Trust Is A Gift You Give, Not Something Others Can Demand Of You
Calm yourself. For it is when you are at peace that you can perceive things as they are. War is the murder of peace and when peace is no more, your perception of reality dissolves into madness. With a world dedicated to war and domination, reality itself is shifted. All that once was clear is swept away, so that the only truth there is are the pronouncements of the powerful.
Those who shout are looking to roil the placid waters, trying to make it impossible for anyone either to peer beneath the surface or to reflect upon oneself. They wish you to see only the turmoil, which is ever-changing and impossible to understand. Then they will tell you they are scryers capable of interpreting the unfathomable.
Breath. Find your center, find yourself. Find that truth within you that reverberates with external truth, so that you are capable of making your own decisions. Trust the experts if you choose, but do not do so out of fear or from coercion. Do not lightly place your trust in people, but allow yourself to first ask yourself if their arguments are in harmony with what your body and your mind are telling you. Those who speak the truth should not be setting off any warning bells within you. Those who speak the truth should not be demanding you agree with them but rather be confident enough in their own truth that they will argue their points calmly and rationally. Those who speak the truth, rather than insisting that you would agree, would rather move on to someone more receptive to truth should you reject them.
Trust, if you like, but remember that trust is a gift you give to another, a gift that no one has the right to demand of you. Trust authority, if trusting is your choice. But do so conditionally, as you should trust anyone. Just as anyone should assume that they should earn your trust, so too should they expect that they must maintain your trust. If they do not receive your trust as a sacred gift, they are unworthy of it.
If you trust in another and your trust is betrayed, this betrayal must be addressed before you ever place your trust in that person or that institution again. Apologies devoid of meaningful change are the most obvious sign that your trust will be abused by that person or institution for as long as you continue to trust them. We are living in a world of insincere apologies today, a world where professional crisis teams guide the untrustworthy through the process of regaining trust without meaningfully changing anything about themselves.
We tend to give our trust to the untrustworthy when we are afraid of being on our own. We give our trust to the unworthy because we have not yet learned to trust ourselves, our own decision-making processes and our own inner voice. Our own insecurities are like unlocked doors through which the untrustworthy impose themselves into our personal space.
If we wish to gain control of the power to trust or withhold trust, we must learn how to be comfortable being alone. We must learn to trust our own perceptions even if it sometimes requires us to be separate from the herd. We must learn to trust ourselves, and to do that we must first learn to listen to ourselves. To do that, we must learn to be calm, so that we permit the various voices within us to be heard. To do so, we must learn to embrace peace, which means seeing and relating to things as they are, without the desire to control. For the moment we feel the need to be in control, we will realize how completely unable we are to control the outside world. And then those who promise us they can control the outside world will ask us to trust them to do so. And we will do so, because we believe that in this way we have some degree of control by proxy. And then, not only will we not be in control of the outside world, we will no longer be in control of ourselves.
Breath. Calm yourself. Hear yourself. Feel yourself. Be yourself. In this way you will be at peace even as you begin to gain power over the one thing you truly can control: yourself. The alternative is madness and manipulation.