The Humble Pie Project, Slice #1

Not so long ago, I woke up to this e-mail:

Pelle, I really enjoy your writing, even when I disagree or question some things that you write. I think that what you say is incredibly important. This particular blog is interesting, and there are some comments that I might make at another time, but this time around i want to address the comments made on here by EIVIND.

Att’n EIVIND:
Eivind, goodness me, although your saturated self-righteousness would never allow you to see this, your approach is dripping with patronising, smug, self importance, and you use words very cleverly to create exactly the ‘I am right and you are wrong’ energy that you so patronisingly caution others against. I mean, seriously mate, eeeeewwwww! Immature, I know, compared to your skilled mastery of new age vernacular, but that is what I get when I read your passive aggressive drivel….eeewwwwww! It makes my skin crawl. The way you deal with people on here is so disempowering and deliberately (though disguised) humiliating and so horribly righteous, but you have the language skills and self belief (pathalogical!) to frame it in a way that makes you sound so new Age and sensitive and right. Mate, you are guessing like the rest of us, just trying to get through like the rest of us; if you were even nearly as evolved as your self-obsession tells you you are you would learn some humility. True humility, not the false ego version that your ego is right now telling you to respond that you have.

That said, Eivind…… men are here on this plane to serve women?? That is our entire reason for manifesting here?? Man, that is a theory, not a fact. Which I think is what Erik was trying to get at, but you passive-aggressively attacked him (oh yes you did, even though right now your little mind is going ‘no, brother, I don’t attack, I’m too evolved’), and used the fact that you are better with words than him to put him down, and he gave up. I am sure that you are used to that, and see yourself as having made some kind of point to him, but man, in your own new age terms, you are darkening your own soul with your smug continued conviction that you are in the right. (Erik, hang in there, and be true to yourself, don’t feel disempowered by knobs like Eivind). Anyway, ‘men are here on this plane to serve women’….just a theory, and very, VERY similar (in reverse) to the Scriptural interpretations, ALSO THEORIES, that were used to keep women in servitude for so many centuries. Is ’serving women is your reason for existence, brother, if you were really spiritual you would understand’, any different to the crap that women were fed about God placing men above them? Eivind, if you weren’t so damaging, i would just laugh and say eeewwww, what a silly, self-righteous, smug wanker. But you are damaging, and the nature of your righteousness is that you will go through life convinced that you are evolved. Sad.

It was a response to a thread I participated in just about a year ago on my friend Pelle Billing's blog, sent to my mailbox because I was still subscribed to it.

You can imagine it got my attention. I found myself strangely enlivened – the energy of the words actually gave me energy. My nervous system went alert and I felt alive. And then I became happy. I actually giggled. What was going on? I realized that this dude had actually, although he was clearly swimming in a lot of his own shit, identified some things about my past self which were true. I laughed because the criticism of my past self – just one year back – was so out of line when applied to who I am now. I sensed how much my life had changed in so little time and it made me rejoice.

I just read that thread again and actually find my presence there to be somewhat intolerable. Quite arrogant actually. "A pompous arse"  comes to mind. I agree in principle with many of the things I said, but the way in which I said them are strangely out of sync with how I now think and what I now feel to be appropriate communication. My absolutist stance is passive aggressive, the dude was right (I have since learned how absolutist statements are a sign of insecurity). And I was shaming another dude in the thread and saying pretty much explicitly that I was further along on the path than him. That's not a decent way to communicate in my book.

The claim that "the nature of your righteousness is that you will go through life convinced that you are evolved" had just enough truth in it to wake me up and was so out of line with reality that it made me feel freedom and joy inside.

HOWEVER, I realized that this is likely to happen more as my audience widens – I will be criticized for words both past and present. What better way to deal with it than starting the "Humble Pie Project". Whenever someone says something nasty about me, something that will make me look like shit, I will post it here, provided it was published in a public forum. Don't let that scare you off from criticizing me – I invite it.

Give it to me