situations it is incredibly important to the fate of humanity that we prove we’re right.
Don’t take the bait! Be coldly discerning.
Best to let it go
If we determine that proving ourselves right is coming from the ego, most of the time the best course of action is to simply…
Let it go.
One concrete thing you can do is pose this question to yourself: If I plow forward trying to prove I’m right here, am I just driving my “righteous” car into an avoidable crash?
If the answer is yes, stop! Let it go. It’s not worth the car damage.
It’s important to note that most of us are taught from a young age, especially here in America, that it is virtuous to passionately express and defend our views. My parents definitely did that.
Consequently, many of you may conclude that letting it go in an argument/discussion reveals weakness. I think it’s the opposite. A strong, confident person doesn’t feel the need to prove themselves right all the time.
The takeaway
The main point of this article is that most of the time passionately professing our rightness is just plain stupid and destructive…for both sides.
I say that we all avoid needlessly crashing our cars.
