There has been numerous mass shootings in the last few years, the most recent one being the one that happened in Santa Barbara California. I don't watch TV, and don't typically keep up with these types of events due to my empathic nature. Then a few days ago one of my favorite spiritual teachers, Teal Swan, released a blog about Elliot Rodgers. The man who shoot and killed 6 people in Santa Barbara. What interested me is how much I agreed with her perspective about this individual.
This sparked my interest in digging deeper into the situation, which lead me to Elliot's Manifesto. Its Titled "My Twisted Life", its around 140 pages long, and is all about his perspective of his life. There are many traumatizing things that happen to him in his early years that emotionally traumatized him. On the surface these things seem little, but if you try to look at it from a child's perspective, many things we believe isn't traumatizing is to a child. Despite his actions, I couldn't help but feel sorry oh him by the end f his manifesto.
Elliot and other mass-murders, appear on the surface as nothing more than mentally ill lunatics. Its not often you get to see their full perspective, like in Elliot's case. What most of these people have in common is they all lack one or more of their basic human needs. In Elliot's case, he lacked more than anything connections and significance. So much that it caused him physical pain when he could no longer obtain these things "normally'. It began to thrill him to commit acts of violence toward those who had what he couldn't achieve. When that no longer filled the void in his soul, he turned to murder. Its clear he was in so much pain, he had to made others feel the same.
From a spiritual and physiological perspective, this is a set-up for mental and emotional disaster. when you look at in terms of vibration, there is many was these types of issues can manifest in ones reality:
- Suicide
- Substance abuse
- Cutting
- Violence
- Depression
- Mental Illness
- Physical sickness
- Alternate Persona's
- Compulsive Behavior
From his perspective its easy to see the ways it manifested in his reality, thus leading him to feel the need to "fight back". Before he became violent, he used World of Warcraft, as way to escape, he also mentions a few different times that near the end of all this he was on medication and heavily drinking. All these things seemed to help release some of his emotions, in an unhealthy way. He was unaware there was any other way to deal with the way he felt inside.
If someone uses drugs, we have many different ways they can receive help in over coming their issues. If we cope in the form of revenge and violence that end up as crime, we are thrown in a cage. Where most get worse before they get better. Prison isolates us from ourselves as much as it isolates us from others. There is no love or connection, and there is no sense of significance. Drug use is also common even in prison, and the environment itself is dangerous. Inmates are often beaten by others and bullied into things the don't want to do. I'm not saying baby these people, but heal them. Like I said earlier humans really only need 6 things in order to be emotionally well:- Certainty
- Verity
- Significance
- Love and connection
- Growth
- Contribution
All of the things are taken away from those we call criminals. People who loose these things will stop at nothing to get these things back, if they don't they fall into a deeper state of resistance. For those who desire to kill, the experience gives them back the sense of empowerment over others. They are really just mimicking the way they feel the universe is treating them. The joy comes from the fact that doing these things makes them "feel" something at all. It becomes the only way they know how to cope. Instead of giving these people support we are focusing on eliminating guns and putting them in prison.
There should be a better system in place for dealing with these types of people. If the conditions that cause these events are the same, why should we treat the effects of these events differently? These types of incidents should inspire us to want to change the system, not eliminate guns. You can eliminate the effects of these events all you want but that doesn't help eliminate the cause. Guns don't kill people, people do, guns are simply a tool to get the job done.
Parenting is also a huge part of all this. We as parents haven't taking our jobs seriously for generations. We have made it acceptable to invalidate our children's emotions, and sugar coat things that are not really meant to be sugar coated. Most of the parting styles we use are in direct conflict with our basic emotional needs. We separate ourselves from our true selves in order to please a society that doesn't value the emotional health of is citizens. This is a extreme contradictory to our very nature. Thus, people are manifesting a reality that is is seemingly out of our control.
This is why I think its important for people to try to see from Elliot's perspective. Its a rare things to get the opportunity to read the perspective of someone who commits a mass murder. I believe there is a lot we can learn from this event, and other like it. I hope that someday this can inspire a new system of prevention and treatment for people like Elliot.
Teal Swan also did an amazing video on all this, check it out: