I’m a big fan of the movie Crash because it did an excellent job of illustrating this point:the greatest good and the greatest evil lies within us all. What got me writing about it now is a couple that I know that is going through a rocky period. I’m not going to describe details … suffice to say that it has a very familiar story line and it got me thinking of a common relationship story. They mostly follow a set path: excitement, everything fits/works, you have so much in common, you look at stuff the same way, until one day …. something happens and it’s clear that this person is not who you thought they were. How could that be? How could you have been so mistaken?

I think for many people it doesn’t feel like they made a mistake. Rather it’s more like they feel they were lied to. This person was pretending to be something they were not, and now the real person has come out now that they feel confident that they don’t have to pretend anymore. Betrayal not incompetence is what occurs for many people.

This relates to a concept of truth that I wrote about on May 12th, which says that truth is a much bigger thing than we’ve been led to believe, and many things that appear to be at odds (one true and one false) may in fact not be. They may both be true. We’re taught to believe that something either is one way or not, and while this is often the case in Newtonian physics, it does not hold for the multidimensional phenomenon of human beings. We’re all of it.

So yes, this person you’re in a relationship is behaving differently, and now you’re seeing some parts of him/her that you never saw before and you don’t like. You could look at this as betrayal, as if this person was waiting till they “had” you to reveal themselves, or you could see this as just a part of being human. Your suave debonair CEO husband is also the uncouth beer drinking poker playing, baseball hat wearing dude on Thursday nights with his buddies.

Can you think of any “contradictions” in you? Do they cause you anguish? And it’s not as black and white as “Oh my God, I say I’m a good Christian/Moslem etc. and yet I (fill in blank).” I’m not pointing you being either this or that, good or bad, right or wrong. I’m pointing to where you are both. You do good things AND you do bad things. What does that say about you? Are you a good person or a bad person? Which is it. It can’t be both. Or can it? Watch the movie Crash. It deserved the Oscar.