How Roles Can Screw Us Up, and How to Escape Them

Think Different

By Cathy Eck


Roles 101

I really enjoyed my ex-husband’s father.  When everyone went off to church on Saturday night or Sunday morning, we would turn off the television, drink an icy cold Iron City, and laugh at our stupid stories.  He was alive, smart, and so much fun.  He was healthy and vibrant.  But the minute the door opened and the family returned, he was an actor who had been signaled to get his ass on stage.  He became a sick, old man who never amounted to anything.  His shoulders dropped.  His back hurt.  His smile turned into a frown, and he would quickly turn on the television.  He had a long-standing role in that family; there was nothing I could do to stop him from playing it or to convince my husband that I knew a different man than he did.

After enough time, I too would fall into a similar dreadful role that I couldn’t escape.  But I was like Andy in “The Shawshank Redemption.”  I was willing to chip away a little each day until I found my way back to freedom.  I learned about roles, and how deadly they can be, from observing my husband’s family.  I’d guess that the leading cause of death is giving up because you can’t escape an unwanted role.

We might have a good white-sheep role like the cute one, funny one, or smart one.  Or we could be a black sheep role like the sick one, negative one, or loser.  Roles are constructed with labels; once people associate us with a particular label, they’re often very slow to let that label go.  They don’t notice when we change; and we often feel like we’re stuck in Shawshank prison with little hope for parole.



Here’s where things get dicey.  People assign roles when they project the unwanted half of their beliefs out through their physical eyes (the bad side of the bottom of the triangle).  We can’t see them do this so we get tricked.  In the illusion, people (in masculine roles) see their own reflection without knowing it.  The masculine projects; the feminine reflects.

They call you the perky one because that’s how they see you, not how you really are.  Suddenly, you’re more perky in their presence; you might like that they bring out that quality in you.  But if they call you lazy or rude because you don’t talk around them (since they bore the living shit out of you),  you’ll find yourself unable to be perky even if you normally are.  Even worse, with a “bad” label, they’ll try to fix you, cementing the label more deeply.

In my experience, the best escape route is to let go from the feminine role until we get into the masculine role.  What we do next is critical.  Most screw up right here.  Once in the masculine role, we must let go of anything we see outside of us that generates emotion until the whole world appears free.  We can’t get free while holding people hostage in roles with our beliefs.

Getting rid of the need for approval is key to getting free of labels.  We must stop measuring our success based upon what others think of us and start measuring our success by the purity of our OWN mind.   Likewise, we stop measuring other people by what they say or do and start measuring them by the quality of their thinking.

For example, we say that people who inspire and motivate others are good people.  But why are they inspiring and motivating?  They see an uninspired and unmotivated world.  They’re fixing their own projection.  When we move into the masculine role, we see our beliefs about others, people, animals, plants, and the world.   It is our job to let go of what we see until we see free choice, true versus false, and a divine sort of justice.  Most people fix their projections and call it a career.


No Roles

The mental perspective is the cure for everything wrong in the world.  From a physically-oriented perspective, medical doctors are helpful; mentally oriented, they’re cursing patients with labels called diagnoses. They focus on sickness, not health.  In a physical orientation, veterans are heroes; mentally oriented, they’re blindly obedient killers.  Physically oriented, caretakers are servants to the needy; mentally oriented, they’re enablers or prison guards.  If we cling to a physically-oriented role, we can’t get free.  It’s impossible!

If you feel like you don’t fit into the world, you probably are more comfortable with the mental perspective.  You might feel judgment from others because people with physically oriented perspectives fit in; they think they’re good and right.  They have a free pass to be completely irresponsible with their mind.  You may have tried to avoid the physically-oriented world, but that isn’t necessary.  I assure you that the illusion won’t affect you once you let go of your beliefs and let your free mind lead your physical body and experience.

Roles disappear once we adopt the mental perspective.  Those who were perceived as good become false; and those who were labeled bad or wrong are revealed to be reflections of false good roles.  It becomes clear that the normal view of life is illusory; whatever was wrong in the illusion will be false in the free world.

When this mental shift happens, shit no longer happens.  A different world is revealed; it was hidden below our beliefs all along.  Roles, authority, and the illusion lose their false power.  We have nothing to fear anymore.  It was all just the boogie man under the bed; he wasn’t real.  The illusion takes over our imagination so we lose our creativity; when we let go of the illusion, our creativity returns.

Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for others to live from this perspective.  It’s there when we let go of our OWN physically-oriented perspective.  It’s there when we live entirely from the mental, True Self, perspective — the world of mental cause producing physical effect.