Generational Guilt
Groups and even nationalities commonly repress accumulated generational guilt. Without doubt, this is the case now with black and white Americans over slavery. The racial problems we now experience in America all stem from the unresolved and repressed guilt within white people and unresolved and repressed rage in blacks.
It has become clear to me during my workshops that a lot of the pain people carry is not their own and may go back several generations. Most frequently it is their parents’ pain they have taken on, but it might also be their grandparents’ or siblings’. When we are children, our energy is purer and less fractured than it is when we become adults, so children feel able to carry that pain where a wounded adult may not. But children forget to give it back, and they make it their own.
The Dark Side
We also experience intense shame over aspects of ourselves we dislike and, therefore, disown. Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst, referred to this as our shadow because it represents the dark side of ourselves, the part we do not want to see or have seen by others. This part of ourselves knows we are capable of killing another human being—knows we could have taken part in the concentration camps had we been German during that time, knows we might have owned and brutalized slaves had we been born white in the South before the Civil War, could hurt or rape someone, is greedy or avaricious, is rageful and vengeful, or is in some other way deviant or unacceptable. Any such characteristics we possess or areas of our lives that bring us feelings of shame we classify as our shadow and repress.
Sitting on a Volcano
Repressing this kind of energy is like sitting on a volcano! We never know when our strength will give out, thus allowing the lava (shadow) to spurt forth and wreak havoc on our world. This explains why we need to bring in a scapegoat on whom we can project all that shame. That way, we can be free of it, at least temporarily.
PROJECTION
Even when we have repressed the feelings and/or memories associated with a life event, we know on an unconscious level that the shame, guilt, or self-criticism associated with it remains with us. So we attempt to rid ourselves of that pain by “taking it out of ourselves” and transferring it onto someone or something else outside of ourselves. This projection process allows us to forget we ever possessed such feelings.
Once we project what we do not want to own onto someone else, we see them, rather than ourselves, as possessing those qualities. So if we repress our guilt and then project it, we make the other person the wrong one. If we repress our anger and then project it, we see them as the one who’s angry. We can accuse them of all the things we feared we would be accused of ourselves. No wonder we feel so relieved when we project! In so doing, we make someone else responsible for everything terrible that happens to us and for what we see as negative about ourselves. Then we can demand that they be punished, so we can feel even more righteous and safe from attack.
This explains why we love to watch the news on television. The news provides us with an opportunity to project all our guilt and shame onto the murderers, rapists, corrupt politicians, and other “bad” people we see on the screen. After doing so, we can go to bed feeling okay about ourselves. The news, and all the other television programs that feature “bad” people and situations, endlessly provides us with convenient scapegoats upon whom to project. (FIGURE 7)
FIGURE 7: Projecting Our Repressed Shame
Recognize When You’re Projecting
As soon as you find yourself judging someone and getting angry, you know you are projecting. Anger serves as the constant companion of projection, for you always use this emotion to justify the projection of your self-hatred.
What you find so objectionable about this person simply serves as a reflection of that part of you that you have rejected and denied in yourself (your shadow) and projected onto them instead. If this were not so, you would not be upset.
If You Spot It, You Got It!
It feels like the other person is doing something to you to make you angry. However, when you own that your feelings begin with you, not with them, you will drop the need to feel victimized and realize that the person is doing these things not to you but for you—enabling you to take back the projection and love it in yourself.
Though repression and projection are meant as temporary relief valves for the psyche, the ego coopts them as the means to increase and prolong the feeling of separation. Hence, denial, repression, and projection become permanent ways of being for us, at least until we begin to awaken. At that point we slowly become aware of these mechanisms and how we use them to create and maintain separation. The task then is to wean ourselves off these mechanisms and begin to take responsibility for creating the circumstances of our lives rather than blaming everything on others.
Fear of Intimacy (“Into-Me-See”)
Every person we meet offers us the opportunity to choose between projection or forgiveness, union or separation. However, when it comes to close personal relationships, the more intimate we become with someone the closer they get to our true self. Thus it becomes all the more likely they will discover all that unpleasant stuff (our shadow material) that we have denied and repressed, the prospect of which creates enormous fear inside us. The temptation to project it all onto them becomes almost irresistible. At this point, the honeymoon is over. The fear of intimacy becomes so strong that the relationship is likely to fall apart. Most do so within six months to a year, often with a lot of acrimony and painful emotion.
ALL RELATIONSHIPS ARE FOR HEALING
To be awake means to fully understand how this all works and how the ego has skillfully used our spiritual intelligence—which is always moving us in the direction of healing and growing—to provide us with people whose role it is to mirror our own projections and repressed self-hatred. Only then can we heal the separation within ourselves and become whole. This is the purpose of all relationships.
As we saw in Jill’s story, Radical Forgiveness can save a relationship (Jill and Jeff are still happily married). However, this is not necessarily the goal. If the true purpose of the relationship has been fulfilled, which is to say the healing has occurred, the relationship may simply dissolve naturally and peacefully. When both parties understand Radical Forgiveness and use the technology, the parting can be loving, respectful, and relatively pain free.
If, on the other hand, the relationship breaks off before the healing has taken place, the parties will likely go off and find another partner with very similar characteristics who will resonate the same issues for them all over again. Many of us do this over and over again, and we can often see the pattern quite clearly when it is pointed out.
8
Attraction and Resonance
As we saw in the previous chapter, we project our guilt and anger onto people who have the capacity to resonate with our feelings, and such people become convenient scapegoats.
Just as a radio station uses a certain frequency to broadcast its programs, so our emotions (energy in motion) vibrate at certain frequencies. People who resonate with our feelings vibrate at that same rate and are likely to have a similar emotion pattern to our own—either the same or the opposite—which they then mirror back to us.
Our core beliefs also have a certain frequency. By speaking them aloud, we give our beliefs even more energy, and they take on a causal quality in the Universe, causing effects in our world. In addition, other people resonate with the energetic frequency of that belief. In other words, they vibrate sympathetically at the same rate with it. When they do so, they are attracted into our lives to mirror our beliefs back to us. This gives us a chance to look at and, if necessary, change our minds about that belief. It is not only negative beliefs that get mirrored back to us. For example, if we are loving and trusting, we will tend to attract people into our lives who are likewise trustworthy and nurturing.
Recall from Part One that my sister, Jill, had a belief that she would never be enough for any man. This belief res
onated with a man who was a sex addict. He provided the ideal partner for her because he supported her belief by continually having sex with other women, thus showing her she was not enough for him. She did not make the connection in that relationship and, consequently, did not heal the pain that created this belief in the first place. So she found another man (Jeff) who resonated with her belief. He supported her belief differently, by using his own issue of codependence with his daughter Lorraine as the catalyst. In this situation, she saw the connection and realized that he was mirroring her belief that she was not enough, and both of them healed.
If you want to know what you dislike about yourself and have likely disowned, simply look at what annoys you about the people who come into your life. Look into the mirror they provide. If you seem to attract a lot of angry people into your life, you probably have not dealt with some anger of your own. If people seem to withhold love from you, some part of you is unwilling to give love. If people seem to steal things from you, part of you behaves dishonestly or feels dishonest. If people betray you, maybe you have betrayed someone in the past.
Look at the issues that upset you too. If abortion really makes you mad, maybe a part of you shows little reverence for life in other ways, or a part of you knows it could abuse a child. If you are passionately against homosexuality, maybe you cannot accept the part of you that sometimes feels homosexually inclined.
Hall of Mirrors
The reflection does not always appear so readily or as simply. For example, sometimes we do not identify with the specific behavior as much as we do with the underlying meaning it holds for us. A man who gets angry about his wife’s overeating and obesity may not be resonating with any personal tendency to overeat; instead, he might be resonating with her use of food to avoid dealing with emotional problems because it mirrors his tendency to run away from his own emotional turmoil. Clearly, seeing what others mirror for us can become like looking at the myriad of distorted images in a hall of mirrors.
Automatic Reversal of Projection
The beauty of Radical Forgiveness lies in the fact that it does not require us to recognize what we project. We simply forgive the person for what is happening at the time. In doing so, we automatically undo the projection, no matter how complicated the situation. The reason for this is simple, in that the person represents the original pain that caused us to project in the first place. As we forgive him or her, we clear that original pain.
Ironically, the people who seem to upset us the most are those who, at the soul level, love and support us the most. They are often the souls we made contracts with prior to our incarnation to do certain things with us during our lifetime. Almost always, and often at great expense to themselves in terms of their own discomfort, these individuals try to teach us something about ourselves and encourage us to move toward our awakening. Remember, this is not a personality-to-personality exchange. In fact, more than likely, our personalities clash terribly. Instead, the souls of each player set up the scenario in the hope that we will eventually see the truth.
Don’t Take Life So Personally
Who comes into our lives to help us accomplish this task is actually irrelevant. If one particular person does not take the job, somebody else will. The tragedy is that, as the victim, we seldom understand this. We imagine that we just happened to be the unlucky recipient of a particular person’s harmful behavior. It does not occur to us that we might have (at the soul level) attracted the person and the situation to ourselves for a reason and that had it not been this person, it simply would have been someone else. We mistakenly feel that, but for this person, we would not have had the problem. In other words, we see the problem as entirely with the other person, whom we now feel justified in hating and resenting for “causing” us pain and unhappiness.
Blaming Our Parents
We often hear this type of blame when people talk about their parents. “If I’d had different parents, I’d be whole and complete today,” people say. Wrong. They could have chosen a different set of parents, that’s true; but the new set would have given them the exact same experience, because that’s what their soul wanted.
Repeating Relationship Patterns
When we see ourselves as victims, we think only about killing the messenger. We miss the message. This explains why people go from marriage to marriage recreating the same relationship dynamic each time. They do not get the message with the first spouse, so they go on to another who continues trying to relay the message the last spouse tried to relay.
Codependency and Mutual Projection
We also find others onto whom we project our own self-hatred, who will not only accept it but reciprocate by projecting theirs back onto us. We call this kind of agreement a codependent or addictive relationship. This special someone compensates for what we feel is missing in ourselves by continually telling us we are okay, so we avoid feeling our shame about who we are. We do the same thing for them in return; thus both people learn to manipulate each other with highly conditional love based on the underlying guilt. (The stereotypical Jewish mother is a wonderful example of this archetype.) The moment the other person withdraws approval, we are forced to confront our guilt and self-hatred again, and everything collapses. Love turns immediately into hate, and each partner attacks the other. This explains why so many faltering relationships that once seemed supportive and loving turn into cauldrons of hate almost instantaneously.
9
Cause and Effect
Central to the idea that we create our own reality is the Law of Cause and Effect. This states that every action has an equal reaction. Therefore, every cause must have an effect, and every effect must have a cause. Since thoughts are causal in nature, every thought has an effect in the world. In other words, we—unconsciously for the most part—create our world, the World of Humanity, with our thoughts.
When we vibrate at a high frequency, such as when we pray, meditate, or contemplate, we can create consciously and intentionally through thought. Most of the time, though, we do so quite unconsciously. Individual random thoughts do not carry a lot of energy, so they create a relatively small effect. However, thoughts accompanied by larger amounts of energy, especially emotional or creative energy, have a much larger effect in the world. Thus they take a larger hand in creating our reality.
When a thought gathers sufficient energy to become a belief, it has an even greater effect in the world. It becomes an operating principle in our lives, and we then create effects—circumstances, situations, even physical events—that hold true to that belief. What we believe about the world is how it will always be for us.
Acceptance of the principle that thought is creative is fundamental to an understanding of Radical Forgiveness, for it allows us to see that what turns up in our lives represents what we have created with our thoughts and beliefs. It allows us to see that we are simply projecting all our thoughts and beliefs about “the way things are” onto the world. (FIGURE 8)
FIGURE 8: Projecting Our Own Reality
PROJECTING THE ILLUSION
Metaphorically, we run a movie called Reality through our minds (the projector), and we project it “out there.” Once we understand that what we call reality is just our projections, instead of blaming others we can begin to take responsibility for what we have created with our thoughts. When we change our perception and drop our attachment to our belief that what appears on the screen represents reality, we experience Radical Forgiveness.
Consciousness Determines What Happens
While it may seem difficult to see the principle of cause and effect operating in our lives, it becomes apparent when we trace back from what is occurring. In other words, if you want to know your beliefs, just look at what is happening; that will tell you what you are projecting. For example, if you keep getting attacked or disasters keep happening to you, the likelihood is that you believe the world is inherently an unsafe place. You are creating these events to prove that you are right about that and people are suppo
rting you in this belief by appearing to you to behave in a threatening or dangerous manner.
Some friends of mine have a spiritual conference center in the mountains of North Carolina. Werner, being of a prudent nature, thought he and his wife, Jean, should have insurance to protect their buildings against fire, storm damage, and the frequent tornadoes that come through each season. Jean was very much against the idea. She felt having such insurance would clearly indicate to the Universe that they did not trust in their safety. Now, I am not advocating this, but they decided against purchasing the insurance.
The following year, a huge storm hit their very mountain and devastated the area. Thousands of trees were uprooted and thrown down. When my wife and I drove up to visit them two weeks later, we couldn’t believe our eyes: it looked like a war zone. They had obviously been obliged to cut their way out. The storm had happened while thirty-six people were at the center attending a conference, and they were unable to leave for two whole days. But in spite of all the trees down, not a single car or any of the buildings were touched—and all were right in among the trees. Trees fell within inches of structures and autos but miraculously damaged nothing. For my friends, it was a great confirmation of their faith and willingness to trust.
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