# Radical kindness (quotes) ###### tags: `kindness` ### General > *Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.* --- [Author unknown](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/29/be-kind/) > *Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.* ― Martin Luther King, Jr. > *Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.* ― Reinhold Niebuhr > *The road to hell is paved with good intentions.* --- Proverb > *We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior* --- Stephen Covey (paraphrasing the [Fundamental Attribution Error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error)) --- ### On awakening through psychedelics From an online web forum (emphasis mine): > *My most recent mushroom trip (also the largest dose I've ever taken) I became fixated on a news story I had heard that week. About an 8 year old girl from a tribe in the Amazon, who was [tied to a tree and burned alive](https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8033) in order to scare her people off their land so it could be logged. I realized that at the moment he did it, whoever lit that gasoline actually felt / thought more or less okay about what he was doing. **And my mind was illuminated with dozens of the parallels between that man's malformed, horrific perceptual / behavioral state, and mine. I saw the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity.*** > > *Reminds me of something (I think) Duncan [Trussell] said on some recent podcast, quoting somebody else: it isn't the victim of violence you have to pray for so much. It's the perpetrator. They are the one who is more trapped in delusion, more estranged from love, etc.* From a first-time user of the empathogen MDMA (emphasis mine): > *My mind brought up memories of being hit by my parents. I felt warmth and love towards them. I could see the bigger frame of everything and expanded my compassion towards them. I could feel their own confusion and see the love behind their actions. I could see them as children. … So, my basic view of the world began to shift. … Instead of seeing myself as a shit-sandwich with occasional bright moments, **I saw myself as basically good with some bad habits I picked up along the way... a white screen with some dark spots.*** --- ### The shadow and projection > *What bothers us about others, what we dislike or fear in them, are aspects of ourselves that they mirror back at us, aspects we dislike seeing. Until we make deep peace with such aspects of ourselves, unwanted aspects we don’t want to see, by learning to receive a love that touches in past them to the intrinsic goodness of our being, we can’t open to the intrinsic goodness of others that also lies hidden from our view.* > > *We need to receive love from those who have sent it to us just as we are, with all our flaws, in order to relax into the deeper goodness within us that always deserves such love and to heal there. Then we can offer a love in turn that embraces others with similar flaws, that touches in on their intrinsic worth, mirrors their goodness back at them, and doesn’t give up on them no matter what.* > > -- John Makransky > *If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.* --- Herman Hesse > *Not that these others are wholly without blame, for even the worst projection is at least hung on a hook, perhaps a very small one, but still a hook offered by the other person.* --- Carl Jung > *The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.* --- Carl Jung > *Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is also in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow, he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved problems of our day.* --- Carl Jung > *If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.* --- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago --- ### You are everyone A section from of [Please Call Me By My True Names](https://plumvillage.org/articles/please-call-me-by-my-true-names-song-poem/) by Thich Nhat Hanh: > I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, > my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. > And I am the arms merchant, > selling deadly weapons to Uganda. > > I am the twelve-year-old girl, > refugee on a small boat, > who throws herself into the ocean > after being raped by a sea pirate. > And I am the pirate, > my heart not yet capable > of seeing and loving. > > I am a member of the politburo, > with plenty of power in my hands. > And I am the man who has to pay > his “debt of blood” to my people > dying slowly in a forced-labor camp. Zen priest (and punk rocker) Brad Warner: > Even if I want to put this realization down I can’t. Sometimes it’s excruciating. You know those morons that rammed those planes into the World Trade Center? That was me. The people that died in the collapse. Me again. Every single person who ever paid money for a Pet Rock? Me. I don’t mean I identify with them or sympathize with them. I mean I am them. It’s impossible to explain any more clearly than that, but this isn’t a figure of speech or bad poetry. I mean it absolutely literally. > > But the universe is sooooo much bigger than any of that. The sky is me, and the stars too, and the chirping crickets and the songs they make; sparkling rivers, snow and rain, distant solar systems and whatever beings may live there: it’s all me. And it’s you, too.