Monica – The many experiences, well I have a list. But not yet all of them in
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/features-found-on-site/ I guess we hide so much of ourselves; even what was said in my personal experience, was only part of the story. For such stories are about love and anger that goes back to long past experiences – love and anger on both sides. And in this life we experiences the consequences of it.
As an example of this, some years ago life events led me to face a very painful experience. My wife was living abroad for a while and I did not know when she was coming back. This triggered the release in me of a terror I had kept buried since the age of three. At that time my mother, at the doctor’s suggestion, had sent me away to a convalescent hospital because my health was poor. Unfortunately, because my grandmother had been my prime carer, and had died before I had reached the age of two, I had already experienced great loss. This had left me open to the fear of abandonment. Being at the hospital released this terror that I had been abandoned.
Meeting that terror again in my late 40s was almost more than I could bear. Although the feeling was originally connected with my mother, as usually happens, whoever we love becomes the target for such fears. In meeting these awful feelings, I traced the origin of them back to the events mentioned. But the terrific anger I felt to my mother at exposing me to such unbearable emotions, also spilled over onto my wife.
The anger did not abate and it became obvious that unless I could forgive my mother, I would ruin my marriage with my anger.
It was difficult to find this forgiveness because I felt that what my mother had done was unforgivable. Of course none of this was neatly rational. The feelings were burning beyond reason, and could not be rationalised away. But I could not ignore the fact that this was not, in the end, about my mother, but about myself. My continued anger was ruining my life. So for my own sake I had to sincerely forgive my mother. This was not a fast change, and it was not easy. But it did release me from the crippling effects of the anger. And some effects of non-forgiveness in these situations are quite subtle. One might, for instance, avoid success in one’s life so that those close to you could never feel the pleasure or relaxation of that.
However, forgiveness sometimes has a much more profound significance. I believe that our primal life difficulties, such as mine connected with abandonment, actually have their roots in the long past. It may be easy for us to recognise that my terror can be traced back to the events mentioned in this lifetime. From this we can say, “Yes, the fears he faced as an adult were caused by the loss of his grandmother. And his mother’s decision to put him in the hospital restimulated that fear.”
However, if we can agree that we can trace things back to causative events, why can’t we also say, the original events also had causes? For instance, my mother did other things later in my life to deepen my terror of abandonment. Why?
From the viewpoint of modern genetics, it is understandable that a present day sickness in an individual’s life may be the result of events from generations ago. We understand that the gene pool, from which our own physical body arises, has had negative and positive features added to it over tens of thousands of years. Therefore our present physical, and to some extent psychological, situation, arises out of events in the long past. If we can understand this, then we might also understand and accept that besides a gene pool, there is also a behavioural pool out of which a great deal of human behaviour arises. This is particularly evident in comparing different cultures where certain types of behaviour are passed on for thousands of years.
Some people think of this in terms of past lives. But we can also think of it simply as past events that influence our present life experience as causative factors. So, because it is easier to explain, I will create a scenario using the imagery of past lives.
Supposing in the far past I had hurt and abandoned a child. Supposing the child I had hurt in that previous lifetime is my mother in this lifetime, and she has never forgiven me for what I did. In other words, the actions generated by the past hurt are causative factors, are active and alive in the life of my mother, and are therefore influencing her. In this present life, my mother is in a position of power, and I am the vulnerable child now. So, from whatever it was in her deep unconscious that influenced her actions, she still wishes to hurt me, and did so several times. Actually that was created out of memories.
How far do we have to go back?
And then, in prayer I asked why this lifelong misery had been my lot. I experienced the immediate impression that I had myself betrayed someone’s love in the past. When I asked the question who, the memory and meaning came to me, my mother walking me home prior to telling me she was going to put me in an orphanage. She said, “You hurt me. Now I am going to hurt you.”
I feel as if she was telling me of my fate, and that I had indeed deeply hurt her in the distant past – past life. As her child I was the vulnerable one, and it was my turn to feel pain. My God, what a journey! God forgive me. God forgive my mother. I saw that true forgiveness ends this terrible cycle of pain and vengeance.
Tony