History is a living entity for its energy and consciousness reaches across time and space to impact how we feel, what we believe and how we think today. The long reach of history informs us who is guilty, who is innocent: Who the bad people are and who the good people are; it tells us who is trustworthy and who is not, it tells us what is safe and what is not safe.
The long reach of history gives us a viewpoint of the world that has been passed down to us by our ancestors, it teaches us about God, the nature of the Universe and our place in it for we hold many beliefs concerning reality and ‘God’ that we simply assimilated without effort or question.
Collectively Facing the Truth of Separation from Our True Nature
If we were to face history then we would start to see clearly how the few, those who feed off the burden of guilt and self-hatred, prey upon our desire to have a blind eye turned to what we have done, to what we have ignored, to what we blame others for, so that they can rob our souls in the name of profit. Those who claim to be conscious rail against these men of power in the name of doing what is right but for the most part what is simply being added to the world is more self-righteousness that is used to justify hatred and partition.
The men and women of corruption only get to blind us when we are willing to be blinded. Our focus is placed upon the one enemy, the one bad ‘man’, or bad nation, or bad religion, or bad ethnicity so that all of our fear, blame and hatred can be safely placed onto them giving us the illusion that we are free from the burden of guilt.
Humanity has committed heinous crimes, however, it is our choice as to whether we choose to single out the evil ones, choose to hate and blame ourselves, or choose individually and collectively to face the truth of separation from our true nature without the use of masks, projections, inflated ideals and defences.
Meeting Ourselves Fully
We live in a global culture of blame and one in which it is always someone else’s responsibility. What we’re being called to do as a species before we either destroy ourselves or most of life on our planet is to meet ourselves fully.
We must have the courage to meet our own prejudices and encounter every single place within us that would rather resort to blame than to face the collective human pain body.
This pain body that has been gathering momentum for generations is bringing us to a major crossroads in our evolutionary path: are we going to risk the heartbreak of truly facing all that we’ve done, embracing the truth of it all, or are we going to continue on a path of denial and turning a blind eye until it is too late?
We need to challenge the notion that the perpetrators are less worthy of healing than the victims, we need to challenge the notion that either ‘my people’ or ‘your people’ are either more or less guilty than the other. These are lies that must be challenged. They are lies because they deny the equality of loss.
Somehow we have come to believe that the one who has caused the loss is not worthy of regaining whatever has been lost. The problem with that is what has been lost is a sense of divinity, our sense of connection to all of life, our sense of innocence.
So if we are to heal the planet, we must have the courage to recognize, to truly, freely, audaciously and boldly see and speak the truth of that. When we insist that only the victim has the right to heal, or has more right to heal then what we are agreeing to is that the perpetrators and all of their descendants live in separation from their true nature – this is how we end up with the world as it is today.
Peace Will Come To Us All When...
Those of us who have stood in righteous indignation demanding the downfall of the wicked, the cruel and the unjust have made just as big a contribution to this age of darkness as anyone else. We insist on separation, we insist that others live in darkness.
However, the inclusive nature of our soul and of the soul of humanity will not allow us to do that and therefore we carry the burden of guilt, for it is impossible to cut off one leg and for the other leg not to notice it.
Peace will come to us all when we have the courage to lament the losses of our enemies, when we have the courage to grieve their dead, when we have the courage to weep for the burden their children carry, when we have the courage to recognize that we ourselves will never be at peace individually or collectively until our sworn enemies are likewise at peace. [*bold added by InnerSelf]
As we seek personal fulfilment and healing we must recognize that as individual as we may experience ourselves to be, we in fact live in a collective field of consciousness in which we are wanting to unfold the truth of our own inner light in order to make a fulfilling contribution to the whole.
Service Is The Soul's Pleasure
Serving others through our gifts of music, art, carpentry, motherhood, leadership, compassionate care and myriad other ways, is the one and only path that truly feeds us. We are communal beings expressing ourselves as individuals and our deepest satisfaction comes from being of service to others.
This can be manifest in many different ways , it makes no difference if you are a stay at home mother serving the next generation of compassionate human beings or if you are a captain of industry leading the way towards more sustainable growth and development that seeks to respect all lives. Service is Divine Nature, it is at the core of the soul and it is through service that we get to experience the core and truth of who we are. When it is distorted by unresolved guilt and self-hatred it seeks constant affirmation or it needs to feed off fame.
However, when we surrender to service as the soul’s pleasure we are content and fulfilled and allow others their nature and their path of service. We all came to serve and none of us came with a God given mission to save the planet, we only came to save ourselves and to realize that the pilgrimage that is manifest in the life we are living has as its intended destination our very own heart.
The heart is the jewel, it is the grand prize, it is what we came not only to uncover, or to discover, but we came to realize its own nature and that with a little attention we can recognize that it has always been here.
Our Deepest Shameful Secret Is Shame Itself
In its extreme, ‘good’ Christians can invade the land of the heathen and subjugate them or a ‘good’ Samaritan can attempt to be better than the parent they despise through doing ‘good’ works. None of this is service, it is compensation for a much deeper problem. Shame.
What is apparent is that our deepest shameful secret is shame itself. We don’t want anyone to know that we have shame and so we bury it deeply, as deeply as we possibly can. We are afraid that if another sees our shame they may go on to shame us further by agreeing with it – through telling us that we should be ashamed.
Shaming has sadly become endemic. It lives and breathes in our churches, our synagogues our temples and in our mosques. It lives in our homes and in our schools, it’s alive and well on television, portrayed and played out in soap opera and in reality TV. Shame shows its ugly head in our treatment of and commentary about women, the obese, assertive women, feminine or sensitive men or anyone who sits outside of what our culture deems morally or socially acceptable. Women shame other women, men shame one another – in fact as a culture we seem to thrive on shaming anyone we either don’t understand or feel intimidated by, or shaming others through demanding that they comply with cultural standards. Online forums and communities are awash with individuals who feed off shaming and negativity for negativity’s sake.
Shaming others only seeks to hide our own sense of shame. It takes courage to face shame and this is what is needed at this time in human history that has coincided not only with the possibility that we may destroy ourselves, but it has coincided with an era in which our individual stories and messages of hope and healing can be broadcast easily to the world.
Do Not Become the Next Bully on the Block
We need more teenagers to stand up and be counted, we need more of those who have been marginalized by society to speak to the masses through social media. However, we are also being called at this time to invite the abusers to dialogue.
We can no longer afford to allow our sense of being a victim to turn us into the next bully on the block, for this happens all too frequently. Often, the very people who are championing causes and standing up for the rights of minorities, whether this be in the field of human rights, racial equality, environmental activism, LGBT rights, animal rights, and women’s rights carry the very familiar energy of the perpetrator and can often be observed simply bullying, shaming and persecuting anyone who either disagrees with them or does not enthusiastically agree with their world view – this is not the solution.
We have witnessed generation after generation of the ‘good’ triumphing over the ‘bad’ and when this happens the ‘good’ tend to become paternalistic both in their viewpoint and in their actions. Before we realize it another regime, another despot or another form of discrimination has been born and all of this is built upon the notion that the way to solve the world’s problems is to weed out the bad.
Somehow, we need to fully admit that this approach has never worked and will never work. However, it would be far easier to point the finger at others than to face the truth of what is really underlying all of our issues of hatred and the need to separate, marginalize or control others – fear.
Facing the Truth of Our Heart and Its Deep Longing
Redemption comes when we have the courage to face the truth of our heart. When we acknowledge our heart and its deep longing, and when we face the fear we have of surrendering to our own magnificent and resplendent heart, redemption is ours for we are no longer turning a blind to the truth of another and the truth of who we are.
We are a child of god, we came forth to make manifest our magnificence and to realize the beauty of who we are through compassion and the heart’s longing to know itself as love. As we deny this we ignore the very existence of God in everyone and everything and this leads us to the fall from grace. The fall from grace is NOT having sinned against God or having sinned against another. The fall from grace is having ‘sinned’ against our true nature – habitually ignoring it. Redemption is allowing ourselves to remember.
©2015 by Shavasti. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
Findhorn Press. www.findhornpress.com.
Article Source
Embracing the Power of Truth: Tools for Liberating Your Heart
by Shavasti.
Click here for more info and/or to order this book.
About the Author
Shavasti, also known as the author John L. Payne, is the author of four books published through Findhorn Press and has facilitated workshops on every inhabited continent: Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia and Australia in countries as diverse as the USA, Canada, India, Brazil, Australia and South Africa, including a host of other locations over the period of helping thousands of people during the more than 450 weekend workshops.
Watch a video with Shavasti: Authenticity as a Path to Love
