The Victim

The victim is a casualty of the human condition of unhappiness. Within each body is the residue of the past experience of humanity, including all the acts of cruelty, hatred and violence which linger in the human psyche. Every young girl, for example, will be the victim of man’s sexually-charged self, as every boy is primed to take his place as a carbon copy of society’s frustration and dishonesty to love.

There are no victims in nature, where each of the species takes its chance in the great struggle for survival. Is the worm a victim or is its sacrifice necessary for the bird to maintain its vitality and beauty? Could it be that there’s something we’re not seeing which could eliminate the identification with being labeled as a victim? The trauma of some atrocity or oppressive situation apparently beyond the control of the person can, of course, be devastating and leave deep emotional scars. But what is the truth of the victim that undermines this negative aspect of human nature?

The word ‘victim’ originates from the Latin ‘victima’, denoting a creature killed as a religious sacrifice. From a spiritual perspective, when identified with the role of victim the individual sacrifices their integrity to a force or entity outside themselves. A victim is victimised, not by an event or situation but by the tyranny of the mind and emotions. For some, adopting a victim’s mentality suits their persona and feeds the appetite of the emotional body. When accepting responsibility for the circumstances of life, it’s impossible to be a victim of anything, be it accident, abuse or misadventure. This is because implicit in responsibility is the knowledge of the justice of life: that there is nothing that can happen now or at any time that is not right and necessary to be faced or lived out.

The challenge is to see through the deluge of ignorance transmitted continually through the media. The media exists to feed the untruth to the masses. Without victims there would be nothing of interest to report and the newspapers would go bust. Across the globe, a riveted audience watches from the comfort and safety of their homes the daily tragedies and scandals of the world – and vicariously participates in the victim’s role as a self-indulgent form of entertainment. When no longer curious of the misfortunes of others or confused by the duplicity of the world, the victim disappears as any interpretation of the uncertainties of existence.

Due to the emotional contortion within the world psyche, everyone is subjected to some form of victimisation; so the role of the victim fills a specific niche in the human condition. Without this anomaly the mind would be unable to process the insanity of its own creation. The Al-Anon Family Groups have a saying: “There are no victims, only volunteers”. The sacrifice, in other words, is to disidentify with the role of a victim and volunteer instead to be responsible, come what may, for life on earth. Then the self-made travesty of pain and suffering is transcended, with the recognition of the supreme virtue of it all. This is not a personal life but a vast system of intelligence, slowly unfolding as one life sequence to the next towards the betterment of humankind.