My meeting with The Scary Guy. Part 3 (and last so far!)

Hi all:

I hope you’ve been following my series sharing my meeting and interview with The Scary Guy. Today we get to the last part, where Scary talks about what he feels is his main message, about his personal experiences, his concept of family and how he’s come to be who he was meant to be.

Scary welcomes us to the last part of the interview

I asked Scary about his core message: He told me he wants to show enough people how to make world peace in their life time. He is convinced that it can happen; the problem is how to show it to all individuals in the world in that particular moment. Part of the reason he believes this is a challenge is because people are essentially reactionary; they react to whatever is happening around them instantly.

He described that sharing his belief, message and teaching is like trying to swim up a waterfall (like the Niagara). He described himself as a “little speck of sand, screaming loudly”. With his tattoos he is screaming to tell people that it can be done and that it is very simple. Some people get it and “when they get it is as if they got a key. “With my teaching, they see that they can work on their own world peace. That is where their power lives” “Creation is not static, not inanimate. You have to keep working at it; you have to keep moving, breathing, changing creation. World peace is a process, not a matter of wood, or a gun, or a war. It’s the process of how to learn to create world peace.  People will say that we would achieve world peace “if we only stop fighting…or if we only make this or that happen, and we end up labelling it as racism or gay prejudice as the problem …” For Scary that is not the root problem, that is a manifestation, it is a symptom, a scar of an underlying problem. Neither racism, nor sexism, nor religious hatred are the problems and even if one of those problems were solved that would not result in world peace.

He noted that he would meet people who would be at pains to tell him straight away, I’m gay, or I belong to this or that religious group. And he wonders why they think that is so important. He knows they want to be accepted, the same as everybody, but he will tell them: “You tell me because you want to be accepted. I love you because you’re you.” It is not a matter of loving somebody for some specific reason, but rather as a whole person.

Both the film and the book also discuss Scary’s concept of creating your own family. He told me that like all of his teachings they come from personal experiences. He told me that his biological father was an afraid and angry man who lived through the period of World War II and was a child of that time. Scary’s father believed that children should be heard and not seen.

Scary needed acceptance from his father and wanted his father to tell him that he loved him as a son but his father did not have the training to do that. Scary’s father’s father had left the family when Scary’s father was 13 (in the 1930s or 40s). He never spoke about this. He had been taught that men had to shut up and be tough. Following this pattern, Scary’s father did not interact with his children. When he divorced, when Scary was 18, he left the house and the family and created a new family in Florida. He married a woman with six children, already grown-up and he was a father to his wife’s children but never again had any interaction with his three biological sons. Scary’s youngest brother tracked their father down and sent him a Christmas present but he returned it.

Scary sees looking back that his father never approved of anything he did and he felt as if he was always walking on eggshells, trying to prevent his father from getting angry, whilst at the same time feeling shameful and guilty. Scary told me he calls these kinds of experiences that everybody has to a certain extent “life” although a therapist might call it “baggage”. One day he looked at himself in the mirror and he realised it was not his problem, it was his father’s. He decided he wanted to find a father that would give him the recognition and guidance his own father had never given him and he chose a guy Honest John. The full story of this is in Scary’s book. Honest John was a tough old guy that Scary saw as a great role model for him. He showed him it was possible to be tough, still be a man and still be loving at the same time.

Scary told me everybody has the ability to choose any family figure, it could be a father or a mother, somebody one feels an emotional connection to. He told me this was a very important message he gives kids through his training, especially kids from difficult backgrounds, where their parents would have had what he described as “bad training”. They might have been addicted to drugs, or be abusive, or have other difficulties. He tells them they have nothing to lose by choosing somebody new and once they try they’ll see if the can do it or not, but they will never be in a worse position than they already are.

He says, “Don’t live in your victimhood.” He told me that he gets many letters on that subject; thousands of letters, and he has at least 20 people or more in Germany who see him as their father, both women and men. We noted that people usually say: “You choose your friends but you cannot choose your family” but Scary feels that is not necessarily so. Why not create your own family? Who wrote the rules? The rules can be re-written. “YOU CREATE YOU.” He believes that you create your own emotional being and you must be responsible for your own life.

St Mary’s Church in Hay after the renovation

Scary told me that he has discussed this concept with religious leaders who oppose his thinking because they say God (whoever their God might be) is the only one who can create people. Scary believes human-beings are God-like and they have free-will to create themselves.

Scary told me that equally, many religious people also applaud what he is teaching, and believe he is God’s work. He has been called a “Prophet of Peace” among many other such names and one person insists he is the “Second Coming of Jesus of Nazareth”. He told me that like all comments he gets, he does not pass judgement on what they choose to believe, he thanks the person and lets them live with their beliefs as it is not harmful to anybody and helps them to live their lives with a sense of purpose.

Although we could probably had carried on talking for hours, it was a Thursday, market day and I had to go to work and needed time to digest all the information. So we left it there for the time being.

I leave you links to the previous posts:

http://wp.me/p2OC9i-1iN

http://wp.me/p2OC9i-1iZ

Scary’s books in Hay-on-Wye, Addyman Books.

And here the links to get to know more about Scary and follow his work. You might be lucky and he might be coming to a place near you soon!

Scary’s Website:

www.thescaryguy.com

Join Scary on his Facebook Fan Page

(https://www.facebook.com/thescaryguyfanpage)

Scary’s Biography: 7 Days & 7 Nights

(http://thescaryguy.com/product/7-days-and-7-nights/)

Thanks Scary and Cathryn for your kindness and for visiting my blog, thanks to all of you for reading, and you know you can like, share, comment and CLICK!