How to Deal with Immature, Stubborn or Spiritually Unconscious Beings

Author

Nebo D. Lukovich
​Learner, Reader, Student of Life

We are encountering various immature, stubborn or spiritually unconscious beings all the time. They can be little children, animals or even grown up people with mental or emotional issues. Although most of the time these interactions can be lovely and amusing, they can also turn out to be extremely challenging, as these beings are ignorant and don’t care much about our expectations or socially suitable behavior.

If we find their behavior unacceptable, we might try every possible known method of persuasion, we may try to talk with them, entice them or anything else, to no avail. They will continue with the same or even worse conduct.

In many cases, we are tempted to react inappropriately. We can become desperate, get angry, even aggressive. But that certainly doesn’t help at all. The child, or our lovely pet, acts defensively and the situation gets worse. Whatever we do, it doesn’t help. They simply cannot understand us. Even if they understand the language itself, they don’t get our point or simply overlook it.

What can we do after all?

There is a “classical” solution, which we will label here as being a short-term solution. There is also a meditative approach, based on everyday mindfulness and being fully present and attentive in the company of those stubborn beings. And finally, there is a simple, often overlooked solution, but the ultimate one: to root out our own unconsciousness.
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Short-term solution

​So, the first strategy is the short-term one: we must be very patient and careful in our conduct, applying carefully numerous patterns of responses, which are proven to be most suitable in such situations.

There are tons of psychological, pedagogical and other material out there covering this field, so I will not elaborate much on that here. I put them all under the label “short-term solution”, not wanting to offend countless hardworking scientists and enthusiasts. This label simply means this: by doing this way and being persistent in that, you will probably improve a lot the asocial behavior of your loving, but unconscious being. However, you will not solve the root of the problem – there will always be some more annoying, unpersuasive and stubborn persons popping up in your life. They all will be different and new, but you will have to do your “homework” again and again.
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The reason is simple: you haven’t solved the inner source of the problem. Yourself.

Long-term solution

A long-term solution is to practice mindfulness and loving-kindness in these challenging relationships. Mindfulness is the practice of living consciously in the present moment. If we want to live mindfully, we should be aware of every emotion, thought, every motion of our body, sensation, texture, sound, taste and smell. From time to time, we should pause and direct attention to our sense of self. All the time we should sustain that state of self-awareness during every activity. Most of this also applies to the challenging relationships with various beings.
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Being mindful in a company of an annoying person or animal who is deeply unconscious of their unacceptable behavior means to be fully attentive in their presence, without thoughts, receptive and non-reactive. You cannot persuade them, nor convince them to do anything you would like them to do. You cannot influence them directly, only indirectly, with your own inner peace. Your stillness will spread onto them sooner or later, but you must be patient, it won’t happen instantaneously.

Another part of this approach is the loving-kindness. Simply put, you have to open up your heart completely to those beings. You have to accept and love them as they are now. You have to love even their annoying behavior.
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Mindfulness in this kind of relationships, combined with loving-kindness, if applied persistently, will gradually yet fundamentally change your whole life. It’ll radically transform the problematic relationships, and, in a subtle way, those beings themselves as well.

However, this approach is difficult to maintain and it’s advisable to employ it with another method, which is based on the so-called holographic principle. Let me elaborate more on that.

Ultimate solution

Is there an ultimate solution? Yes, there is. In this case, it is a very elegant one, but don’t think it’s a kind of magic wand. No. It’ll also require some inner work and taking full responsibility for your life.

The baseline of this approach is the holographic principle. It's a principle applicable in many areas of science and human behavior. Basically, it says that each part of an entity contains complete information on the whole entity. Accordingly, within every human being, as a part of the Universe, there is complete information about the Universe. Similarly, the same correlation is between one's inner and outer reality.[1]

The world around us is a strange but relentless mirror. All people in our life are playing some role to us as symbolic “projections” of our particular traits. Of course, I’m not implying that other people are not real, or that they are just reflections from our mirror. They are as real as us, as any animal or thing. But we are involved in their individual, unique universes the same way they are involved in ours. Any person or thing of significance to us unconsciously plays a role in mirroring our own internal universe, just as we do theirs.

On that basis, we can derive the following deduction: all unconscious beings that interact with us are external projections of unconscious parts of our own being. This implies that those little children or cute pets behave exactly in accordance with our inner unconscious patterns. When we become aware of these patterns and reintegrate them back into our consciousness, the corresponding fellows around us will inevitably change their conduct, too.

We must ask ourselves: What is my hidden personal trait which corresponds to this behavior? We have to be absolutely open-minded and honest with ourselves. There is surely some pattern, probably hidden in our past, buried deeply into our subconscious, which emerges from time to time projected onto our external world as the annoying and stubborn fellow in our life.

When we find this particular trait or traits, we must not fight them. That would only suppress, even strengthen them more. Instead, we have to reintegrate them back into our personality. There are many methods of doing that, and I would recommend here the Reintegration techniques. Of course, there are many other great sources out there, for example, the books and teachings of my favorite spiritual author, Eckhart Tolle.

Finally, when we reintegrate a particular subconscious pattern, the outside world will adjust to the new situation: the behavior of our little fellows will be completely transformed in such a way that we will be deeply surprised with it.

Combined approach

After all, the combined approach is always the best solution. It is very advisable to do the reintegration work regularly on hidden parts of our personality, while being mindful and loving toward those beings at the same time. We should work on ourselves, rather than keep trying to change the external people or circumstances. When we change our inner world, the external reality will follow that, slowly but inevitably.

The key to every challenge and every pleasure is always within us.

[1] It seems that modern science is also going toward the holographic idea. A lot of groundbreaking research has been done in the last couple of decades in the fields of neurology and psychology, showing striking correspondence with holographic principle, especially related to memory and other functions of the human brain. Moreover, the holographic model is also emerging in theoretical physics, particularly in string theory. For more information on this principle you may refer to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle or to Michael Talbot’s remarkable book “The Holographic Universe” (Harper Perennial, New York, NY, 1992).