An Open And Honest Letter To Little Man

Dear LinkedIn Friends, Students, And Colleagues,

Recently, I was reflecting back on a book I had read many years ago. The book is entitled "Listen Little Man,” and it was written in 1946 by the Austrian Psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich. After seeing the women's march on Washington D.C. and other major cities in the United States, I was passionately moved to address the little man whose words and deeds galvanized three million women to march together in protest around the world.

Although I am addressing the “little man” in this lettered teaching, I am also calling out and challenging all of us to honestly see ourselves just as we are, to stand steadfast in the truth with courage, humility, and integrity, to always trust the pristine clarity of our beginner’s heartmind, to wholly live from the still brilliance of our core-Self, and all the while gather together to express the power of our boundless intimacy, our openhearted decency, and our basic goodness.  

With blessings and one bow, 

Dr. Bonnici

_________________________________________________________

AN OPEN AND HONEST LETTER TO LITTLE MAN

Dear little man, I am writing to let you know that I see you just as you are. I see through your deceitful speech, your devious ego, your arrogant mental posturing, and your suppressed doubts, insecurities, and apprehensions. I see how you use verbal and emotional abuse to demean and control others. I see how you bully and intimidate those who seek to clarify the truth and who would question your opinions and perceptions. I see through your subtle tactic to make people feel that they are never enough. I see how you maliciously attack the character and reputation of good people because they challenge your inconsistent, narcissistic, and contradictory way of being reality. I see how you use a despicable strategy where you malign and denigrate others, then you wholly deny you ever did so, and finally you extend to them your fabricated praise and false admiration to make them emotionally ripe for manipulation.

Little man, even though you have wealth and power, you are always afraid that people will finally come to see the truth that you are really a very little man. You cover up your littleness and smallness by always proclaiming your greatness and smartness to yourself and the world at large. Your emotional armoring and instant defensiveness are the chains that keep you in bondage.

Little man, I see through your obsession with gaining fame and power for your own benefit. I see how your disparaging and divisive rhetoric seeks to undermine democratic institutions, the checks and balances of governmental power, our vision of a more perfect union, and our faith in democracy itself. You say you want to serve all the people before yourself, but your daily words and actions show otherwise. You stubbornly believe that you know everything, entrench yourself in dishonesty and deception, speak lies and falsehoods to bend the minds of others, and constantly suppress your arising feelings of guilt, ignobility, and shame.

Little man, I acknowledge that many people see you as an extremely shrewd and successful billionaire. However, this does not make you a noble and honorable human being. I know you are deeply afraid that you might experience all your repressed flaws and failings. Someday, the flowering sword of truth will catch up to you; it will cut you whole and you will know that you are a just a little man. I know that day will be very hard on you, but it will free you from your bondage; it will liberate your nobility, authenticity, and integrity; it will grace you with the treasures of self-forgiveness, wisdom, and compassion, and it will bless you with a boundless empathy that is now far beyond your imagination.

Little man, you are very different from a great man. A great man has littleness within himself, but he is willing to truthfully see where littleness and smallness enters into his thinking, speaking, and acting. A great man acknowledges the threat to uprightness and lucidness that comes from arrogance, pomposity, prejudice, and pettiness. A great man is willing to be cut whole by the flowering sword of truth and begin again with humility and unfabricated confidence. A great man acknowledges and accepts the wisdom of being a simple and ordinary human being in the sea of humanity.

Little man, even though I see you just as you are, please know that I genuinely hope for your successful and amazing transformation as a noble, decent, and upright human being. I challenge you to wake-up to the still brilliance of your core-Self that is far beyond all your grasping, gaining, owning, or attaining. I challenge you to be a great man who sincerely acknowledges his bondage to egotism, conceit, and boastfulness. I challenge you to honestly see your littleness and smallness just as you are, compassionately forgive yourself, and always confidently begin again to honor one humanity in all people, to selflessly serve others just for the sake of serving others, and to creatively engage the awesome power of our collective interdependency to advance the remarkable future of our great country and our world. DrBonnici ? 01/28/2017

In The Way Of Truth And Unity,

Andrew Shugyo Bonnici, Ph.D.