02.09.2026
When your own people throw you out
I built a temple from nothing in the Canaries. I put it up, I filled it, I held it up.
And they threw me out. The people inside. Over politics, and for having said too much about things that were known and not said.
It’s a far more common situation than it looks, and you don’t need a temple: it happens in companies, in families and anywhere there’s a group. What marks it out isn’t the injustice. It’s that it comes from the people you shared what mattered most with.
It hurts differently from an enemy. The enemy confirms your view of the world. Your own people break it.
The text starts exactly there: a man on a battlefield with his own family and his teachers in front of him. It isn’t a metaphor I’m forcing, it’s literally the scene the book opens with. And the first thing that man does is admit he doesn’t know what to do:
Now I am confused about my duty and have lost all composure because of weakness. In this condition I am asking You to tell me clearly what is best for me. Now I am Your disciple, and a soul surrendered unto You. Please instruct me.
Bhagavad-gītā 2.7. 1972 edition.
That’s what was worth something to me. Not the answer, which comes afterwards and runs to seven hundred verses. The question.
A man with all his own people in front of him admits out loud that he has lost his composure and can’t see clearly what his duty is. Nobody does that. We all pretend we know what we’re doing, above all when we’ve just been thrown out.
It took me twenty years to stop telling that story as a victim. The text helped. So did time.