Looking at this from a cause-and-effect standpoint, Jean recognized that buying insurance reinforced a belief (a cause) in adversity and would create the energy for something bad (an effect) to happen. Instead she chose the thought (cause) “We are doing God’s work here, and we are absolutely safe.” The effect, as it played out in the world, was that in the midst of chaos nothing bad happened.
As I have said, if you want to know your beliefs, look at what you have in your life—or what you do not have. If, for example, you do not have love in your life and do not seem to be able to create a loving relationship, examine your beliefs about self-worth, or about safety with the opposite sex. Of course, this may not be as easy as it sounds, for the beliefs you hold may be buried deep in your subconscious mind.
You Don’t Need to Know Why
The good news is that you do not have to know why you created your situation or what beliefs led you to its creation. Just seeing the situation’s existence as an opportunity to perceive it differently —being willing to see it as perfect—is enough to bring about the required shift in perception and a healing of the original pain.
The truth is, we in the World of Humanity cannot know why a situation is as it is because the answer lies in the World of Divine Truth, and we can know little or nothing of that world as long as we are in human form. All we can do is surrender to the situation.
Just Surrender
If new insights or connections, old memories, emotional movements, and other psychic events are necessary for the desired change to occur, they will happen automatically and without our conscious control. If we try to figure it all out and manipulate the unfolding process, this creates resistance and blocks the process completely, which puts us right back under the influence of the ego.
Freedom from the Law
It is important to realize that the Law of Cause and Effect only applies to the World of Humanity. It is a physical law, not a spiritual law. Creating an open parking space or any other physical thing that you desire and create with your mind is still only manipulating the illusion. It has little to do with being spiritual as such. In fact, if we imagine that we are special because of how well we can manifest in the world, this simply increases our sense of separation and strengthens the ego.
On the other hand, when we truly drop the need to know the why or how of everything, let go of our need to control the world, and truly surrender to what is—as is—in the knowledge that the love of God is in everything, we shall transcend the Law of Cause and Effect entirely. Then we shall realize that karma is just another story that exists only in our minds in the World of Humanity. In the World of Divine Truth, there is no such thing as karma or cause and effect. There is only first cause, which is God.
However, if we engage in activities and consistent ways of being that result in our vibration being significantly raised (through the continual and sustained use of Radical Forgiveness over a long period of time, for instance), we may find ourselves becoming “first cause.”
That would be in stark contrast to how it is for the majority of us at the present time, where we are always the “effect” in this cause-and-effect world—always having to react to what appears to be happening “out there.”
Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, when our vibratory rate is raised and we have all our energy and consciousness in present time rather than tied up in past or future, we will find ourselves not so much noticing synchronicities as becoming synchronicity itself.
For more on how to gauge your own vibratory rate, how you stack up against the “enlightened” ones, and how many it would take of a certain vibration to shift planetary consciousness, I recommend David Hawkins’s book Power vs. Force, published by Hay House.
10
Mission “Forgiveness”
Not one of us can feel our soul’s journey to be over until we, as an entire species, have completed the mission we created for ourselves. This involves no less than transforming the energies of fear, death, and duality by coming to the full realization of our oneness—that we are not separated from God at all and that these energies are simply illusion. This is our collective mission; each of us serves as an individual expression of that mission, and the life we create for ourselves here in the World of Humanity purely serves that purpose. There are no exceptions. Whether we know it or not, we are all on that spiritual path.
OUR INDIVIDUAL MISSION
The decision about which energies we work with on the earth plane is not made by us at the human level. That decision predates our incarnation and is made by our soul group—a group to which we belong made up of souls who either incarnate with us or act as our spirit guides during our incarnation.
Once it is decided which energies we will work with, we then carefully choose parents who will provide the experiences we need as children, and we arrange for others to come along at the right time to play their respective roles in the experiences necessary to the accomplishment of our mission. We create dramas throughout our physical lives that allow us to experience the feelings that make up our mission. These dramas serve as opportunities to experience the separation we came to experience. Then we can awaken, forgive, and remember who we are.
MISSION AMNESIA
Seen from the World of Divine Truth prior to incarnation, the mission seems easy. But once we incarnate, it takes on a new level of difficulty. This is due not only to the greater density of energy in the World of Humanity but to the fact that the mission must be undertaken free of any awareness that we have chosen this experience. If we knew (remembered) the truth about our purpose, the experience would be pointless. How can we remember who we are if we have never forgotten? So Spirit creates the human experience in such a way that when we are born into our bodies we lose all recall of our mission and all awareness that life on the physical plane is, in fact, a setup.
To accomplish our mission (to transform energies) we must have a total experience of those energies. For example, to transform the energy of “victim,” we must feel utterly victimized. To transform the energy of fear, we must feel terrorized. To transform the energy of hate, we must be consumed with hatred. In other words, we must go fully into the experience of being human. It is only when we have fully felt the emotions connected with these energies that we gain the ability to move into the full forgiveness of them. And it is through forgiving them that we remember who we are.
From this viewpoint, we are clearly never in a position to judge anyone. A person who appears hateful may have chosen as his mission to transform that energy. Thus his hateful behavior, even though it seems to harm others (who may have volunteered to have hate projected at them as their mission), is neither right nor wrong. His hateful behavior simply represents what needs to happen to transform the energy of hate. Period.
The energy of hate is transformed when someone who feels hated sees the love beneath the hate and forgives the person for hating him. In that moment, hearts open and love flows between the two people. Thus hate is transformed into love. Awakening results from a continuous process of transformation of the energies of all forms of separation.
Janet’s Story
Janet, who had cancer, attended one of my early cancer retreats, but her tumor was not the only thing eating away at her. The anger she felt concerning her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Melanie, was doing the same.
By all accounts, Melanie exhibited some pretty strong rebellious behavior. She was verbally abusive to Janet and Janet’s new husband, Jim, and she had attached herself to a rather unsavory man. “I hate her with a vengeance,” Janet related. “Her behavior toward me and Jim is simply abominable, and I can’t stand it anymore. I really hate her.”
We dug a little deeper into Janet’s personal history and found that a similar relationship had existed between Janet and her own mother. It was not as clear and dramatic as the drama with Melanie, but the dynamic was similar. Janet had resented how much her mother had controlled her and tried to run her life. She did not rebel as Mel
anie did, though. Instead she had become withdrawn and cold toward her mother.
We began to explore how the dynamic with Melanie reflected her soul’s willingness to help Janet heal her issues with her mother, but Janet was not willing to see this. She was simply too angry to hear anything that did not correspond with her feelings. So we asked her to move into her anger, to feel and express it by beating cushions with a tennis racket and shouting. (Anger is very effectively released through the combination of physical action and the use of the voice.) Although she released some anger toward her mother, her anger with Melanie remained.
Janet’s Satori
That evening’s retreat session was reserved for Satori Breath. To experience Satori Breath and use it for healing, everyone in the group lies on the floor and breathes consciously and vigorously for about an hour while listening to loud music. (See Chapter 27.) While this may sound bizarre, breathing in this manner often results in emotional release, insight, and integration of change at the cellular level. That night, Janet had her satori—her “awakening.”
After the breathing session, people began sharing what had happened for them during the exercise. As soon as Janet began to share, we knew something important had happened. Her voice was soft and sweet, whereas before it had been hard and abrasive. Her posture was relaxed and open, whereas before it had been tight and constricted. There was not a trace of the anger that had filled her being and that we all had felt emanating from her previously. She was calm and evidently peaceful. In fact, she hardly seemed the same person. “I have no idea what all this means,” she began. “All I know is that I saw something while I was breathing, and it felt more real than anything I can possibly describe. Nothing much happened for quite a while after I began breathing,” she continued. “Then, suddenly, I found myself floating in space, out there in the ethers. I was not in a body, and I knew with certainty that I was re-experiencing a time before I came into my current life. I was pure spirit. I have never felt so peaceful and calm. Then I became aware of Melanie, also in spirit form. She came close, and we began to dance together—just dancing in space without limitation.
“We began a conversation about coming into our next lifetime together,” Janet said. “This lifetime. The big question we had to decide was who would play what role—who was going to play the mother and who was going to play the daughter. It didn’t much matter, for either way it was going to be a difficult assignment for us both. It would be a very strong test of our love. We had to decide, so we agreed that I would be the mother and she would be the daughter and that we would incarnate soon thereafter. That’s about it,” she concluded. “It doesn’t sound like a whole lot happened, but really it did. I just can’t put it into words. I just can’t describe the depth and the meaning of what I experienced.”
Energies Transformed
We discussed her experience and looked at the notion of mission as suggested by Janet’s vision. Several others in the group felt strongly about her experience and saw parallels in their own lives. I suggested that Janet say nothing at all to Melanie when she returned home after the retreat. Within a few days of Janet’s homecoming, Melanie called her mother and asked if she could come and talk. Janet agreed, and, while the first meeting was tentative and awkward, their relationship changed dramatically after that. Melanie soon dropped all her bizarre behavior, sent the unsavory boyfriend packing, and came home to be with her mother and take care of her during her illness. They literally became best friends and were quite inseparable after that. Also, Janet’s mother began calling more often, and gradually their relationship began to improve as well.
In this example, the transformation of energy happened in a roundabout way. Janet was extremely resistant to forgiving Melanie. Her soul guided her to the retreat so that she could do a process that opened her to a remembrance of her mission agreement, which in turn enabled her to see the perfection in the situation. By forgiving Melanie, she transformed the hate in their relationship and, as a result, healed the original pain between herself and her mother.
MISSIONS TO HEAL THE COLLECTIVE
While all of us come in to heal aspects of our own soul or those of our soul group, some may incarnate with a larger role to play. This may be to take on particular energies that get played out at the social, political, national, and international level and offer large groups of people the opportunity to heal.
Of course, as with all missions, it may not look anything like a healing opportunity. It may show up as war or famine or maybe a natural disaster. But when we open to the possibility that a group soul healing is being offered and that the whole thing is being orchestrated by Spirit for the greater good of all souls involved, we begin to see things very differently. Let me give you some seemingly outrageous examples.
1. Suppose the soul who came in to become Adolf Hitler did so with a mission to transform the victim consciousness of the Jewish race and the superiority consciousness of the German race.
2. What if Saddam Hussein came in to help American consciousness transform its guilt about slavery and the terrible abuse of its own people? (See my book A Radical Incarnation, which explores this possibility.)
3. Suppose Slobodan Milošević came in to enable America to project onto him the self-hatred it feels about the ethnic cleansing it has perpetrated against the Native American people.
4. What if the Chinese government had to invade Tibet so the Dalai Lama would be forced to travel the world and spread his beautiful message beyond the borders of his country?
5. Suppose the soul that was Princess Diana chose to die in exactly the way she did, and when she did, in order to open the heart chakra of England.
In the first edition of this book Princess Diana’s story appeared as the Epilogue. That was because she died within a very few days of my going to press, so it had to go in almost as an afterthought. In this new edition, I am including it in this chapter since it is so pertinent to the issue of mission.
The event was still very fresh in my mind when I first wrote about Diana’s death. The funeral had only just taken place and the emotional outpouring was still continuing. I was still very much in the experience of it all, and I think that comes across in the piece. For that reason, I have decided not to alter the original version in any way so that you may experience the satori vicariously through my own experience of it.
Good-bye England’s Rose
I began this book with a story about my sister, Jill. Its purpose was to illustrate how a seemingly desperate situation can be transformed when we approach it from the standpoint of Radical Forgiveness.
Just a few days before going to press, fate handed me an opportunity to end the book with a story that was equally instructive and open to a Radical Forgiveness perspective. Unlike the one about Jill, this story was one with which virtually everyone in the world was familiar, as well as deeply involved emotionally. I refer of course to the story of Princess Diana, who made her unexpected transition in the early hours of Sunday, August 31, 1997.
The drama began for me when my lifetime friend Peter Jollyman woke me with a phone call from England. For him it was around midday, but for me, in Atlanta, it was still early and I had not yet seen a newspaper or listened to the radio.
“Have you heard about the accident?” he asked.
“What accident?” I replied, still in a stupor but aware enough to realize this had to be serious for him to be calling.
“Princess Di was killed last night in a car crash in Paris. She was being chased by paparazzi. Her car spun out of control and hit a concrete post. She and Dodi were killed.”
I noticed a perfunctory pang of remorse pass through me as I listened to the details as best he knew them at the time, but I can’t say that it lasted more than a few moments. I tried to sound suitably shocked, but I really felt somewhat ambivalent about it.
Lots of people died in the last twenty-four hours, I thought after I put the phone down. Why would her death be any more, or any less, tragic than anyone
else’s? It was her time to go, and that’s about all there is to it. Sad for her two boys though, of course. With that, I went downstairs to make tea and fix breakfast.
Then I turned on the TV and, from that moment on, was gradually drawn into and involved with what was to become, in the days culminating in her funeral on Saturday morning, a roller coaster of emotion.
As the days went by, I realized that something quite extraordinary was going on. The reaction to Princess Diana’s death, not only in England but throughout the world, was truly phenomenal. As I saw my countrymen on the TV in heartfelt pain, crying and grieving in public—something English people simply do not do ordinarily—I found myself feeling the same emotions and crying with them. I was shocked to realize that I was hurting too. Somehow this woman, whom I had never met or thought much about, especially during the thirteen years I had lived in the U.S., had touched me deeply. I felt the loss profoundly, and I was very surprised.
I began to pay attention and to wonder what was really happening here. Something of extraordinarily deep significance was occurring, and I began an inner search to find the message and the meaning in it. Diana’s death clearly had meaning far beyond the apparent circumstances in which it occurred, dramatic as they appeared to be. Some higher purpose was being played out here, I thought.
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