There is a lot of hate in the world. It’s not that is raising or falling, but there has always been a lot of anger and rejection of others. People will judge literally anyone over anything. Your skin color, clothes, location, family, accent, word choice, name, belief, practice, work, skills, talent is wrong. At some point you have to realize you can not please everyone, but you do need to practice tolerance.
When practicing tolerance you need to realize your own prejudice and judgements to others and yourself. You constantly judge others all the time. A drive who got in your way is suddenly a lousy driver who is selfish and stupid. At work you judge your co workers for being better or worse, lazy, stupid, or snobby. You judge your children against other children to make sure they are the best or should do better. You judge the other Jedi to see if they are more or less “Jedi” than you. Worse of all you judge yourself. You are ugly, fat, lazy, hateful, scared, selfish, stupid, and so on. These negative thoughts are incredibly harmful, yet they are habitual and socially reinforced.
When you get leave a party with your spouse or friends, do you talk about your experienced at the party? Does it not end up talking about how someone drank too much or someone doesn’t seem to be doing well? Well innocent gossip is not so innocent. It’s telling you it’s ok to talk and judge people even when they will never hear about it. Negative actions leads to more negative actions, which eventually leads to the dark side.
When you judge others you are only seeing the negative in them and refusing to acknowledge the good in them. When you continuing only see the hate and ugliness of the world, we Jedi call that the dark side. It’s a vicious nasty cycle that makes you darker and darker. I see this happen at call centers because usually lazy, rude, dramatic, and just awful people call to yell and scream, pick fights, and demand what can’t be done. The call rep loses sight that there are good people in the world and learn to hate everyone. The only answer is to consciously stop yourself and purposely look for the good. Find a reason to be happy and see joy in the world and soon you will see it everywhere. This is the path of the light side,
Tolerance is about allowing differences to exist. It’s about acknowledging something is different from you and then being emotionally and mentally ok. Tolerance is also about letting yourself be less perfect and understanding you will judge others, stop, realized you judged and letting it go. A good way to overcome prejudice is to ask why is good about the difference. How do those people succeed? You can research their difference and understand the history and importance of it. You can ask yourself “what is driving my feeling of judgement? Why do I need to feel better than them? Why do I need to hate them?” You can also talk to these people and learn more about their difference. You can start with asking how are they doing? And then “I was wondering, where are you from? Or that is a cute top, where did you get it from? Start with a polite neutral question and slowly work in the thing that makes them different. You may even get more friends, more education, and learn a new skill simply because you talked to them. Remember the code: there is no ignorance; there is knowledge.
The only thing to remember with tolerance is not allow others to abuse that tolerance. There is a difference between being tolerance of differences and being abused and attacked. There was a troll by name of Hannigan. He was constantly creating fights and debates. He would attack anyone he could and then claim innocents or point of a lack of rule for his behavior. People got tired of his endless negativity. He was trolling the community for years, going from one group, eventually getting kicked out, to another, repeat, repeat, repeat. He has been kicked out of nearly every Jedi group out there and serves as a warning: Do not allow people to push your tolerance beyond a personal level. It is not ok for a person to constantly be bending and slightly breaking the rules. Do not tolerant abuse from anyone even if they constantly give excuses or apologies. You own it to yourself to respect and love yourself and by tolerating abuse you aren’t doing that. You need to have clear limit and tell a person to stop. They may kick and scream, call you names, threaten you, harass you, and tell you are a horrible Jedi. Just ignore them, report them to a staff member with screen shots, and then block them.
Jumping to conclusions, being racist or bias. Looking at why society likes or hate a certain thing. Look at the history. Tolerance vs recognizing a threat. Tolarnace is not going and looking for a fight. Do not think going and picking a political argument is being tolerant. I have friends I don’t agree with their political view. I don’t go ranting on about how they are wrong and I am right. I just either ignore the message or tell facebook I don’t want to look that post because I value friendship and peace more than trying show I’m right. As long as what they are doing or saying doesn’t hurt anyone or strongly encourage others to hurt people, then I can be a bit tolerant of their views.