Nincy Perdomo

Some of humanity’s oldest myths contain the same warning: not to look back. Lot’s wife looks back at the world she was leaving and turns into a pillar of salt. Orpheus looks back for Eurydice before they have completely escaped the underworld and loses her. In Japanese mythology Izanagi looks back at Izanami in the land of the dead and discovers that the woman he remembers no longer exists. Different cultures, different stories, but all have the same message….that there are thresholds in life that can only be crossed by accepting that what was behind you is gone. This doesn’t mean we have to forget the past. But it does mean refusing to live there. The past can teach you, shape you, and become material for the Great Work, but it cannot be inhabited again. We become frozen when we keep trying to resurrect an old relationship, an old life, an old identity, or an old version of ourselves. Transformation requires something to die so that something else can be born. Sometimes the final test of an initiation is simply this: can you keep walking without turning around?

When I recently wrote about the possibility of a public execution being livestreamed, several people responded by telling me they’d been watching videos of beheadings, torture, and other atrocities since they were children, and that seeing another human being killed wouldn’t bother them in the slightest. They seemed to think this somehow proved me wrong when I said that witnessing such things changes us. But desensitization isn’t evidence that something has no effect on you. Desensitization IS an effect. If you’ve spent your entire life consuming images of human suffering, how could you possibly know what kind of person you might have become without them? How much compassion you might have developed? How much sensitivity you might have retained? And just because some adults have conditioned themselves to view human suffering as entertainment doesn’t mean children should be subjected to it. Once something like this is put on the internet, it becomes impossible to contain. It gets shared, turned into memes, and inevitably reaches people who never chose to see it. Everyone has heard the phrase “you are what you eat,” but very few people seem to understand that this applies just as much to the mind as it does to the body. Everything you repeatedly give your attention to becomes part of the material from which your inner world is constructed. If you spend years feeding your body garbage, your health will eventually reflect it. And if you spend years feeding your mind hatred, cruelty, violence, and human suffering, your inner world will eventually reflect that as well. You may not even recognize the changes, because they’ve happened so gradually. This is what we mean in alchemy when we say, “The laboratory doesn’t lie.” You can tell yourself that none of it affects you, but that doesn’t make it true. There’s a tremendous difference between having the strength to face human suffering and developing an appetite for watching it. One can deepen our humanity. The other can slowly destroy it.