“IYLI” Chapter ONE: Transcending shame & guilt
Shame and guilt are both destructive in nature, with each one representing different lower value points for self-judgment and self-esteem. Neither shame nor guilt do anything for the experiencer other than create more resentment toward humankind and life in general, and/or provide more ammunition for the story you tell yourself about how cruel God was to allow such horrible feelings to be present.
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CHAPTER ONE:
Transcending the Forces of Shame & Guilt
Powerlessness and unmanageability pretty much summed me up…
It wasn’t so long ago that shame and guilt were part of my regular experience of being human. For years, I made decisions which did not bring me closer to God. I became cognizant that every interaction in life is a choice to choose God or not. But I continued to make choices that reinforced my continuing sense of shame and guilt. Shame, guilt, and other forms of fear create perpetual loops of choosing and then believing you are the thing you just chose. When you choose something over and over again it turns into a belief system about yourself and all your worth being dictated by the outcomes of the same decisions. That you are shame. That you are guilt. The truth is, you are neither.
For 32 years, I was a lost man. I continually pursued answers about life out in the world. And searched for such answers amongst those who also searched for truth in low down and far-off places – without satisfaction ever being part of the equation. I would search for the meaning of love by lusting after people. I would search for the meaning of money by falsely claiming work done as worth a day’s wage. I would look for friendship in frivolity and regularly drink myself into oblivion. The plain and simple truth about me for many years was that I didn’t even like being alive most of the time. I hated being me.
I was constantly hiding from God in places I thought would be good enough to appease God. I would make deals and I would barter with divinity about choices once made to never be made again. Only to repeat the same negative choices all over. I would cower from responsibility and run from commitment, only to continue these patterns. What a bare laden carcass of a man I was by the time I reached the age of thirty-two. There was a falsehood I couldn’t get out of the way of, which was in order to embrace a calling shared with me at 20, I had to be Jesus for everyone. When the truth all along was that I simply have to show the world I know Jesus, not through words but solely through actions. The frustration that was mounting was that I didn’t know Jesus either. Not from a first-hand perspective. I also no longer believed in the religion of Christianity to show me who or what God was.
I peddled in half-truths and outright lies. And for the most part I pretended to be what I thought others wanted me to be. I spent years telling someone I loved them only to burn that bridge through deliberate acts of self-destruction in a twisted attempt to have them prove their love to me in return by not leaving me when I was worth leaving.
I tried drugs of all kinds and gave lip service to the thought of humility being something I didn’t possess. I was a waste of time and space by most accounts, despite my best efforts to appear worthy of attention and desirable for love. I played a part in the play of life where I no longer knew what the costume was or if the part was still active. Only to be reminded every time I hit another wall constructed by my own hands and efforts, that I wasn’t a good actor. And that maybe the play had been cancelled already.
I had more reasons than most to have shame and guilt remain mainstays in my perception of who I was. My lack of integrity to acknowledge such dispositions and do anything within my power to alleviate such emotional states and feelings propelled me further into despair. The repeating cycle of shame and guilt perpetuated more shame and guilt. I didn’t even have the ability to see that shame and guilt are shared amongst all people at one time or another. An easier way to say that is I never lived in the land of shame and guilt, I only visited regularly. If you find yourself in an energy field of shame and guilt, life is done. You are reaching expiration. If what you are is shame and guilt. Or apathy or any of these lesser “realities” of existence, you are closer to the grave than you realize. Time is running out. You also open yourself up to possession and a lot of less than desirable things. Fortunately, most people do not live in a world of shame and guilt. They may experience it, but they don’t live in it.
Self-pity is a favorite companion of shame and guilt. Followed by a quick targeted anger and judgment not only at the world, but also at God for giving you such a bad lot in life. “How could you be a loving God and allow this to happen to me?” I was spoiled and felt entitled to a life I had no part in helping to create. Mostly I wanted happiness despite not meeting God halfway or changing any of my destructive habits.
Shame and guilt are both destructive in nature, with each one representing different lower value points for self-judgment and self-esteem. Neither shame nor guilt do anything for the experiencer other than create more resentment toward humankind and life in general, and/or provide more ammunition for the story you tell yourself about how cruel God was to allow such horrible feelings to be present.
My experience with shame and guilt are probably not much different from most of you reading this. Neither of these words carried a positive connotation as I traveled through them. However, once I moved past believing I was these two aspects of a non-integrous life, I look back on both as necessary operations of the ego from which miracles could take place. When I speak of these two terms, I do not come from a place where my daily experience was racked by shame and guilt as a constant, but more from a place where I lived with these realities in spurts, usually based on past decisions which no longer represented who I was in the moment. Shame and guilt are tricky feelings. They appear justified at first glance, and few people investigate long enough to see what is actually being presented to them is only a partial reflection framed to appear a certain way. I ran away from these sensations the moment they arrived. And if I wasn’t able to change my immediate mind about why I shouldn’t feel a certain way, there was always alcohol to help. For me, alcohol became medicine. Alcohol, along with other drugs creates a barrier to the ego from being able to work against the host. At least for a little while. In essence, the effects that drinking heavy amounts of alcohol had on my consciousness was instant liberation from having to feel bad about myself in the moment. The part about alcohol that only the alcoholic realizes, and often times too late, is that alcohol might deliver you from feelings in the short term, but quickly delivers you back to yourself, without the aid of proper dopamine and serotonin levels, which the alcohol depletes, and without the aid of a clear mind when shame and guilt come visiting again. Alcohol was pals with my ego and they both knew the interchangeable roles they played. You, most likely do not have alcoholism as a barrier to transcending the ego. But quite possibly your barrier is right there with shame and guilt, and without stopping to feel these things then properly surrendering them over to a power greater than yourself, shame and guilt are here to stay, no matter how many miles you find yourself running in the interim, or how many self-help best sellers you read that aren’t based on wisdom at all, just re-contextualized jargon made new again by a fresh perspective on the current society.
AA worked for me (Let me make it clear, I don’t speak on behalf of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous) because I was battling alcoholism before I knew anything about the ego and was desperately looking for a way to stop drinking. If you’re an alcoholic, you should put this book down and go check out a meeting. Do not use this work as a substitute for experiencing AA for yourself. AA is a total program of recovery, and what you have here is a story of experiencing God and freedom from the ego through the aid of the 12-steps, which are similar things at a particular level, but nowhere similar with concern to an active addiction to a substance.
Shame and guilt as a continual way of life bring almost certain death, imprisonment, suicide, and any other form of negative life experience associated with living at the bottom of the barrel. Shame and guilt can be a way of life, and believe it or not, these two areas of non-refuge are occupied as reality by millions of the world’s population at the time I am writing this paragraph. And even while you are reading it.
To provide a little more info into what life looks like for someone operating at this level, we can reference back to Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness and see that their view of God hovers somewhere between despising and vindictive. The general life-view for someone characterized by shame and guilt would be visibly witnessed as miserable and potentially evil, and these folks would quite literally cause the average person to walk the other way. The constant stream of emotions running, and unbeknownst to them ruining, their life on a minute-to-minute basis are ones of blame and humiliation, and the folks unlucky enough to be residing in states of shame and/or guilt have two main courses of action for all those who find themselves in their path: destruction and/or elimination. Misery loves company is an apt saying for this level of calibration.
Circling back, what can be referred to as demonic possession can occur when someone inhabits the levels of shame and guilt for long periods of time. It is not as if these levels create the possession, it is more that these levels help foster an attitude that creates a higher likelihood to be possessed by energy of lesser astral entities. Or more simply put, where you reside is what’s around you. Currently, whether you acknowledge other realms as a possibility or not, they exist, and they exist ad infinitum. There are more parallel dimensions than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of our planet. Multiply that unknown number by infinity and you will have a basic understanding for how many parallel dimensions, astral planes, current lifetimes, etc. there are happening at this very moment. We experience life most of the time in this earth realm at this time and from a single vantage point. I classify it this way because I am not an expert on parallel dimensions and planes of existence, but trust me, there’s a lot happening in other places than what we experience as right here and right now.
Our Earth plane is smack-dab in the middle of all the infinite possibilities for existence, and there are an infinite number of realms and dimensions emanating forth from us. As well as projecting backwards from us. As well as outwards in all directions simultaneously. Rules of infinity dictate that wherever you are is the center of everything, because you can never be at the beginning or end of infinity. Infinity doesn’t have beginnings or ends.
Because of the nature of infinity, no matter where one finds oneself, they are always at the center of the evolutionary unfoldment of creation. Our particular realm is characterized by having a multitude of dimensions and opportunities for our soul’s karmic evolutionary process. Every aspect of consciousness is a distinct and experienceable dimension. The only difference between someone experiencing heaven and someone experiencing hell is the dimension of consciousness they are inhabiting.
Our Earth realm allows us a full plethora of heaven and hell and everything in between. Other realms not so lucky as ours, don’t have this. Other realms start at a calibrated level of enlightenment for every inhabitant coming into existence there. Heavenly realms exist inside and outside of our space time, and hellish realms exist in the same manner. However, both exist here and now as degrees of perception and interaction with the world.
As part of my experience with a level of consciousness that has taken on a life of its own in growth-rate and potential, regularly I am aware of dimensions operating with different parameters than ours. I can tell you something with certainty, and although my physical body did not live this lifetime within a prolonged experience of these energy levels, I have visited these realms characterized predominantly with shame and guilt. It is not a fun place to find oneself. There you find existence similar to ours, but total chaos at the same time. There is no mention of God, but there is still an inkling of possibility. These realms are reserved for those who choose an anti-God position, and therefore have the consequence of spending time in a hellish realm before heaven again becomes known. God is always but a choice away. So, if you ever find yourself stuck in one of these levels of consciousness or in one of these realms through astral projection or other means of exploration, do yourself a favor and cry out to God. Only the energies of immense Love can save you from hell. Don’t believe anything otherwise. Or risk an eternity spent trying to figure out the very thing that was just shared here freely.
I tell you all of this not to scare you, or to make it seem like I live in the land of the “woo woo’s,” but I tell you all of this because there is much more beyond what is seen and unseen, and at a certain point you will find yourself down in the dumps, possibly depressed, and possibly clinically depressed, and it is at those times you will need to remember what you read here. Typically, within bouts of depression, one will endure prolonged experiences of shame and guilt, but fear not, for the tools you will learn here will serve you well if you ever find your life consumed by such low attracter fields. When one transcends the states of shame and guilt, they have in turn transcended aspects of and attachments to the ego, but in no way the entirety of the personal ego.
Now that we have a slightly better understanding of shame and guilt from a consciousness and non-linear perspective, let’s dive back into the physical realm and take a look at how dictionary.com defines the terms in question:
Shame: The painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, ridiculous, etc., done by oneself or another
Guilt: a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, etc., whether real or imagined.
These definitions are at the heart of what most people experience as defined models of shame and guilt. For the average person, they will not live in the world of constant shaming and incessant guilt but will only visit these realities from time to time as the ego sees fit to engage their thought process.
One of the most astonishing bits of knowingness that came during my upswing in consciousness, which came around the time I crossed into the level of love, was that our thoughts fuel our feelings, and our feelings fuel our emotions. And if we want to change how we feel about a thing we must first change how we witness our thoughts. Emotions are comprised of many feelings, and feelings are comprised of thousands of habitual thought patterns, and thought patterns are the byproduct of what one allows into their brain, mixed with how the ego chooses to manifest that allowed stimuli into the day-to-day psyche of the average human experience. Quite literally, our experience with the world is the byproduct of nature and nurture, and the old adage of “garbage in, garbage out” holds specifically true in the world of thinkingness. We will spend more time breaking this contextual understanding down as the book progresses, but for now all that is needed to move into the next part of this chapter is understanding a simple truth: what we hold in mind tends to manifest.
In the next section in this chapter, we will look at what four different enlightened masters had to say with regards to the nature of life, and not only what they had to say about a particular topic, but the similarity between each master’s teaching portrayed in religious texts, which served as a major blessing for me when going through my evolution of consciousness. Once you read through the quotes from Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism, there will be a short thought detailing with how shame and guilt can be re-contextualized to better serve the understanding for transcending the ego as the basis for Step One of this program.
TRUTHS
(The Gospel of Luke) The kingdom of God is not coming in any way that you can observe. The kingdom of God is already here - within you.
(The Dhammapada) Those with a pure heart, and who seek the Way without ceasing, will find it. It is like cleaning glass until the dust is removed.
(The Bhagavad Gita) Those who seek to find the One without ceasing, will find the Lord dwelling in their own hearts.
(The Tao Te Ching) In bygone days men of wisdom honored the Way by declaring that it could be found by all who seek it.
CONTEMPLATING ON TRUTH
I spent more than thirty-two years searching high and low for the kingdom of God. More accurately, I spent that amount of time searching for a connection to the God of my ancestors’ understanding, while unknowingly doing my best to create a separation from the Creator through my conscious decisions and actions, and through my sub-conscious programming related to guilt and personal feelings about myself and the world around me. It was not until I was thirty-three that I experientially knew that God, the Creator of the Universe, the Sustainer of the Cosmos, the Magnificent and Ultimate Authority of life and death, was not to be found anywhere outside of me, but had been with me and within me the entire time. Not outside but inside I found God. Right there within my being was the connection I searched for. Within myself was the connection to the divine. God was not coming in any way I could observe externally, but rather, God was moving towards me in the still and small space of my quieted being, communicating through a voiceless and loving whisper, “Welcome back, I’m glad you found me. Now what, my son?”
You see, God isn’t over there doing things with other people in other far-away places. God is right here, right now, with you all the time, because you and God are not in fact separate, you’re one. Only you can’t see that yet. And if you can’t see what’s directly in front of you, why hold onto outdated feelings and programs of shame and guilt any longer? Shame and guilt do two things well. First, they convince people they’re real. Second, they make a person believe God is that which punishes you. You’re your own judge, you’re your own tormenter. God isn’t found in your torment. God doesn’t take pride and joy in your suffering or self-indulgences, because experiencing God isn’t found in shame or guilt, but rather in love and forgiveness. Love and forgiveness aren’t found out there. They’re found within. Because of this, love and forgiveness not only bless the world around you, but within you simultaneously. One can’t change the world around them before acknowledging how the world is but a reflection of what’s happening inside of them. If you seek happiness, choose love and forgiveness in every moment as opposed to fear and judgment, for it is loving yourself that creates happiness and healing and love in the world around you. The inside-first approach is the only approach that works if you desire true happiness and endless joy.
Life has a funny way of showing a person their truest potential as a human being. It does not wait around for one to manifest it, but more allows room and growth to realize it. It is solely upon when I or another are ready to accept a view of life through another lens. Every moment contains an opportunity to present that. This book from one lens is a love letter to the gift of choice. For many years, I put everything of the world in front of simply being. Namely, addictions, the quest for power, the desire for physical intimacy, the wanting of security, the hope for riches and the trappings of an ego-inspired life. My personal ego needed to be cleansed and the mind needed to be dusted off through the process of surrender before I was able to see my truest potential – the potential that is within all who pursue life with a pure heart while choosing to move towards a transcended mind, which is waiting for all who seek God without ceasing while consistently surrendering the lesser for the greater, the just-around-the-corner expressions of the ego for the certain but prolonged future of realized potential. Fear is the motivation of the ego, and it was fear which dominated my intentions both consciously and sub-consciously before learning the obvious but seemingly at times hidden secret of “cleaning one’s glass until the dust is removed.” You see, one does not clean one’s own glass. In fact, you can’t. You can only notice the dust and ask God to clean it for you. In life, we have but a small number of actual choices, and all choices boil down to a single series at a certain point: noticing dirt in our vision or looking past it through muddled lenses, and then choosing more ignorance or, although uncertain-where-it-leads, surrender.
The path to healing, happiness, joy and even enlightenment begins for those who allow the guilt and shame dust on the glass in front of them to be washed away by the hands of their creator, through the process of surrendering the lesser fear-based experiences of the ego for the greater loving-truths found beyond one’s mind. The mind is but an instrument for the human experience, and it is far from the greatest aspect of being a human. The mind plays a part in this game of life by allowing programs to appear as if real, but once one surrenders over the programs of the mind, the promise of what’s found beyond mind becomes evident, and one now has the opportunity for actual happiness and continual joy as a reality. Shame and guilt reside in the mind, but not in what comes once one transcends the ego.
Shame and guilt can either be seen as the messengers from Life that can direct one’s way upward towards enlightenment and a conscious connection with the divine, or as the tools needed to help dig an emotional grave in preparation for an eventual physical death. The shame I felt over addictions, and the guilt I carried for allowing my life to sink to such a level of depravity were two realities that kept me stuck in the rat race of self-pity and despair, with both serving as amplifiers of a victimhood mentality. I let shame and guilt run my life for a period of time, with the byproduct being the arrival at a moment where I needed to make the choice to either live a different way or continue dying emotionally until I physically arrived at death’s doorstep.
Thankfully, I chose to surrender my life and will over to a power greater than myself and began again to seek the nameless and voiceless One. Over a relatively short period of time, my personal vantage point went from a constant experience of self-pity to a regular connection and experience of self-love, and all because once I surrendered my hopeless state for an unknown one, on the other side I found the One had never left myside. God, the One, the Creator/Sustainer, Allah, Yahweh or whatever name given to deity that fits the mold you align with, that power is not just found in other parts of the world and universe, it’s residing within you as well as all around you. God is everywhere all the time and nowhere in particular, so when you call out for help and meet that call with action and different decision making, God has a way of helping those who help themselves to more of God. We have the choice to choose a different path at any part of this journey. No amount of will without God, however, is enough to choose anew and experience the peace that heading north creates. We can choose anew, but it’s actually a power greater than our self that gives us the context of choice to begin with. Because God is context and content, we’re never separated. So, when you surrender your shame and guilt (which are pieces of content) over to God, that step starts developing a recontextualization of life, a reorientation of life, and a resurgence of possibility in your life to contextualize and manifest love present with every step you take moving forward.
With the removal of shame and guilt from my inner being through the act of surrendering them to a power greater than myself, I was free to move upwards on the path to prolonged happiness, increased joy, and at the time, the hope of enlightenment in this lifetime. I was not alone in my search for a better Life, and I was not alone in my desire to connect with the divine. And from the ledge of continued serenity I now lie perched, I can honestly say, the Way can be found and honored by all those who seek it, not just by the blessed men of antiquity and supposed wisdom from a bygone age, but by you reading these words now.
The first two stumbling blocks to living the life I always hoped was possible were taken away from the terrain below my feet when surrender became the last option before death, and with that act came the immediate understanding and eventual knowingness that the same miracle is possible for anyone else who has the courage to acknowledge their own bouts with these two negative forces, realizes for their own self that they no longer wish to be slave to the ego and the manifestations of shame and guilt, and makes the choice to move towards the Way without ceasing. Transcending guilt and shame means one is no longer under the impression they are what they feel when moments of shame and guilt creep in, but instead understand that to feel these things are moments of teaching happening “for us” to grow and to learn and not “to us” as punishment for past sins.
Surrender is the key to growth and seeking the Way, and without surrender, you’ll find that moving past the confines of the mind will be impossible, let alone achievable through modern medicine or personal willpower. At this point it must be stated, there is no joy without truth, and it is truth the Way proposes. The truth is sometimes seen in everyday life amongst peers and bedfellows, but always within the still and quiet moments of those brave enough to admit to God that humility is worth embracing. That’s where it grows. Those who humble themselves with surrender are the same who will inherit heaven here on earth, and conversely, those who choose the world over the Way, will find life repeating in a circular motion in not just this lifetime, but in the next as well. From experience, walking the straight and narrow path is easier than going in circles. And more rewarding as well.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR STEP ONE
Find a quiet space away from the noise of other people and from the busyness of the world. If you find yourself making it to this step and you cannot escape what’s around you and you’re ready to take this step, don’t worry about where you are, just close your eyes for a moment or two and take a few deep breaths to begin. This step can be taken by speaking the words below internally or externally, but I would recommend doing both in succession and then writing them down after you’re finished reciting them. What this step means, is that you realize the impact the mind plays on your daily life, and the way it presents thoughts, feelings and emotions which are rarely asked for or chosen. By taking this step, you are choosing humility in the form of surrender of that which you cannot control, the ego/mind, and starting to let go of your attachment to the belief that you are what you think, feel and emote. The magic of this step is the recontextualization it provides the experiencer once admitting to one’s self and the world around you that yes, in fact, I have no control over this thing called mind and its goings-on. By taking this step, you are informing God, I am ready to see what life has in store for me no longer being unwarily attached to my personal ego, and no longer remaining attached to the belief system that I am anything other than a child of God, infinite in nature, and because of these facts, I am ready to chase after truth within the pathway provided here and found as a by-product of working the 12 steps.
STEP ONE
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I admit I am powerless over my ego, and my life up until this point has been managed and run by it, but I am ready to find truth despite not knowing it personally yet.
STEP ONE PRAYER
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I surrender over my ego to Thee oh Lord, in its entirety, and all attachments I have to the belief that I am my mind. Thank you for how this decision will impact my life positively from this point forward.