Pete Brigham's Blog
May 11, 2019
Forgiveness is Letting Go
Introduction
All our earthly religions tell us to forgive. Yet few people even seriously try to forgive. All of us pretend to forgive, to various degrees. But what is forgiveness? What exactly do we have to say or do to forgive? What magic “ritual” needs to be observed? Is it as simple as saying, or even thinking, “I forgive you?”
The answer can be felt in our heart. We all know how dissonant and unsatisfying it is to lie and tell people that we forgive them. After someone “wrongs” us, do we ever feel one iota better for merely saying that we forgive him? Clearly, such words don’t dissipate our anger and resentment. So, what are we doing wrong? And how can we possibly forgive someone who has something really awful?
The answer is to learn to shrug at everything we see…except love.
Someday, when we see the foolishness of blame for what it is, we will change our point of view, and forgiveness will at last dawn in our minds. But if we could do that now, we wouldn’t even be here, since there would be nothing left to learn. Down here on Earth, we need simpler, less threatening steps. If we have been “wronged” by another person, and yet can still recognize that she is a fellow Child of love, we can start to develop our internal forgiveness narrative, intentionally overlooking the erroneous sensory data that our ego insists that we perceive.
When that shift happens, we will have started to “begin to begin” to unlearn what we have mis-taught ourselves over the years—time we mis-spent looking intently yet ignorantly through a backwards telescope at a majestic galaxy called love and thinking, how small it is…
A New Vocabulary of Forgiveness
From now on, we should try harder to see all earthly misdeeds, from mundane coffee spills to what the world calls global calamities, as if they were the errors of children. When an infant spills his milk accidentally, you simply clean it up. You don’t blame the child, because he is not capable of understanding spilled milk. You overlook it.
But isn’t that letting the bad guys off easy? Of course not, because there are no bad guys out there! The error that just inconvenienced us passed in a nanosecond—yet our soul lives forever. Often, people on Earth get so confused and paranoid that they do things that are fearful or hateful or angry or ugly (by the standards of this world). As the Course admits, “frightened people can be vicious.” But when that happens, why not try to simply let it pass, as we would with an infant? You will outlive this “event” by more than a trillion billion years—infinitely more!
This is not a “physical” activity where we wave a magic wand at a real problem and hope it disappears. It is a mental reassessment of our own mistaken judgments. It is letting go of our rage and anger from that bad pizza we just suffered through. However, forgiveness doesn’t require that anyone else be present. We are surrounded by forgiveness opportunities everywhere, even if we are alone on a deserted island. We do not need to be physically “with” other people in order to forgive them and receive the benefits of this forgiveness. Even a brief loving thought directed at someone is enough.
We vastly underestimate our soul siblings’ value by ignoring the phenomenal opportunities they provide us for growth—as we perceive them doing annoying things, we can then receive the vast karmic benefits of overlooking these perceived misdeeds. This is the saintly gift of every difficult, abusive, insincere, antagonistic, angry, dishonest, vicious person on Earth. The tougher, as they say, the better, because it’s only a lesson in school. Don’t “rise to the bait” as you encounter difficult people, but look up and adjust your eyes to Heaven’s magnanimous vision, and feel the peace flow in, demolishing your obsolete castle walls.
Trust in the invisible matrix of love to catch you, as you step forward confidently and luminously, with open hands, gentle eyes and a beatific smile that holds all things within its lovingness—go ahead and forgive the entire world, and you will receive the entire peace of Heaven in return.
A Constellation of Living love
The next time we note an imperfection in one of our fellow earthlings, rather than judging it, we should try to simply overlook it. This small echo of Vision can then be expanded to the entire Universe—where each of us is only a tiny pinprick within an infinite golden Constellation of pure starlight. We will remember that the Light of the Whole is indeed found in every minute part. With each crystalline lightning-flash of divine recollection, we revisit in perfect clarity this glittering celestial body, which is our true home. There, each component speck of dazzling brilliance only serves to enhance the Whole—and is never apart from it. And whenever, wherever, we forgive, we are again gifted with the sacred whispered knowledge that we are all limitless, and that Infinity never needs to forgive. How should a star forgive a star?
No analogy does our shared Soul justice, because no frame of reference in our Universe could reflect our “super-connectivity” with all life. Yet we are too busy looking sullenly at our feet to dare to cast our gaze up, as I said once under trance. We should embrace Heaven’s starlight, and not shrink from earthly shadows, as we accept the miracle of sameness into our hearts. We should see Everyone whenever we look at anyone—in fact, we should see only One.
Just as we gently brush away distracting thoughts in meditation, so should we gently wave away all judgmental ideas about other people. We should softly let these negative thoughts go, not with a petulant swipe of our plastic conductor’s baton, but with a hopeful smile, and an acknowledgment that we are all part of a supreme Galaxy of love, in a dimension we cannot as yet know. This world was made to help us learn forgiveness, as a pathway to love, and when the world’s sole purpose becomes forgiveness, it will become a beautiful world indeed.
As the Course says, “How lovely is the world whose purpose is forgiveness of God’s son!”
How to Forgive
At this point, it might be helpful to examine exactly what we can do when confronted by a difficult situation requiring forgiveness. How do we let it go when we have been wronged? The following three-step process is my “take” on the Course’s approach.
Step One: Admit That You Love the Blame Game
To start, we need to admit that “it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” and that we get a lot of emotional mileage when bad things happen to us. As Ken Wapnick would say, we need to admit how much we love our problems—they define who we are. Our martyrdom scoreboard eagerly “lights up” whenever someone is out there doing bad things to us: abusing us, ridiculing us, hurting us, cheating us. Whenever this happens, we delight in aiming our crosshairs of rage on the other person, just like a vindictive child who has been elbowed out of his prime sandbox position in the playground.
The key to reassessing all our judgments correctly is to identify that “blaming impulse” as coming from our ego and nowhere else. We are trying to show God that we are innocent… and the other person is clearly guilty. But, fundamentally, each “sandbox drama” we experience is just our ego’s latest ploy to misdirect our perception by manipulating our feelings—enhancing the illusion of separation from our fellow humans.
Thus, the first step of forgiveness is to examine the blaming mechanism we hold within ourselves, in order to see that the ego is behind this—not only in our wanting to judge this person, but also in our seeing the offense in the first place. We see sin because we want to see sin—simply put, it gets us off the hook! It should not surprise us that the ego is up to its old tricks—what else is new?
Step Two: Admit That You Don’t Have All the Information
What if I am missing something? Given the information at my disposal, am I qualified and able to judge? Given our track record of bad judgment, we can see that we are not naturally gifted at judging. Therefore, if we want to be really sure we have this right, we need all the information. In order to avoid the mortification of accusing someone falsely, we should stop and rewind, and question what we know about this offense that has occurred. We should wonder what this person has been going through recently, and imagine his hopes and fears. What if he has a medical condition or family problem that is causing him to act in an irrational way? What if there is some aspect of this that is completely unknown to us? Are we letting other people—our friends, for example—egg us on to take retribution? Do we secretly want this offending person to let us down?
It’s a helpful start for us even to accept some doubt about our initial judgments—the next step is to acknowledge that we probably goofed on all of it. This is because the person we’re judging is secretly a perfect soul who is only trying to learn his lessons in life, just like the rest of us. We don’t have the full picture. We don’t have the full “background check” required to judge someone—that comes much, much later.
Even if we just look to Earth for the answers, we must accept that we would have to consider an impossibly large list of potential explanations for someone’s behavior before we could definitively state that we weren’t being premature in our judgments. We would have to be telepathic to be 100% certain we had the story straight. Why not play it safe and just let the issue go?
Going back to a higher “Super-Soul” level, we could equally ask, “What if this person is incapable of any error at all? What if we were both made by a common Source who loves us equally?” Are we falling into a trap by getting upset over this “set play?” Whether or not this annoying person is in my soul group, I surely love him—that is, I love his hidden soul essence. This person is just an actor in my movie. What if the whole point here is to get a rise out of me?
The second step is thus to agree that you have insufficient information, and you don’t have the time to research all the possible explanations for what happened. In fact, you don’t have the energy to figure it out either, and you should start to consider how happy you might be if you stopped trying. Try to remember the last time you felt angry about something and got no sleep thinking about it—and then woke up to learn that the situation was actually much less catastrophic than you had feared the night before. You can now consider the Course’s wise words: “You have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes from meeting yourself and your brothers totally without judgment.”
Step Three: Give the Decision to a Higher Authority to Judge it for You
Think of whatever symbol of perfect judgment you can imagine. Christians might use Jesus or the Virgin Mary, for example. If you don’t feel comfortable choosing a religious figure, then choose Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, or someone else. You could pick Moses. Pick someone with perfect judgment—someone whom you believe never gets it wrong. Imagine this wise person in your mind, ready to hear about this serious problem. He is your new judge and jury and he is going to be doing your judging for you going forward. Henceforth, you are giving him “power of attorney” to handle all judgment on your behalf.
Let’s say you pick the Buddha. As you bring forward the “accused” (the person who cut you off at the fast food drive-through) to your wise Buddha-judge, consider the flaws in your argument. Admit that you might be perceiving this wrongly, since both you and the “sinner” in front of you are immortal children of the same Source. Understand that this person is fearful and paranoid.
Now ask your chosen judge to help you see the situation differently—by taking it off your hands completely. Admit that you have no idea how this all gets tallied up in Heaven, and that you’re best off just handing this one over to Buddha and asking him to deal with it, because right now your ego is running wild with it. Recognize that you just want this situation to go away. Admit that you can’t handle this and don’t want to. Then see yourself handing the problem symbolically away to your Buddha. Visualize placing a full garbage bag, or a dead fish, or rotten apple, or any other symbol of something you do not want, on a silver platter and sliding it over. Ask Buddha to make it go away, because it has gotten out of your control. Then give thanks and step back. Phew! Your job is done.
See your immaculate Buddha-judge looking at your “offering,” and watch it disappear under his loving gaze. In the sunshine of that saintly regard, all illusions dissipate like steam, and all errors melt away like dry ice on a hot sidewalk. love’s X-ray vision has seen through the imaginary problem you have been grappling with, and revealed it to be something that does not exist and cannot hurt you. Your master judge gently promises you—his ancient wisdom curated by centuries of pious lifetimes—that you will indeed feel better as you let go.
That’s it. As you get in the habit of “handing over” your judgmental moments more often, your sense of freedom should grow. Hallelujah, you are no longer responsible for judging anyone! As Ken Wapnick would say, you need only bring the problem (your mistaken judgments) to the solution (your spiritual mentor or judge) and then stop. That is all we need to do—and then bask in the warm glow of unconditional release from all worry and anxiety.
As the Course says at the end of Chapter 5:
• I know I have chosen wrongly;
• I know my choice has not made me happy;
• I choose to be happy, by letting the Holy Spirit choose for me.
Thus, the third step is easy. We find a good judge and hand the problem to him or her to solve for us. This is an unapologetic abdication of our role as judge and jury, precisely the “cop-out” our ego is screaming at us not to take—and that’s why it works.
We will bring in a pro to handle this one.
Then we will forget about it.
Because we have just forgiven it.*
*Note: This post is an excerpt from my latest book, Be Love, currently available on Amazon. All rights reserved.
(https://www.amazon.com/Be-Love-Betwee...)
All our earthly religions tell us to forgive. Yet few people even seriously try to forgive. All of us pretend to forgive, to various degrees. But what is forgiveness? What exactly do we have to say or do to forgive? What magic “ritual” needs to be observed? Is it as simple as saying, or even thinking, “I forgive you?”
The answer can be felt in our heart. We all know how dissonant and unsatisfying it is to lie and tell people that we forgive them. After someone “wrongs” us, do we ever feel one iota better for merely saying that we forgive him? Clearly, such words don’t dissipate our anger and resentment. So, what are we doing wrong? And how can we possibly forgive someone who has something really awful?
The answer is to learn to shrug at everything we see…except love.
Someday, when we see the foolishness of blame for what it is, we will change our point of view, and forgiveness will at last dawn in our minds. But if we could do that now, we wouldn’t even be here, since there would be nothing left to learn. Down here on Earth, we need simpler, less threatening steps. If we have been “wronged” by another person, and yet can still recognize that she is a fellow Child of love, we can start to develop our internal forgiveness narrative, intentionally overlooking the erroneous sensory data that our ego insists that we perceive.
When that shift happens, we will have started to “begin to begin” to unlearn what we have mis-taught ourselves over the years—time we mis-spent looking intently yet ignorantly through a backwards telescope at a majestic galaxy called love and thinking, how small it is…
A New Vocabulary of Forgiveness
From now on, we should try harder to see all earthly misdeeds, from mundane coffee spills to what the world calls global calamities, as if they were the errors of children. When an infant spills his milk accidentally, you simply clean it up. You don’t blame the child, because he is not capable of understanding spilled milk. You overlook it.
But isn’t that letting the bad guys off easy? Of course not, because there are no bad guys out there! The error that just inconvenienced us passed in a nanosecond—yet our soul lives forever. Often, people on Earth get so confused and paranoid that they do things that are fearful or hateful or angry or ugly (by the standards of this world). As the Course admits, “frightened people can be vicious.” But when that happens, why not try to simply let it pass, as we would with an infant? You will outlive this “event” by more than a trillion billion years—infinitely more!
This is not a “physical” activity where we wave a magic wand at a real problem and hope it disappears. It is a mental reassessment of our own mistaken judgments. It is letting go of our rage and anger from that bad pizza we just suffered through. However, forgiveness doesn’t require that anyone else be present. We are surrounded by forgiveness opportunities everywhere, even if we are alone on a deserted island. We do not need to be physically “with” other people in order to forgive them and receive the benefits of this forgiveness. Even a brief loving thought directed at someone is enough.
We vastly underestimate our soul siblings’ value by ignoring the phenomenal opportunities they provide us for growth—as we perceive them doing annoying things, we can then receive the vast karmic benefits of overlooking these perceived misdeeds. This is the saintly gift of every difficult, abusive, insincere, antagonistic, angry, dishonest, vicious person on Earth. The tougher, as they say, the better, because it’s only a lesson in school. Don’t “rise to the bait” as you encounter difficult people, but look up and adjust your eyes to Heaven’s magnanimous vision, and feel the peace flow in, demolishing your obsolete castle walls.
Trust in the invisible matrix of love to catch you, as you step forward confidently and luminously, with open hands, gentle eyes and a beatific smile that holds all things within its lovingness—go ahead and forgive the entire world, and you will receive the entire peace of Heaven in return.
A Constellation of Living love
The next time we note an imperfection in one of our fellow earthlings, rather than judging it, we should try to simply overlook it. This small echo of Vision can then be expanded to the entire Universe—where each of us is only a tiny pinprick within an infinite golden Constellation of pure starlight. We will remember that the Light of the Whole is indeed found in every minute part. With each crystalline lightning-flash of divine recollection, we revisit in perfect clarity this glittering celestial body, which is our true home. There, each component speck of dazzling brilliance only serves to enhance the Whole—and is never apart from it. And whenever, wherever, we forgive, we are again gifted with the sacred whispered knowledge that we are all limitless, and that Infinity never needs to forgive. How should a star forgive a star?
No analogy does our shared Soul justice, because no frame of reference in our Universe could reflect our “super-connectivity” with all life. Yet we are too busy looking sullenly at our feet to dare to cast our gaze up, as I said once under trance. We should embrace Heaven’s starlight, and not shrink from earthly shadows, as we accept the miracle of sameness into our hearts. We should see Everyone whenever we look at anyone—in fact, we should see only One.
Just as we gently brush away distracting thoughts in meditation, so should we gently wave away all judgmental ideas about other people. We should softly let these negative thoughts go, not with a petulant swipe of our plastic conductor’s baton, but with a hopeful smile, and an acknowledgment that we are all part of a supreme Galaxy of love, in a dimension we cannot as yet know. This world was made to help us learn forgiveness, as a pathway to love, and when the world’s sole purpose becomes forgiveness, it will become a beautiful world indeed.
As the Course says, “How lovely is the world whose purpose is forgiveness of God’s son!”
How to Forgive
At this point, it might be helpful to examine exactly what we can do when confronted by a difficult situation requiring forgiveness. How do we let it go when we have been wronged? The following three-step process is my “take” on the Course’s approach.
Step One: Admit That You Love the Blame Game
To start, we need to admit that “it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” and that we get a lot of emotional mileage when bad things happen to us. As Ken Wapnick would say, we need to admit how much we love our problems—they define who we are. Our martyrdom scoreboard eagerly “lights up” whenever someone is out there doing bad things to us: abusing us, ridiculing us, hurting us, cheating us. Whenever this happens, we delight in aiming our crosshairs of rage on the other person, just like a vindictive child who has been elbowed out of his prime sandbox position in the playground.
The key to reassessing all our judgments correctly is to identify that “blaming impulse” as coming from our ego and nowhere else. We are trying to show God that we are innocent… and the other person is clearly guilty. But, fundamentally, each “sandbox drama” we experience is just our ego’s latest ploy to misdirect our perception by manipulating our feelings—enhancing the illusion of separation from our fellow humans.
Thus, the first step of forgiveness is to examine the blaming mechanism we hold within ourselves, in order to see that the ego is behind this—not only in our wanting to judge this person, but also in our seeing the offense in the first place. We see sin because we want to see sin—simply put, it gets us off the hook! It should not surprise us that the ego is up to its old tricks—what else is new?
Step Two: Admit That You Don’t Have All the Information
What if I am missing something? Given the information at my disposal, am I qualified and able to judge? Given our track record of bad judgment, we can see that we are not naturally gifted at judging. Therefore, if we want to be really sure we have this right, we need all the information. In order to avoid the mortification of accusing someone falsely, we should stop and rewind, and question what we know about this offense that has occurred. We should wonder what this person has been going through recently, and imagine his hopes and fears. What if he has a medical condition or family problem that is causing him to act in an irrational way? What if there is some aspect of this that is completely unknown to us? Are we letting other people—our friends, for example—egg us on to take retribution? Do we secretly want this offending person to let us down?
It’s a helpful start for us even to accept some doubt about our initial judgments—the next step is to acknowledge that we probably goofed on all of it. This is because the person we’re judging is secretly a perfect soul who is only trying to learn his lessons in life, just like the rest of us. We don’t have the full picture. We don’t have the full “background check” required to judge someone—that comes much, much later.
Even if we just look to Earth for the answers, we must accept that we would have to consider an impossibly large list of potential explanations for someone’s behavior before we could definitively state that we weren’t being premature in our judgments. We would have to be telepathic to be 100% certain we had the story straight. Why not play it safe and just let the issue go?
Going back to a higher “Super-Soul” level, we could equally ask, “What if this person is incapable of any error at all? What if we were both made by a common Source who loves us equally?” Are we falling into a trap by getting upset over this “set play?” Whether or not this annoying person is in my soul group, I surely love him—that is, I love his hidden soul essence. This person is just an actor in my movie. What if the whole point here is to get a rise out of me?
The second step is thus to agree that you have insufficient information, and you don’t have the time to research all the possible explanations for what happened. In fact, you don’t have the energy to figure it out either, and you should start to consider how happy you might be if you stopped trying. Try to remember the last time you felt angry about something and got no sleep thinking about it—and then woke up to learn that the situation was actually much less catastrophic than you had feared the night before. You can now consider the Course’s wise words: “You have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes from meeting yourself and your brothers totally without judgment.”
Step Three: Give the Decision to a Higher Authority to Judge it for You
Think of whatever symbol of perfect judgment you can imagine. Christians might use Jesus or the Virgin Mary, for example. If you don’t feel comfortable choosing a religious figure, then choose Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, or someone else. You could pick Moses. Pick someone with perfect judgment—someone whom you believe never gets it wrong. Imagine this wise person in your mind, ready to hear about this serious problem. He is your new judge and jury and he is going to be doing your judging for you going forward. Henceforth, you are giving him “power of attorney” to handle all judgment on your behalf.
Let’s say you pick the Buddha. As you bring forward the “accused” (the person who cut you off at the fast food drive-through) to your wise Buddha-judge, consider the flaws in your argument. Admit that you might be perceiving this wrongly, since both you and the “sinner” in front of you are immortal children of the same Source. Understand that this person is fearful and paranoid.
Now ask your chosen judge to help you see the situation differently—by taking it off your hands completely. Admit that you have no idea how this all gets tallied up in Heaven, and that you’re best off just handing this one over to Buddha and asking him to deal with it, because right now your ego is running wild with it. Recognize that you just want this situation to go away. Admit that you can’t handle this and don’t want to. Then see yourself handing the problem symbolically away to your Buddha. Visualize placing a full garbage bag, or a dead fish, or rotten apple, or any other symbol of something you do not want, on a silver platter and sliding it over. Ask Buddha to make it go away, because it has gotten out of your control. Then give thanks and step back. Phew! Your job is done.
See your immaculate Buddha-judge looking at your “offering,” and watch it disappear under his loving gaze. In the sunshine of that saintly regard, all illusions dissipate like steam, and all errors melt away like dry ice on a hot sidewalk. love’s X-ray vision has seen through the imaginary problem you have been grappling with, and revealed it to be something that does not exist and cannot hurt you. Your master judge gently promises you—his ancient wisdom curated by centuries of pious lifetimes—that you will indeed feel better as you let go.
That’s it. As you get in the habit of “handing over” your judgmental moments more often, your sense of freedom should grow. Hallelujah, you are no longer responsible for judging anyone! As Ken Wapnick would say, you need only bring the problem (your mistaken judgments) to the solution (your spiritual mentor or judge) and then stop. That is all we need to do—and then bask in the warm glow of unconditional release from all worry and anxiety.
As the Course says at the end of Chapter 5:
• I know I have chosen wrongly;
• I know my choice has not made me happy;
• I choose to be happy, by letting the Holy Spirit choose for me.
Thus, the third step is easy. We find a good judge and hand the problem to him or her to solve for us. This is an unapologetic abdication of our role as judge and jury, precisely the “cop-out” our ego is screaming at us not to take—and that’s why it works.
We will bring in a pro to handle this one.
Then we will forget about it.
Because we have just forgiven it.*
*Note: This post is an excerpt from my latest book, Be Love, currently available on Amazon. All rights reserved.
(https://www.amazon.com/Be-Love-Betwee...)
April 9, 2019
Be Love is Available for Pre-Order!
Happy to share that the paperback version of my first book, Be Love, is now available for pre-order on Amazon!
If anyone is even slightly interested, could they please simply click on the links below so the relevant algorithms report that there is traffic to the site so they order more books? No need to do anything else.
It is totally costless to you but will help my profile in terms of Amazon (and B&N) activity!
thanks and blessings,
Peter
https://www.amazon.com/Be-Love-Betwee...
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/book...
If anyone is even slightly interested, could they please simply click on the links below so the relevant algorithms report that there is traffic to the site so they order more books? No need to do anything else.
It is totally costless to you but will help my profile in terms of Amazon (and B&N) activity!
thanks and blessings,
Peter
https://www.amazon.com/Be-Love-Betwee...
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/book...
April 3, 2019
BE LOVE is Now Available!
I am overjoyed to announce that the book that has filled the last 8 years of my life, BE LOVE, is now available on Amazon!
For US readers, please see https://www.amazon.com/Be-Love-Betwee...
Initially only the ebook will be available, but the print version is coming soon.
I have set the price for the ebook as low as I can, so please consider downloading it and reviewing it on Amazon and Goodreads!
Thanks and blessings.
Pete
Be Love
For US readers, please see https://www.amazon.com/Be-Love-Betwee...
Initially only the ebook will be available, but the print version is coming soon.
I have set the price for the ebook as low as I can, so please consider downloading it and reviewing it on Amazon and Goodreads!
Thanks and blessings.
Pete
Be Love
January 27, 2019
Be Love Will Be Out Soon!
I am happy to announce that my first book, Be Love, will be out soon! I am self-publishing the book, and will get back the digital PDF proofs on Monday. I could have the ebook out in a week (softcover will take a few weeks longer). I think the cover looks great, and I hope people agree.
I have spent 8 years working on this first-hand account of my spiritual lessons learned under deep hypnosis. Hit the "Want to Read" button to make sure you download it when it comes out!
I have spent 8 years working on this first-hand account of my spiritual lessons learned under deep hypnosis. Hit the "Want to Read" button to make sure you download it when it comes out!
January 14, 2019
The Circle of Life
Sometimes it may seem like we have “drawn the short straw” in life. It may seem like the events of our lives are being done to us. We curse our “bad luck.” Why do these things always happen to me? We mutter. Yet we wouldn’t worry about the vicissitudes of life if we could see them for what they really are. How can we see our problems differently? My friends know that I get inspiration from a type of deep trance called “LBL Hypnotherapy.” This approach has brought me a comforting sense of perspective about our existence here—most importantly, that we reincarnate here on Earth and in fact, we never die.
Of course, we have all heard about reincarnation. Billions of people believe in reincarnation. I did not grow up believing in reincarnation, but I absolutely recognized what I saw under hypnosis. Yet under trance, I realized how normal and logical it is that we should live again and again; in fact, it would be strange if we only had “one shot” at learning life’s lessons. Reincarnation means that we can always come back and try again with another human identity—and that is very reassuring news.
After each of my lives, I saw myself return to a place of wonder and peace (which I call the “True World” in my book) where we prepare for our next life. In that tranquil place of purity, I saw myself choosing each new life in order to learn important lessons—especially, that we should love other people. To return to the original idea here, I was shown how wrong we are to complain about our “problems” in life. In fact, we are not the victims of our lives—we are the active designers of them! We are not only the actors in our movie—we are the co-directors of it.
Designers of our Lives
We chose this life. And through our many incarnations, we have chosen many bodies to live in. By choosing this body for this life, we have chosen every problem we face here—and all for a perfectly simple reason: we are here to learn.
Our life is a learning game. The main reason why the world’s injustices shouldn’t make us angry is this: the whole point of them is to provoke us to see if we will get angry! Life’s challenges are an obstacle course meant to teach us. It is a learning process, but at least it is our learning process. As the Course in Miracles would say, it is our dream. The dream is a test being continuously projected into our awareness, to gauge our allegiance to the things of the world, and our willingness to overcome them.
All our human senses reinforce the importance of the world, and the barriers we think we need to put up to protect us from other people here (not realizing that they are only innocent fellow actors in our movie). The point of spiritual practice is to break out of this mental loop; to step off the merry-go-round; to refuse to rise to the ego’s bait when it is offered, and to overlook all offenses, in that glorious culmination of human expression we call “forgiveness.” The Course in Miracles would say that forgiveness provides the closest approximation of Heaven’s Love on this planet, a love that is unique because it is shared by all.
This life is only one in our long pathway to revelation. Behind the scenes, we are immortal and all-knowing, and we have no needs, living in a boundless expression of infinite joy, in the blinding light of pure knowing. Planet Earth and its issues simply aren’t where we should be focused—we should only think about the love that unites us all. To sense this love is to begin to accept that we are all secretly unified as One. Behind the scenes, we are pure and innocent, steeped in the truth that binds all existence in the pure divine essence of Oneness.
We ought to know that we are advancing towards our glorious and inescapable reunion with Love with every incarnation here. In addition, as LBL hypnotherapy teaches us, we simultaneously experience every life from the perspective of Heaven as well as Earth, so we should be quietly confident that there is nowhere to go and nothing to do, because we always have one foot in Paradise.
After every life, back in base camp, we reunite with the timeless knowledge that is hidden from our earth-awareness, and we remember why we deliberately and purposefully chose this life on this planet. We aren’t here accidentally, through some random fluke of biology. We are here because we want to be here—to learn about love. Life is a remedial “traffic school of love,” and we selected the exact curriculum, in order to get our celestial driver’s license back.
What we call our problems are merely learning opportunities, true-or-false tests we can take over and over again, as long as we need to. This is a school that we can never flunk out of—a school where we learn that there is no scarcity, and the only product worth having (love) multiplies magically the more it is given away. A happy outcome is always 100% sure, as the Course in Miracles would say. We are all coming home.
Michael Newton
Hypnotherapist and author Dr. Michael Newton showed, through his past-life and LBL research, that difficult lives on Earth impart the most profound lessons to the incarnating soul. Even the people with the most severe worldly “problems” have merely chosen these hurdles for their growth potential. Therefore, we shouldn’t pity people with disabilities (such as my own father), or people enduring famine, war, and disease. Neither should we idolize or envy those with more pieces of colored paper (which they call money), or those “blessed” with sports cars or pretty faces. Our bodies are only temporary identities, and our reward in Heaven is assured no matter what—although everyone has chosen a slightly different curriculum of love-training.
We are all just briefly passing through, and although we have all chosen different lives here, we are all in the exact same boat, learning the exact same thing: to accept our shared interests and the divine Love that unites us all.
A Course in Miracles
A Course in Miracles (the “Course”) has been a great inspiration to me over the years. This remarkable book and self-study course maintains a philosophy that is totally consistent with what I saw under hypnosis: that we are already saved, and that the best way to hasten our return home is through forgiveness of other people.
The Course would question Newton’s reincarnation-based view of our experience of the world. In the Course, the world itself is a hologram. Far from physically experiencing these tough lives here, each of us is simply putting a new DVD into the machine and watching another virtual reality video segment, courtesy of our ego. The world is a projection in the Course’s view, and we are the watchers of its dream-sequences.
Yet should our response be any different in practice? Of course not. However we see our lives, our goal here is absolutely the same: to learn how to love, through the miracle of forgiveness. As long as our bad dreams of separation, guilt, and competition are still lodged in our mind, we will remain too paranoid and delusional to accept our destiny and let go. Distracted by petty grievances, we ignore the accessible ecstasy of Paradise, which is ours for the taking every moment of our lives. Peace is a changeless place we never truly left, and thus can instantly rediscover. Since there is no time, there is no time “limit;” no worry or distress should ever pass through our minds, because our enlightenment is happening now.
We Are Home Free
Very soon, (actually, in the timeless right now) we will perceive correctly that every brother/sister on the planet is one with us in innocence, and cannot be judged. At that point, we will realize that “the war is over,” and rejoin our soul companions—i.e. everyone who has ever lived—in the sanctified Oneness, perfect stillness, and supreme bliss of Heaven. Our enlightenment will appear to happen at a moment in time. But as all minds are joined, and there is no time, it will happen simultaneously, in the continuous present. We never left Heaven, and never will, and we only need a “little willingness” (in the Course’s parlance) to release the fantasy that the world matters, and to accept love as its permanent and infinitely preferable alternative.
Although the Course implies that reincarnation is our reality, it also says that it doesn’t matter if we believe in reincarnation. What matters is realizing that the answer is always available to us, no matter where we are. The only solution is to let go of our judgments right now, and choose love— this applies no matter what challenges we think we are facing. All challenges are the same, since they all force us to choose between fact (our shared innocence) and fiction (the world’s notions of “good” and “bad”).
We can indeed see peace instead of chaos by choosing love—and the word we apply to this choice is “forgiveness.” True forgiveness— a kind of eternally-patient and kind overlooking of the faults and blemishes of the world—is the entire point of the Course in Miracles. We have all experienced the faint echoes of heavenly love, but the closest we can ever get to living that Love on Earth is forgiveness. True forgiveness, when fully accepted, integrated, and interwoven throughout our entire awareness, reminds us that we are all One.
The Myth of Separation
In truth, there are no differences between anyone, because separation is a mythology that we created. We are all the same inside, and all as innocent as the angels. There are no levels or distinctions between us, because everything is interconnected, and time does not exist. No person is different from any other—nor any snowflake, nor tree, nor ocean, nor tiny paramecium, nor enormous Black Hole—none is different from any other. No remote galaxy is farther away from us than our own heart; no event is earlier or later than right now; and no person we have ever known can ever “leave” us.
No particle or continent can be measured by any physical “dimensions,” and thus none can genuinely exist, compared with the monolithic, infinite Unity of Love to which we belong. This is actually very good news, because this Unity—the only Thing that ever existed—is our inheritance. Paradise is ours for the asking, because we are connected to it, and it can never be taken away from us.
The Final Gift
In closing, we all ought to feel a great and equal compassion for all our fellow learners: voyagers who have opted to take a spin with us on this wobbly planet. Every one among us is a (temporarily) lost child, scratching her head, trying to figure out Grand Central Station at rush hour. Yet the child doesn’t realize that there is only one train—and it will only take her home. By smiling through life’s challenges, we can demonstrate to our fellow earthlings that love is the only possible answer and the only possible way.
Love is literarily all there is, and we are only love—because we are the immortal children of the One Source of Love. Love is both the subject and the object in an eternal circle of creation, and as Love beholds Love, our hidden gift of Unity is revealed. Tears of gratitude are the only sane reaction whenever we perceive—albeit briefly at first—the faint flickers of Love’s golden promise in our memory, as we thankfully recognize that We are All One.
Of course, we have all heard about reincarnation. Billions of people believe in reincarnation. I did not grow up believing in reincarnation, but I absolutely recognized what I saw under hypnosis. Yet under trance, I realized how normal and logical it is that we should live again and again; in fact, it would be strange if we only had “one shot” at learning life’s lessons. Reincarnation means that we can always come back and try again with another human identity—and that is very reassuring news.
After each of my lives, I saw myself return to a place of wonder and peace (which I call the “True World” in my book) where we prepare for our next life. In that tranquil place of purity, I saw myself choosing each new life in order to learn important lessons—especially, that we should love other people. To return to the original idea here, I was shown how wrong we are to complain about our “problems” in life. In fact, we are not the victims of our lives—we are the active designers of them! We are not only the actors in our movie—we are the co-directors of it.
Designers of our Lives
We chose this life. And through our many incarnations, we have chosen many bodies to live in. By choosing this body for this life, we have chosen every problem we face here—and all for a perfectly simple reason: we are here to learn.
Our life is a learning game. The main reason why the world’s injustices shouldn’t make us angry is this: the whole point of them is to provoke us to see if we will get angry! Life’s challenges are an obstacle course meant to teach us. It is a learning process, but at least it is our learning process. As the Course in Miracles would say, it is our dream. The dream is a test being continuously projected into our awareness, to gauge our allegiance to the things of the world, and our willingness to overcome them.
All our human senses reinforce the importance of the world, and the barriers we think we need to put up to protect us from other people here (not realizing that they are only innocent fellow actors in our movie). The point of spiritual practice is to break out of this mental loop; to step off the merry-go-round; to refuse to rise to the ego’s bait when it is offered, and to overlook all offenses, in that glorious culmination of human expression we call “forgiveness.” The Course in Miracles would say that forgiveness provides the closest approximation of Heaven’s Love on this planet, a love that is unique because it is shared by all.
This life is only one in our long pathway to revelation. Behind the scenes, we are immortal and all-knowing, and we have no needs, living in a boundless expression of infinite joy, in the blinding light of pure knowing. Planet Earth and its issues simply aren’t where we should be focused—we should only think about the love that unites us all. To sense this love is to begin to accept that we are all secretly unified as One. Behind the scenes, we are pure and innocent, steeped in the truth that binds all existence in the pure divine essence of Oneness.
We ought to know that we are advancing towards our glorious and inescapable reunion with Love with every incarnation here. In addition, as LBL hypnotherapy teaches us, we simultaneously experience every life from the perspective of Heaven as well as Earth, so we should be quietly confident that there is nowhere to go and nothing to do, because we always have one foot in Paradise.
After every life, back in base camp, we reunite with the timeless knowledge that is hidden from our earth-awareness, and we remember why we deliberately and purposefully chose this life on this planet. We aren’t here accidentally, through some random fluke of biology. We are here because we want to be here—to learn about love. Life is a remedial “traffic school of love,” and we selected the exact curriculum, in order to get our celestial driver’s license back.
What we call our problems are merely learning opportunities, true-or-false tests we can take over and over again, as long as we need to. This is a school that we can never flunk out of—a school where we learn that there is no scarcity, and the only product worth having (love) multiplies magically the more it is given away. A happy outcome is always 100% sure, as the Course in Miracles would say. We are all coming home.
Michael Newton
Hypnotherapist and author Dr. Michael Newton showed, through his past-life and LBL research, that difficult lives on Earth impart the most profound lessons to the incarnating soul. Even the people with the most severe worldly “problems” have merely chosen these hurdles for their growth potential. Therefore, we shouldn’t pity people with disabilities (such as my own father), or people enduring famine, war, and disease. Neither should we idolize or envy those with more pieces of colored paper (which they call money), or those “blessed” with sports cars or pretty faces. Our bodies are only temporary identities, and our reward in Heaven is assured no matter what—although everyone has chosen a slightly different curriculum of love-training.
We are all just briefly passing through, and although we have all chosen different lives here, we are all in the exact same boat, learning the exact same thing: to accept our shared interests and the divine Love that unites us all.
A Course in Miracles
A Course in Miracles (the “Course”) has been a great inspiration to me over the years. This remarkable book and self-study course maintains a philosophy that is totally consistent with what I saw under hypnosis: that we are already saved, and that the best way to hasten our return home is through forgiveness of other people.
The Course would question Newton’s reincarnation-based view of our experience of the world. In the Course, the world itself is a hologram. Far from physically experiencing these tough lives here, each of us is simply putting a new DVD into the machine and watching another virtual reality video segment, courtesy of our ego. The world is a projection in the Course’s view, and we are the watchers of its dream-sequences.
Yet should our response be any different in practice? Of course not. However we see our lives, our goal here is absolutely the same: to learn how to love, through the miracle of forgiveness. As long as our bad dreams of separation, guilt, and competition are still lodged in our mind, we will remain too paranoid and delusional to accept our destiny and let go. Distracted by petty grievances, we ignore the accessible ecstasy of Paradise, which is ours for the taking every moment of our lives. Peace is a changeless place we never truly left, and thus can instantly rediscover. Since there is no time, there is no time “limit;” no worry or distress should ever pass through our minds, because our enlightenment is happening now.
We Are Home Free
Very soon, (actually, in the timeless right now) we will perceive correctly that every brother/sister on the planet is one with us in innocence, and cannot be judged. At that point, we will realize that “the war is over,” and rejoin our soul companions—i.e. everyone who has ever lived—in the sanctified Oneness, perfect stillness, and supreme bliss of Heaven. Our enlightenment will appear to happen at a moment in time. But as all minds are joined, and there is no time, it will happen simultaneously, in the continuous present. We never left Heaven, and never will, and we only need a “little willingness” (in the Course’s parlance) to release the fantasy that the world matters, and to accept love as its permanent and infinitely preferable alternative.
Although the Course implies that reincarnation is our reality, it also says that it doesn’t matter if we believe in reincarnation. What matters is realizing that the answer is always available to us, no matter where we are. The only solution is to let go of our judgments right now, and choose love— this applies no matter what challenges we think we are facing. All challenges are the same, since they all force us to choose between fact (our shared innocence) and fiction (the world’s notions of “good” and “bad”).
We can indeed see peace instead of chaos by choosing love—and the word we apply to this choice is “forgiveness.” True forgiveness— a kind of eternally-patient and kind overlooking of the faults and blemishes of the world—is the entire point of the Course in Miracles. We have all experienced the faint echoes of heavenly love, but the closest we can ever get to living that Love on Earth is forgiveness. True forgiveness, when fully accepted, integrated, and interwoven throughout our entire awareness, reminds us that we are all One.
The Myth of Separation
In truth, there are no differences between anyone, because separation is a mythology that we created. We are all the same inside, and all as innocent as the angels. There are no levels or distinctions between us, because everything is interconnected, and time does not exist. No person is different from any other—nor any snowflake, nor tree, nor ocean, nor tiny paramecium, nor enormous Black Hole—none is different from any other. No remote galaxy is farther away from us than our own heart; no event is earlier or later than right now; and no person we have ever known can ever “leave” us.
No particle or continent can be measured by any physical “dimensions,” and thus none can genuinely exist, compared with the monolithic, infinite Unity of Love to which we belong. This is actually very good news, because this Unity—the only Thing that ever existed—is our inheritance. Paradise is ours for the asking, because we are connected to it, and it can never be taken away from us.
The Final Gift
In closing, we all ought to feel a great and equal compassion for all our fellow learners: voyagers who have opted to take a spin with us on this wobbly planet. Every one among us is a (temporarily) lost child, scratching her head, trying to figure out Grand Central Station at rush hour. Yet the child doesn’t realize that there is only one train—and it will only take her home. By smiling through life’s challenges, we can demonstrate to our fellow earthlings that love is the only possible answer and the only possible way.
Love is literarily all there is, and we are only love—because we are the immortal children of the One Source of Love. Love is both the subject and the object in an eternal circle of creation, and as Love beholds Love, our hidden gift of Unity is revealed. Tears of gratitude are the only sane reaction whenever we perceive—albeit briefly at first—the faint flickers of Love’s golden promise in our memory, as we thankfully recognize that We are All One.
