"The Devil Made Me Do It"

The Slippery Slope

“The truth is that no one can avoid personalizing or projecting. There are only those of us who are aware of it, and those of us who are not; only those of us who own it when it happens, and those of us who don't.”

                                        Mark Nepo (The Book of Awakening)

Do you remember the 'Flip Wilson Show' in the early 1970's? He had a character named Geraldine Jones who was always up to trouble and any time she got caught she would say, “The devil made me do it.” It became a catch phrase at the time. Truth is, we are all guilty, devil or not. The traffic made me late to work (instead of I got a late start); my husband's indifference made me vulnerable to an affair, (instead of I lost interest and went looking for someone new). You get the picture. It's one of the ways we tell little white lies, and sometimes lies that are not so white or little. The phenomenon is known in psychological terms as 'personalizing' and it goes hand in hand with 'projecting', which is to ascribe to someone else traits that you don't want to see in yourself.

We humans are capable, thanks to our stellar cerebral hemispheres, of all sorts of razzle-dazzle; even of hood-winking ourselves. Those of us who are co-dependent personalize by thinking that we are in control of everyone's happiness or misery. Those of us who are narcissistic, think everyone else is responsible for our happiness or lack thereof. We see anger or jealousy in someone else instead of owning our own anger and jealousy. We can actually go through an entire lifetime pulling the wool over our own eyes to keep from taking responsibility for ourselves. The Hindu sage, Ramana Maharshi, called it 'trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on rocks and thorns' instead of simply putting on shoes.

The sign above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo, better known as the 'Oracle of Delphi', says, “Know Thyself.” It is a lifetime's work in two words. To know oneself is the greatest challenge to humankind and the most important. The day that we stop personalizing and projecting will be the day we actually have peace within our relationships and on our planet.

In the spirit,

Jane