Yokesh – “Do not judge, so that you will not be judged, since you will be judged in the same judgment that you make, and you will be measured by the same standard you apply.”
A quote from the Bible, but it is fantastic psychological wisdom. My mother said to me with great force, for she was speaking out of her anxiety because she thought I had been lost, “You hurt me. Now I am going to hurt you!”
Then she did something to me that hurt so much that I cut off from her emotionally at five years old. My unconscious decision led me along a path of years of personal suffering. Then, at 46 I learnt forgiveness. At the time I was experiencing such torment that I used LifeStream to see if I could find a way through. Here is what I wrote at that time:
“But then I saw the hell I had created out of my own pain and devastation; I had smashed my own children. I could feel the guilt and burdens of that. I wanted to say to them, “Look, you don’t need to punish me, or be angry with me, because I have suffered enough already.” I also thought my mother suffered enough as well. I don’t need to hate her anymore. Then sweet forgiveness came. Prior to that I was resisting ever wanting my sexual problem healed. It was a weapon I could hit women with, and use to be miserable in the world. That is, to punish the world. But when I could forgive my mother I could also forgive myself and the world. What a relief it is to forgive oneself, and out of that find peace and forgiveness of others. I could see how many people unconsciously create their own state of depression in an attempt to hit back at the world. Forgiving oneself wipes that away. It took me several days to find the courage to make love though. But I have felt easier since and I watched to see how I now relate to this area since forgiveness and the hate campaign has been released.”
Judging oneself is a form of personal torture. It took me year to be able to use LifeStream in that way, and of course you need to develop ego strength to be able to face what is revealed about oneself.
As for meeting death, I had a long fascination and relationship with it. I was born prematurely in the 1930’s – the doctor who delivered me threw my lifeless body to one side and said to my mother, “Why attempt to give life to this premature and tiny baby? It will be difficult to rear, more prone to illness, and it will be harder for it to cope with life. It isn’t breathing at the moment, so forget it and try again for a healthy baby. Leave it.”
Reliving my birth – yes we have memory of such things – again using LifeStream – I faced death and struggled to live. Death is with us always, as is Life. Here is an account of the best meetings-
Here the first good meeting, experienced during a Seed Group.
Of a sudden
I see the face of Death.
I hear its voice.
I know it -
For we have met
Often and always.
Death has the features of
A child I made cry;
The profile of
My loved woman;
Your countenance.
Have I known you?
Then I have known Death.
Have I betrayed any?
Then I have betrayed Death.
And its face is beauty
For it is all things -
Naked,
Undressed of flesh,
Leafless,
Exposed,
Unclad Life -
Without the garment
That our selfhood is.
And the waters in me rose
To tears.
Bathing me in regret
That I had
So often
Forgotten
My love
For the
Naked Beauty.
Another:
I was alone in my house and asleep in bed. Something materialised or landed on the foot of the bed. It woke me a little and I felt afraid. I had the feeling it was some sort of entity materialising and coming for me in some way. It moved up the bed a little. I felt paralysed, partly by fear but also as if the ‘thing’ was influencing me. This made me more afraid of it. Then it moved up higher, not on my body but on the bed. I was very afraid and struggling against the paralysing influence. I managed to shout at it – “I will destroy you. I will destroy you”. As I shouted I pushed at it with my hand. This felt to me as if I were going to will its destruction and use my hand to smash it. I still felt a little uncertain of the outcome but I was very determined to fight it. At this point I woke up or was awakened by my wife. She asked me what I had been dreaming. Apparently I had been pushing her and shouting that I would destroy her.
Explored my dream in depth and describing my insights as follows –
I started by considering the recent nightmare of the ‘thing’ at the foot of my bed. Gradually I began to feel tense throughout my body, with difficulty in breathing. The ‘thing’ seemed at first to be a woman’s vagina. There was a little feeling in this but not much. Then it slowly grew in intensity and I realised the ‘thing’ was death. Recently it is obvious from the mirror that my body is going through another period of rapid ageing. The dream was a dramatic representation of my feelings about this. Death was gradually creeping up on me, gradually overwhelming me and I was fighting it. As the session deepened I saw that in my feelings I felt that death had put its finger on me. The touch of death was like a disease though. Once touched the disease was incurable and gradually took over one’s body. I could hardly breathe as I experienced this, and I understood the sort of emotions that might lie beneath asthma attacks. This struggle with death went on for some time. It was not terrible but was felt strongly. I also recognised that my wife has similar feelings about her ageing, and is communicating to me that her body is dying and unclean, especially her genitals, and this is off-putting. I see that when I shout I ‘I will destroy you!’ in a way it is my fear of being destroyed that is behind the emotion.
I began to wonder what to do about the situation. The feeling was that death was claiming me. So, I wanted to face the truth about death, whatever it was. I wanted to walk right up to it and look it in the face and know whether death meant a final end. If it did I would rather know. As I approached death like this by imaging walking toward the THING, my feelings went through an amazing transformation. All the tension left me. I felt good, positive, easy to breathe and with a sense of hope about life and death. This was so surprising and sudden I wondered what had produced it. I needed to be aware of how this change had occurred. So, I retraced my steps to look at death and try to understand why it had lost its power of fear.
At first I saw that my tension and sense of death being or giving a disease was due to a view I had of it. When we look at the world only through our senses, death is obviously a terminal sickness that claims everyone. Someone said on TV the other day - Life is a sexually transmitted disease that produces a 100% mortality. Seen in this way death is the rotting corpse, the skeleton. The path to it is disease or breakdown. But in looking it in the face I saw another view of it. I saw the dead body, the corpse, the skeleton, as a form left behind by the process of life. When I looked at myself to see what ‘Tony” is - I cannot separate myself from the process of life. That process leaves behind shells, bodies, tree trunks, but it goes on creating other forms. I am Life.
The disease is caused by seeing oneself as a body that is bound to die. The cure is to realise that you are a product and expression of Life. See
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/ 