Stages Of Control Over Others

This is the second part of the article about control. If you haven’t read the first part, click here to read it.

There are several stages of wanting to control others, the worst one being hatred and the best one being neutrality-appreciation.

Once you achieve neutrality, it means you have completely given up the want to control others.

Let’s start from the beginning to assess all the stages and understand how to get out of each one.

1.Hatred

This is the worst stage to be in. If you hate some people, it shows that you want to control the outside circumstances. It bothers you that some people behave in a certain way or because of who they are. Because you feel this way, you are completely imprisoned and you feel angry or disappointed as a result. Your ego is happy because it has achieved its goal of separating you from others and you indeed feel very distant from other people.

To give up hatred you simply need to want to change. When you honestly seek ways to stop hating people, you magically stop hatred. That’s how it works. I know it sounds easy, but that’s how it is. I’ve seen this happening to many people and it will happen to you to too if you honestly want to change. Usually the changes take place very quickly, within days, so you will very soon know if your want to change was genuine.

2.Dislike

The second stage that you experience once you don’t hate people is disliking them. You no longer feel deep anger, disgust and resentment of others, but you still feel negative towards them. However, now you feel a bit better as though you got rid of some of the uneasiness and uncertainty.

At this stage you would still feel uncomfortable with the idea of oneness of all the humanity and the unconditional love because you would not be able to grasp the real meaning of such ideas. A better way to improve this feeling is by understanding that you don’t need to control others to feel good.

You can feel good no matter what other people do, what they have or who they are. You can be completely okay with yourself amongst people who behave very differently to how you do.

If you try to control others, you may feel temporary satisfaction, but in the long term you will just feel increasingly more frustrated because you will realise that you are against the force that you just cannot win over – the willpower of other people. That will exhaust you, depress you and make you feel unable to control your personal life, let alone the lives of the people you dislike.

3.Disapproval

A milder control stage is disapproval of the actions of others. You may not necessarily dislike people anymore, but you still disapprove of some of their actions or behaviours. So now you no longer want to control people, but you want to control certain actions they take. As you no longer want to control people, you feel a huge relief but you still don’t feel entirely peaceful and free.

You may, for example, disapprove of how some mothers teach their kids. You honestly feel that those kids will not benefit from what they are taught and that upsets you. In such case you should realise that you cannot save the whole humanity from experiencing something negative.

After all, maybe your limiting beliefs do not let you see the benefit in the teachings of that mother. Maybe the mother wants the child the best but you fail to see that because you are looking through a negative lens. There are so many ways to view the situation and you will change your opinions about the same situation throughout your life.

For example, I used to not understand why mothers would let their children run like wild and make noise in public places. Then I began to think that it’s actually much better to let children express themselves than suppress their creativity and their uniqueness, so I no longer minded them shouting and playing.

Now I just don’t think about that – different parents have different opinions about how children should behave. There are children from very conservative families who grow up to be excellent and there are some who grow up to be drunkards and criminals. So there’s no right or wrong way, just your thinking makes it so.

4.Tolerance

Many people think that tolerance is the last stage in giving up control over others. Yes, it is better than hatred or disapproval, but it still contains a desire to have power over others. When you become tolerant, you still don’t feel a complete peace of mind and freedom.

At this stage you can feel that some small part of yourself still wants to cling to other people and teach them the right way to live, but you restrain from doing that. This shows that you still have some want to control others and therefore you fail to free yourself. Go further than that, seek complete neutrality and ignorance to what others do.

5.Neutrality

This is the last stage – you completely give up control and you are perfectly fine with that. You completely give up your ego. No matter what other people’s opinions are, no matter what they do, who they are or how they look – you are perfectly fine with that.

In the neutrality stage, when you hear someone angrily comment about the way someone looks or behaves, that just seems funny to you and you feel sorry for the person who critiques – you know that they are still suffering because they want to control what they cannot control.

Your neutrality may even develop into appreciation. You may start to notice good things in even worst people. You may start to understand that everyone is a creator and that from their perspective they are doing the right thing. Every behaviour rises from a good cause, just the action people take to get what they want may not be agreeable to you.

Conclusion

The desire to control others tricks many into the false illusion of importance and power. However, a real sense of importance can only be acquired by searching for importance within yourself and not outside of yourself.

It is so easy to get away from the want to control, it may even at first be hard to believe. All you need to do is want to change, because when you ask it is always given. That’s the law.

Once you completely give up control over others you will feel a huge relief and peace of mind. You will realise how stupid it was for you to try to control others because you will understand how unproductive and dangerous it was to your personality.

Further reading: You Don’t Have To Do Anything You Don’t Like, Seeking Approval, How To Be Happy, How To Manifest.

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