In an earlier post I wrote about accepting the unacceptable. I was surprised to discover this was the most read post on my blog. I thought I’d come back to it again, but this time from a slightly different perspective.
In the first post I attempted to make a clear distinction between accepting and condoning. “Accepting is about recognizing the truth of a situation (water is wet, I have a son, I feel worried). Condoning means taking an attitude of allowing (I don’t vote out political leaders who are corrupt; I don’t step in when I see someone bullied). I can accept the fact that people are starving but I don’t have to condone the greed and corruption that maintains the starvation.” This distinction still stands.
Science On Non-Acceptance
Also in the original post I mentioned Newton’s Third Law: for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. If you push against a wall, that wall pushes back against you with equal force. Newton, writing in 1687, was of course talking about physical objects. Since that time, quantum scientists have also discovered that physical objects are ultimately made of energy. If that’s true, then Newton’s Third Law also applies to energy.
The late 19th- and early 20th-century psychologist Carl Jung is famous for saying what you resist, persists. Meaning that whatever parts of our psyche we push away or try to hide will always find a way back into our lives. Resisting them does not get rid of them. They push against us as hard as we push against them.
These two ideas from Newton and Jung sound a lot alike to me.
Now I’ll throw one more idea into the mix: the law of attraction. According to the law of attraction, energy attracts similar energy to it. In other words, if you’re experiencing “positive” energy, “positive” things happen. If you’re experiencing “negative” energy, “negative” things happen. (See Physics Brings Freedom and Seeing is Believing.)
Futility of Non-Acceptance
When we see things we don’t like or want, we often brand them as unacceptable. Cruelty, starvation, poverty are unacceptable to many. But non-acceptance of them invokes Newton and Jung’s ideas. Fighting them continues them. And from the law of attraction point of view, if we engage with the energy of opposition, we attract opposition. If we look at all the wars we’re waging, we notice they only get bigger: the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, etc.
Newton and Jung teach us of the futility of pushing against what is. The law of attraction encourages us to put our attention, our thought and emotional energy on what we want.
The Possibilities of Acceptance
Acceptance is about making peace with the facts of a situation as they are at the moment. It’s about recognizing that certain things are. Period. There’s nothing we can do to change what the past has brought to the present. Finding ease about this is what acceptance is all about.
The past has created the present moment. But what we do with the present is what will create the future. Only after reaching the place of acceptance, of not trying to change the past, of complete and peaceful recognition that things are as they are, can we bring our desires to a situation in order to create a different future.
True acceptance comes with surrender to the present moment. Surrendering not in terms of giving up, giving in, quitting, but in letting go of the struggle to change what cannot be changed. It means not maintaining the status quo by continuing to push against it. With this sort of surrender comes peace, clarity and real power, the power to act in such a way that the future can indeed be different.
© 2020, Paul Boehnke. All rights reserved.
Luv this. It reminds me of the following quote I have posted in my office, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality…to change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” (R. Buckminster Fuller) Thanks for the encouragement of confirmation in this way of understanding life.
You’re most welcome. I’m glad it resonates with you.