Friends, what is tolerance?

Polite respect for someone else, even if you don’t understand them. Excellent, and the odds are there will be plenty of people in life you don’t understand, because they come from a different culture than you, speak a different language, or just have to deal with a noticeably different living situation than you.

Allowing. Perhaps allowing for?

You raise a good point with seeing tolerance as allowing. People often feel like they have to give allowance to theirs, but who do you have to allow to do anything? Do you control whatever it is you are allowing in the first place? But people do see tolerance as allowance.

Life gives you permission to exist, or you would not. But what do we have to allow, really, and why would tolerance be in any way difficult? Does anyone want to share something about what they feel they had to “allow”?

I guess that question sums me up. Altruistic to the point of being a doormat. Ah, then that would mean you are also practicing intolerance. In this case, intolerance for your own presence and needs, excluding the “you” factor from the situation. Is that tolerance?

I would say I suffer intolerance. Sure, it’s my own. Indeed. We tend to side with the ones in power, even if it’s we who put them there, and even if they don’t want to be the ones in power. So we can even operate under an assumed intolerance, just because it seems more convenient. Rules we assume exist so we live by them, as unspoken and unpractised by anyone else as they may be.

I have a psycho-neurological condition, a genetic condition that caused temporal lobe seizures when I was a juvenile. In my case, my seizures would go on to shape my capacity for tolerance to the point of it being a “developmental disorder”. For me, everything is patterns, cause and effect, logic, and I get really distressed with incongruency. It makes me act really weird, tolerant of things people think I shouldn’t tolerate, and intolerant of things people assume should be tolerated. My whole life has been an exercise of tolerance that first failed when I was in my teens (a hormonal issue maybe). But for myself, I have learned tolerance by embracing the patterns in the world, as incongruent and inconsistent as they seem on a more superficial level.

I think tolerance evolves according to your moral development. As you advance on Kohlberg’s levels, you get more universalistic, and so more tolerant. Tolerance does grow with it being tested, yes, and can mature, and given time and trial, one can discover that it’s in their best interests as an individual to embrace tolerance.

You need experience of different lifestyles, races, beliefs. Indeed, and you experience only what you will attend to, but perhaps what is most needed is experience of ones own limitations. We tend to fall into a model that no one lives up to, that of the “moral paragon”, and all instead wind up living the life of an egotistical hypocrite.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~