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Step
Two: Forgive Your Perceived Shadow Maker
Chapter V Love
And Forgiveness The
World Trade Center was reduced to a grotesque monument to madness the
day after I began writing this book. Thousands perished in that
terrorist attack; millions watched, and the horror of that scene is
indelibly imprinted on our national psyche. Arguably, it has been
visually reviewed more often than any event in our nation’s history.
There is a certainty among us that America and the world will never be
the same again. We are at war with a ubiquitous, invisible enemy. The
battlefield is the mind, our minds, and “they” have won the first
battle. The wounds inflicted are fear, anger and helplessness. Our old
sense of security and invulnerability lies dead under the rubble of the
Twin Towers. The invisible, deadly substance in the air is not
biological. It is psychological. Death that seemed so foreign has
moved in to live with us, and we don’t know how to evict this dreaded
guest. The
Light Of Love On Our National Shadow This
terrible, dark cloud, however, has more than a silver lining. Lights,
unexpectedly bright and steady, have turned on as a result of these
events. Prayer has been reinstated as a worthy and needed private and
public practice. There has been an outpouring of love for God, country
and the world. Selfless and heroic service has lifted our spirits. It
generated an international solidarity that seemed dead before “nineeleven.”
In France, the day following the attack, a sign was seen on a Parisian
street, “Today we are all Americans.” In the midnight of our shock
and grief, no light shone more brightly than what blazed out of the cell
phone conversations from people about to die in the hijacked commercial
aircraft and the torched Trade Center offices. The callers were speaking
to those dearest to them. Their messages varied. Most were aware that in
minutes they were going to perish. What was telling was the consistent
content of their goodbyes: “I love you.” “Remember that I love
you.” “I love you and I’ll always be with you.” Love
The Deathless Reality The
dominant theme of these calls was, “I love you.” There was little
hysteria. Nor did they take time to indulge in emotions that implied,
“I’m mad as hell and get even for me.” In those final moments they
knew what mattered most: the love they shared. What they were reflecting
in their final moments was not sentiment but reality. Love is the one
reality that death can’t touch. Facing Eternity, Reality was
real to them. There was no room for hatred, the bastard child of
unforgiveness. As we move toward Eternity, this is what we need to learn
from those cell phone messengers who were soon to move into It. Forgiveness > Love = Light Our
journey through this life is too brief, too precious to
waste
on hate. In the midst of routine living we must learn what it means to
love and to forgive. our life, our children's lives and the world to
inherit from us, will be blessed to the
degree that we learn these two principles. It will be cursed to the degree that we don’t. The equation for stability,
personal and global, is: The
Nothingness of Death An
early mentor, Dr. Glenn Clark, took the ancient affirmation of the
Psalmist, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death, I will fear no evil...” and explained it with this twist: What
is a valley? It is a nothing between two somethings mountains. And
what is a shadow? It is a nothing, made when an object moves between a
light source and another object. With this understanding, we have every
reason to fear no evil. Now the affirmation would read: “Yea,
though I walk through the nothingness of the nothingness of death, I
will fear no evil....” Cell
phones in hand, the 9/11 callers were about to walk into that shadowed
valley. Light shone in the darkness. Love saw no darkness. Darkness and
shadows have no reality. They are an absence of a reality, light. They
are nothing! When Light appears, darkness disappears. The beloved
callers walked through the nothingness of the nothingness of death into
Life. This is the truth we need to bring to the experience of
forgiveness. ~~Forgiveness
As The Path To Healing Reality Think
for a moment about a dark event in your life and the perpetrator behind
it. If you haven’t forgiven them, they are still in your mind,
haunting you, still capable of making your life miserable. They are
still raining on your parade, clouding your happy sky. The memory of
their behavior, remembered or not, leaves you wounded. You now are
inflicting the wound on yourself, resurrecting a long dead corpse every
time your subconscious or conscious mind embraces it. Your
unforgiveness maintains the corpse in the graveyard of your mind. By
default, you neurotically or psychotically live with these shadowed
hosts, or in a bizarre effort to live more comfortably with them, you
struggle through years of psychotherapy. Without the experience of
forgiveness, you can read a library of selfhelp books, go to every
possible lecture on how to deal with emotional pain, all to no avail. Until
one learns to turn on the light of forgiveness, none of these sincere
efforts pay off. You can have authentic spiritual and meditative
mountain top experiences only to find yourself down the road in a dump
of ugly emotions. Seeing this happen to good and sincere people led me
to look for answers in spiritually oriented psychology as to why this
happened. Initially I didn’t know
that I had this corrupting disease within my own mind. I did,
and I found healing in this truth: To find inner peace
your life must be rooted in Reality and forgiveness as the
only path to that Reality. The
Ego’s Ploy In The High Profile Villain It
is an ego ploy to protest that some people don’t deserve to be
forgiven. To support this idea we create a rogues’ gallery of high
profile bad guys. In my youth the unforgivable villain was Hitler. A
more recent candidate is Saddam Hussein. After the horrific events of
September the 11th,
the poster boy of hate was Osama Bin Laden, mastermind behind the
World Trade Center holocaust. As tempting as it may be to join this
chorus of hate and vengeance, it would be a costly mistake. This popular
attitude, malice toward a global bad guy, is a smoke screen, a
diversionary tactic to keep you from dealing with the only “enemy”
standing between you and peace: your egodriven self. Don’t waste
your energy wrestling with shadows “out there.” Don’t get caught
up in the seductive arguments about bringing “evil doers” to
justice. Although this appears to be moral high ground, it is delusional
selfrighteousness. What
would have happened to the Viet Nam vet if his goal had remained to
bring his father to justice or to get even? I am fully aware that what
is being presented here is a challenge of the first magnitude. Once it
is faced and conquered, it will prove to be a priceless treasure. The
road to inner peace leads through your heart alone. A vigilante
mentality must be abandoned. Your goal must never be to “string up”
the Darth Vaders of the world. Rather, be vigilant to deal with your
inner Shadow. That is the only tyrant able to successfully attack
and destroy your inner peace. At this point you stand before the second
step to peace, learning to forgive your perceived Shadow maker. This
requires that you look at the experiences that hurt you with the same
vision shift the Viet Nam vet activated as he took a forgivenessillumined
look at his father’s demented behavior. He moved toward forgiveness as
he changed his perceptions. Twentyfirst
Century Science and Forgiveness The
miracle of healing forgiveness is the miracle of transformed perception.
Perception is not seeing objectively. Perceiving is rendering a
complex of judgments based on what we think we see. Again, 21st
century science weighs in on
the side of this long held spiritual truth that once seemed so
irrational. Quantum Physical research has discovered that the objective
world is not at all objective. If you are a true believer in the most
popular religion of the 20 th
century, science, be informed
that the foundation of your theology, objective observation and
empirical evidence, is being trashed. The unlikely culprits aren’t
some wildeyed religious fundamentalists. The pillars of your temple
are being torn down by your own high priests scientists. The clergy
of quantum physics are the ones who are calling into question the
validity of perception. These respected scientists, going to the edge of
the envelope, state that by a collective mechanism they have not yet
discovered, what occurs on the physical plane is initially composed by
some mental process in what they term the “implicate universe.” It
is then manifested on the level of our sense experience in the
“explicate universe.” If this sounds like medieval alchemy, it gets
worse. Max
Planck, the father of quantum physics, began the hierarchy of our cosmos
with “matter,” which finds its foundation and conclusion in
“spirit.” The heresy becomes more blatant. A colleague of
Planck’s, Nick Herbert, posits that material observation is quite
other than it appears. He goes so far as to challenge the authenticity
of what you and I were certain was the basic physical stuff of everyday
life. He contends that behind what our senses have frozen into the
observable world is always “a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly
flowing quantum soup.” Some of that “soup” is being served to us
in the new generation of computers which further bring into question the
former certitude that what you see is what you get. The experimentally
operational Quantum Computer is literally capable of speed of light
calculations. The heart of the system is a processor that makes the most
advanced Pentium chip obsolete. Instead of a chip, it uses “twinned”
electrons. This twinning causes one electron to rotate in a clockwise
direction and its twin to rotate counterclockwise. Now, hang on to your
objective hats. The scientists who created this technology tell us that
these two electrons are traveling nonlocally (that is, everywhere
and nowhere) in all directions at the same time until observed.
Only then do they operate in counter movement in a particular
place in time and space. That is a revolutionary statement. It affirms
that the mind, somehow, directs the condition of the physical universe.
Supporting this premise, these same scientists have discovered a
particle of matter, the Anomalon, which in the laboratory always follows
the theory of the experimenter. The scenario goes something like this:
Three different scientists in three different laboratories in
Berkeley, London and Moscow have three different, conflicting theories
about the Anomalon. Each one sets up a series of experiments to prove
the validity of his particular theory. As though following a directive
from the scientist’s
mind, the particle behaves differently in each experiment, proving
each theory correct. This propounds through a scientific discipline the
fact behind all perception: we see what we want to see. Doubting
Your Doubts About Creating Perceptions What
has all of this to do with forgiveness? Just one important thing.
Hopefully, these scientific insights about the delusional nature of
“objective observation” will help generate the necessary humility
needed for forgiveness. We need to doubt our doubts about the power of
our mind to create whatever we perceive. Put another way, we are certain
that we have been offended by others and that some of them have
crucified us. And we have the wounds they inflicted to prove it. What
might be termed quantum healing says that there is another way of
looking at life’s ugly moments, one that can remove all sense of being
wounded by others. Believing
Is Seeing Perception
is the product of what we think we see. Seeing is not believing.
Perception is another smokeandmirrors trick of our ego. It sees what
it wants to see, what it expects to see. Thus believing is seeing. When
this capacity is given to our Inner Advisor, the Holy Spirit, the
anger and fearinducing perceptions are changed into moments filled
with beauty and healing. Seeing on the level of your soul is faith.
Jesus said that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains.
Today he might have said, “the size of a molecule.” It did for the
hateimmolated veteran introduced in the first chapter. Returning
to his story, he found a visual sword forged in the white heat of his
rage. With it he acted out feelings he had felt throughout his life. He
“destroyed” his father. Moments later his Friend bathed the dead
body in Light, restoring it to life. The forgiveness process had begun.
He could never have seen his father alive again unless he had been
willing to change his perceptions. The mind is the creator. A
Miracle Of Transformed Perception As
the man visualized his father now lying on the floor in front of him, I
asked, “Do you know anything about your father’s childhood?” “Yeah...his
dad was a drunk. Used to beat the shit out of him. A lot.” It was here
the faith factor took over. His soul was about to show him what ego
perception refuses to see. “Can
you see that beaten, frightened little boy inside your dad?” “Sure,
I see him. He’s a scared little kid.” “That
little kid you now see, was the one who used your body so insanely. A
grown man doesn’t want a little boy. Only an insane child would want
another child’s body.” “Sure,
the kid didn’t know what he was doing to me, did he?” And
I heard inwardly another voice speaking from another cross, “Father,
forgive them for they know not what they do.” This
young man was seeing things very differently. Transformed perception was
his. It was at this point that I asked what I related earlier. “Can
you forgive your father?” to which he answered, “Of course I can.”
I
don’t know the details of his earlier spiritual experience. I
didn’t ask. I do know that in my office, because of his determined
will to find the Truth, he was “born again.” To be sure, that phrase
has become a threadbare and abused cliché. In this context it is
nothing of the kind. Weeks later we received a letter of thanks from his
wife. She wrote that his nightmares never recurred and his rage was
gone. Her nightmare in the home, she assured us, was gone too. Unforgiveness
And Past Flawed Perception An
essential element in the veteran’s healing was the correction of
perception. That raises the questions, “What is perception?” and
“How can one creatively correct toxic perceptions?” Simply stated,
perception is how one subjectively “sees” a situation or a group
of related events. The world you think you see is not the same world
anyone else sees. There isn’t one world in the universe of perception.
There are as many different worlds as there are people. The world
we perceive is only the world we have been led to believe it is. All the
billions of past personal perceptions dictate what we think we are
seeing and, therefore, what we are feeling and, therefore, how we react
to a given experience. Unforgiveness and the anger and hurt it sponsors,
never arises out of some objective offense. Every painful perception
and the object of our blame for that pain, is a predictable disaster
waiting to happen based on our past flawed perceptions. The
Beginning of the Perception Correction Process The
perception correction process begins when you get tired of the pain
caused by unforgiveness. At this point, you start scrambling for some
relief. You search for it in God or anyone else. You are willing to see
things differently and in that moment Light is given. Whenever one
allows a little willingness to surrender their Mr. McGoo distortions to
the Light of Love, the ugly and unforgivable becomes a lifetransforming
vision of beauty where there appeared to be a beast. Now the offender is
not only forgivable but loveable. Does that sound miraculous? It is. To
illustrate the magnitude of this process, imagine entering a darkened
room. There you see a woman lying prone with a man about to drive a
knife into her chest. He is wearing a mask. How should you respond? It
appears you’re witnessing a potential homicide! The likely response is
fear followed by an adrenaline rush. Why? Because within seconds your
mind is scanning past information, past perceptions of similar scenes
from television, motion pictures or a mystery novel. You possibly even
witnessed an earlier stabbing. So, murder, you thought. Now
imagine you find a light switch. Instead of screaming and running from
the scene or grabbing an available pistol and emptying a clip of
bullets into the knifewielding man, you flip the switch and the light
turns on. In the illumined room you see what is actually happening.
What appeared to be a knife is a scalpel. The mask is a surgical mask.
The man is not a killer but a surgeon! The woman isn’t a victim but a
patient. The
hypothetical “crime scene” describes what we do when we judge
another human being. Our judgmentalism turns the Light off. This makes
it impossible to see our perceived antagonist or the situation clearly
and in our myopic midnight, our fear and anger seem justified. Our
“airtight case” supporting our malice is just a lightstarved
illusion. We are sure we are right although we are dead wrong. We are
letting past negative perceptions determine our present responses. This,
in turn, assures that our future will be a journey down the valley of
perceptive shadows leading to certain suffering and death. Until we are
willing to turn the Light on. We
Relive What We Don’t Forgive Present
judgment always assures future pain because, whatever
we don’t forgive, we are doomed to relive. The
unforgiving mind is masochistic. Unless we lay aside all judgment of
ourselves and others, we repeatedly face the same lessons. Until we get
it right. The sword of anger cannot become a scalpel of healing until
we abandon ego judgment for soul vision. One
of the ugliest words in the human vocabulary is “rape.” It connotes
the darkest expression of manhood. When I received a call from a friend
of many years who told me she had been raped, I was shocked. She is a
professional. A man she met in her business came to her
after hours. She was working alone. Big and strong he overpowered
her, seized her by the shoulders and threw her to the floor. As he
ripped her clothes off, she felt like a rag doll. She thought she might
die. As in slow motion, she thought of her family and then his. She
didn’t really know this man; he could be capable of anything. In her
fear and confusion, she silently began to pray. I knew she was
spiritual, but I didn’t realize the depth of her spiritual maturity.
As she rose above the shock of the moment, she was able to tell him,
“If this is the only way you can discover the love of God, I forgive
you....” That is the last thing a rapist wants to hear. He jumped up,
hastily closing and buckling his pants, and was immediately out the
door. The
Rapist Did Nothing To Her I
asked her if she had told her husband. She said, no; she was afraid he
might kill her assailant. Had she sought post traumatic stress counseling?
No. Why? “Because I don’t need it. The experience momentarily
devastated me, but as I prayed, I realized that what happened was only
flesh against flesh. He didn’t do anything to me.” I have counseled
others who have endured the madness of rape. I never expected such a
response. I would still seek to empathize and comfort any woman caught in
the nightmare of such a seeming tragedy. But here was a woman who saw
things in Light from another world. She was living the truth that she has
a body but is not that body. Through prayer and an act of the will, she
saw the event through different eyes. It was this vision that allowed her
to forgive. One may not feel up to that level of spiritual heroics, but it
remains our potential and will become our experience as we continue to
will to see through our spiritual vision. The
Choice To Be Right Or Happy Our
testing ground probably will be more familiar terrain, like a domestic
spat. I recall several times when I felt my wife was wrong. At different
times it was different “wrongs:” what she said was wrong; what she did
was wrong; her attitude was wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. On one occasion,
Sandra and I were standing in the kitchen of our retreat center with
Lorraine Cook. She and her husband were managers of the center. We were
into a silly argument. However, it didn’t seem silly at the time. I knew
the “facts” supported my position. In the midst of my madness,
Lorraine said in the sweetest spirit, “Cliff, would you rather be right
or happy?” She was quoting straight from “A Course In Miracles.” She
knew that I am a student of that spiritual discipline and that I take its
concepts seriously. My deflating ego had just enough hot air to get out,
“I’d rather be both.” The
problem is, I can’t have it both ways and neither can you. If I insist
on being right, I must make you wrong. Our happiness goes south the moment
we hold the position that we are right and the other person is wrong. What
I give to you I give to myself. There is no wiggle room for my ego. It is
a clear and simple choice: I can choose to be right, or I can choose to be
happy. One or the other, but never both.
The
Meaning Of “Right” Forgiveness Gives The
flip side of this truth is that when I seek to make you “right” I will
also be right (because what I give to another, I give to myself) and I
will be happy. This definition of “right” has nothing to do with
behavior. It means that I affirm the unalterable goodness of your soul.
You are a Son of God. No behavior can change that. It is a state of mind
depicted in the lovely East Indian tradition called “Namaste.” You
have seen it. As a person greets another, they clasp their hands together
much as is done while praying in our western tradition. Loosely
translated, the act is meant to convey the thought, “The consciousness
of God in me greets the consciousness of God in you.” Why
You Are The Son Of God If
you are a woman you may have reacted being described as a Son of God. This
appellation has nothing to do with chauvinism or sexism. The term
“son,” in its masculine role, describes the part of every mind that
is active generative. In the more recent studies of brain function, this
has been identified as the “masculine” aspect of the brain located
primarily in the left hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere holds
a passive creativeproductive “feminine” role. The feminine
subconscious receives what you give it from your masculine consciousness.
You think a thought. That is a conscious, therefore, “masculine” function.
If you hold that thought as true or necessary for your well being, you
impregnate your subconscious with it. The feminine subconscious receives
what it is given without determining its validity or value. It always
gives birth to what penetrates its consciousness. It is your inner
masculine that makes the choices in life. These choices decide your
destiny. The masculine side of your consciousness holds the power of the
will in its hands. It is “wed” to your feminine subconscious that has
the power to give birth to your thoughts as feelings and emotions in your
inner world. When
this feminine energy is lifted to the level of the soul, it becomes the
glorious Sophia of Wisdom literature or the divine Mother of the Christ as
reflected in the exalted position of Mary in Christian tradition. When
imprisoned in the subconscious, it becomes the slave of the ego and the codependent
spouse of the perverted male chauvinist masculine. What liberates the
feminine in a man or woman is the will dedicated to the Love of God. As a
conscious, volitional being you reflect the active generative Creative
Force we call “Father.” To make your way Home you assume the
responsibility of the SonofthatFather in your mind and actively
undertake the disciplines of that sonship. Discipline is tied to the will
and the will is activated and directed from the conscious, masculine part
of your mind. What you feel in the moment decides nothing but what you
responsibly will decides your destiny.
Jesus’ statement, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is
perfect,” meant: God, as Perfect Love, is perfect and you must
rediscover this part of you that has been yours from your creation as His
Son. That perfection is manifested through the active generative aspect of
the Creative Force, the Father of Creation. We are perfect because we are
the same as our Source, created in that Image. But we will never manifest
that perfection until we will to see our brother as God’s Son. Again he
was teaching the forgotten truth that what we see in another is what we
see in ourselves. Our perfection is regained by willing to give it away to
another. This seems like such a simple act; however, it demands utter
dedication to its application. The
Power Of Perfection’s Vision The
Nobel Peace Prize winner who has shown the world the power of this vision
is Mother Teresa. When asked how she could work among the poorest of the
poor in Calcutta and remain joyous, she said, “I spend the morning
meditating on Jesus. Then I go out and find him in everyone I meet.” Her
soul was in charge. The vision it held allowed her to see Jesus in the
destitute, dying Hindu, the ulcerated Buddhist baby, the blind beggar
seeking food. She didn’t try to change them. Seeing them as Christ she
changed the world in which she lived. Calling such a discipline impractical
blinds one to the power of spiritual vision. The millions she helped
knew how practical she was. Her service to humanity didn’t begin with
mighty deeds. As with every disciple of love, she began with a little
willingness. She began with a little willingness to see the divine where
others see depravity. She confessed, “I don’t do great things. I do
little things with great love.” And there is no greater act of love than
to will to see as holy the person your ego would despise.
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