Guilt is the price for doing something that violates your integrity or value system. Even people who are incapable of feeling compassion suffer from some sense of guilt, often at a subconscious level. You can readily see this as their lives go quickly downhill after they have committed a murder or have done something very destructive. They often arrange to get caught for the crime despite their lack of conscience. The reason for this is that a person always knows they have committed an infraction at the deepest levels and their guilt arranges for various forms of punishment. Sometimes, no amount of punishment alleviates their guilt and they pay and pay and pay.
These infractions take the form of debt that upsets the balance of life. The common human agreement is that all debts must be paid one way or another in a form of retribution if you will. If someone has taken a life, they need to save a life or lose their own life in payment. This is the ancient law of karma. Something must be set right, paid back, balanced out. Ultimately, each person is the keeper of the balance sheet. The only influence over this balance sheet is, you guessed it, forgiveness. Of course being forgiven by another is always a boon but it does not guarantee that you will forgive yourself. Even an adept such as Jesus could not guarantee that the ones he offered forgiveness to would forgive themselves. Self-forgiveness can only be accomplished by the person who committed the infraction themselves.
When I was sixteen years old I got my first car. It was a used VW bug and had a lot of miles on it. After a few months of driving it the tires became noticeably bald but I could not afford to put four new tires on it. One day while walking around the neighborhood I found an old trailer sitting in front of someone’s house with four VW tires that had a little tread on them. They were better than the ones on my car. Desperate for a solution, in the middle of the night, I stole the tires off the trailer and put them on my car, rationalizing that I needed them more.
While I got away with the theft I could never get away from my feeling of guilt and for years I felt bad about the inconvenience I had cause the owner of the trailer. Whenever I had something stolen from me I thought of the theft of those tires and figured I had it coming. Finally one day over forty years later I returned to that neighborhood and to the scene of the crime. I had no illusions that the same people were living there after all this time. I found the house where the trailer had been parked and I offered a handful of tobacco for the well being of the victim. I said some prayers for them and breathed a big sigh of relief. As crimes go it was a small one but it was big for me. I may still owe them a set of tires someday or their equivalent in some future life but the important thing is that I took the energy out of the debt. I now feel completely neutral about what happened. If they came up to me with their hand out and asked for payment I would instantly reach in my wallet and pay them but without any emotional charge on it.
The whole point of self-forgiveness is to unblock the energy flow and get life moving again. The game is then reset for new and better choices. As long as there is guilt, the guilt will arrange for punishment, and one bad feeling leads to another and leads to another. When this happens, the game never gets reset and thus there is no progress.
In a larger context, everything needs forgiving, because almost everything we see or experience is a part of the great wheel of consequences or as the Hindus call it, the Wheel of Karma, derived from the grand illusion or maya. Forgiveness stops the wheel, clears the maya, neutralizes its effects, and therefore it is one of the most powerful tools in your shamanic toolbox. You can forgive war, forgive traffic, forgive all pain and suffering, forgive lies, ignorance, hunger, or any form of separation or disconnection. There are some that would argue, “So what? How does that help? It doesn’t solve anything whatsoever”. Not so. It resolves everything because it gets at the foundation of the pattern. Forgiveness dissolves the root of the unwanted pattern that has persisted. If each person forgives each thing they see, sense, or feel, the entire dream of the world is reset with regularity. We start over on the right track. There are basically four parts to this simple formula. 1. I forgive you your debt to me. 2. I forgive myself my debt to you. 3. You forgive me my debt to you. 4. You forgive yourself your debt to me. Voila, game over, game reset. We all win. Apply this to international debt. Apply this to tribal squabbles that have been going on for millennia. Teach this to perpetrators and to victims. Teach this as a way of life in all cultures, in all parts of the world.
A second line of argument goes like this. “Are you crazy? This is never going to realistically happen. Why bother? Besides, it will just teach criminals that there are no consequences. People will be able to get away with whatever they want. The good will pay and the bad will take advantage. Besides, it’s no fair. It’s just a bad idea.”
So this is saying that the status quo is inevitable and there is nothing we can do but keep on punishing others and ourselves and in this way make people behave better. The only problem is that this has not worked as a policy for thousands of years. People do not behave better because their feet are held to the fire. In fact, they often get worse because that is what resistance does. The world is living proof of that.
Remote Healing
Each month, around the new and full moons, Jose, Lena or Anna leads a remote shamanic healing session. These approximately 30 minute sessions are designed to be experienced in a quiet, safe place free from distraction. Even if you cannot join live they can be very powerful, and always include a good clearing and beautiful icaros. Recording access is included for a short time afterwards. See the product description for dates and times.
If you suddenly reach into the cage of your pet guinea pig, it may nip you out of fear. You could take revenge and beat the guinea pig or kill it but that would make no sense. Usually you realize that you had some culpability and you forgive the guinea pig. We are way more neutral toward animals in general even though we love them. Notice that neutrality can go with love, that they are not mutually exclusive. We tend to be much more forgiving of our pets than we are of our loved ones or other people. Instead we tend to want to punish them, to make them feel what we just went through. We don’t expect our pets to be fair in their treatment of us but we expect people to always play fair and they clearly don’t. Nor do we always play fair if we are really honest with ourselves. We are weird that way. That tendency needs healing in a big way.
Oh, and one other thing, the world is not fair. When we are children, we complain that things are not fair and then we grow up and realize that it isn’t fair in the short term. As adults, we understand that and learn to make due.
There really is only one solution and the world’s most renowned teachers have offered it up to us time and again. Not only does forgiveness work, but it is inevitably the only solution for a world loaded to the gills with debts of every kind. This debt is unsustainable and it will take us down eventually if we allow it to. Forgiveness is the only tenable solution to a world out of balance and we will learn it sooner or later. It would be less painful to learn it sooner.
Now keep this in mind. The ego cannot forgive, as it is incapable of the task. There is no forgiveness in its vocabulary. The false personality is committed to the old game of separation, fear, blame, and punishment. So this is not where forgiveness comes from. Forgiveness comes from spirit, in the form of the inner shaman and that is the only place it comes from. If you have no relationship with the inner shaman, you cannot forgive yourself or others and you are rather stuck in repeating the same old boring patterns.
There is a final messy condition that needs to be addressed. What about all the anger that leads not only to lack of forgiveness but to revenge? Anger is always based in fear. This is rather hard to see but if you look closely you will discover fear’s presence every time you are angry. “I am afraid if I don’t get you back or eliminate you, that you will destroy me. I am afraid that you will think I am weak or a wimp if I forgive you. I must punish you for what you have done so that you will feel guilty and ashamed and then I need not fear you any longer. Blah blah, blah.
There is a man who owes me thousands of dollars in royalties he has never paid me and probably never will in this lifetime. For years this made me very angry with him and every time I thought of this I felt very bad. In the middle of the night I would wake up with anxiety about how I was going to get him to pay me. I was afraid that he would never pay me. I was afraid that I would never be able to recoup this money and it would cause me to not have the funds to do things I wanted to do in my life. I was afraid that he thought I was so easy a mark that he could get away with it. And so on.
One day I went through a very deliberate process of forgiving him, not in person since we have no contact, but from a distance. I forgave him the debt and any future debt he might incur as he continues to withhold my money. I no longer had anxiety at night. I no longer worried I wouldn’t have enough. I saw that I have more than enough to take care of my needs. I have plenty of prosperity in my life and I don’t miss the money he owes. I know he will repay the debt some time in some place, some lifetime in the future, but I don’t actually care when and if he does. I have let go of the energy around it and I feel much better about the whole thing. The alternative is that I could continue to feel horrible forever. It’s not worth it. There is no power in that. The power is in the neutrality.
There is no power in the response: “You made me angry. You forced my hand. I am not responsible for my reaction”. In fact, this is the response of a weakling, someone who is doomed to remain stuck. We are responsible for the fears that fuel our outrage and anger. We are the ones who are feeling this way. We can choose to let go of our fear, to let go of the anger, to become neutral even about horrible things. There are people who have forgiven criminals of killing their children, their spouses, their loved ones. They have done so successfully and good things have resulted. In one case, perpetrator and victim speak together in schools about the power of forgiveness.
There you have it. Rather than an impossible religious ideal, forgiveness is an achievable shamanic strategy that detaches you from drama and leads to clarity, truth, and neutrality. Try to remember that forgiveness is not about right or wrong nor is forgiveness about what is fair. Forgiveness is a power house strategy that works better than just about anything else you can come up with because it resets the game every time. That is the only way out of the mess we have created. Welcome to the new world.
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José Stevens
José Luis Stevens, PhD is the president and co-founder (with wife Lena) of Power Path Seminars, an international school and consulting firm dedicated to the study and application of shamanism and indigenous wisdom to business and everyday life. José completed a ten-year apprenticeship with a Huichol (Wixarika) Maracame (Huichol shaman) in the Sierras of Central Mexico. In addition, he is studying with Shipibo shamans in the Peruvian Amazon and with Paqos (shamans) in the Andes in Peru. In 1983 he completed his doctoral dissertation at the California Institute of Integral Studies focusing on the interface between shamanism and western psychological counseling. Since then, he has studied cross-cultural shamanism around the world to distill the core elements of shamanic healing and practice. He is the author of twenty books and numerous articles including Encounters With Power, Awaken The Inner Shaman, The Power Path, Secrets of Shamanism, Transforming Your Dragons and How To Pray The Shaman’s Way.
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