When we see actions that seem less than loving in ourselves and others, we interpret it in different ways. And these interpretations are based on our experience, understanding, and assumptions about people and life.
Behavior: Theft, lying, killing etc.
Surface psychology: Greed, anger, jealousy.
Moralistic, metaphysical: Evil.
Evolutionary: Behavior that, in some situations, helps us survive and bring up children.
Cultural and social perspective: Learned patterns. Learned ways of dealing with pain, fear, being a human in the world.
Family dynamics: A natural and understandable reaction to certain family dynamics.
Ordinary psychology: Coming from pain, wounds, trauma, reactivity.
Fear perspective: Reaction to unloved and unquestioned fear. Or, more precisely, unloved fear and reaction to the fear, and unquestioned assumptions behind the fear and the reaction to the fear.
Love and inquiry perspective: How we sometimes live when parts of us and our experience are unloved and unquestioned.
Living Inquiries: Deficient self, trying to protect an identity and/or fill a perceived hole.
The Work: The natural consequences of beliefs and identifications.
Satsang inquiry: Worried love, confused love, misguided love. An expression of love for the imagined self, trying to protect the imagined self.
Self-inquiry: Unquestioned assumption of being a separate self. Unexamined experience of (a) this seamless field of experience (b) being split, and (c) identifying with one part (me, I), and seeing the rest as “other” (others, the wider world).
Awareness: The play of awareness/awakeness.
Spirit: Divine play, lila.