DOES EVERYONE "CREATE THEIR OWN REALITY"? By William Bloom |
Sunday, 02 December 2007 | |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE I wrote this for Cygnus Magazine in June 2007. The editors asked me to write something in response to some of the terrible comments around the kidnapping in Portugal of the little girl and other comments concerning Darfur and other world crises. ‘My baby boy was thrown on the fire in front of me. My daughter was older. They thought she was a boy so they slaughtered her too – they snapped her neck like a chicken. Some of the children they threw down a well …. After they raped the women they cut off their breasts to make them suffer. They used those of us who were left as donkeys.’ Her experience is not unique. Recently too there has been the incident of the little girl kidnapped in Portugal, the tip of an iceberg of the sexual abuse faced by hundreds of thousands of children every day, not to mention the thirty thousand children who daily die of starvation. In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. Surely all this suffering can only be approached with stillness, humility and wisdom of the heart. Not with half-baked metaphysics and denial. It is pure ignorance, shameful and cold-hearted emotional cruelty to suggest that these women and children asked for this destiny, deserved it, chose it or created their own reality. It completely misunderstands karma and the laws of attraction. There is a frequent error of assuming that souls have complete control and choice over their incarnations. New souls entering for the first time, for example, may simply be drawn to where there is a newly conceived fetus. They may have no choice but to participate in the collective rhythm and cycle. There are more dynamics in incarnation than simple choice. Equally we do not create our lives in isolation. We pass through collective historical and karmic events over which we may have little individual power. We are participants as souls and as biological creatures in a constellation of relationships that includes our species, our gender, our family, our ancestors, our ethnicity and faith. Our parents and children, for example, are within us, as we are also within them. We are not just individual souls creating our own individual lives and futures. We are also subjects of the group soul and our histories and futures are entwined. As a species we have created a shared karma of suffering, and it is as a collective that we experience, redeem and heal it. The collective affects even the most forceful individual. The redemption of all this lies in the fact that each of us has the freedom and power to adopt our own inner attitude regardless of circumstances. I am inspired, for example, by the Catholic priests who chose the way of self-sacrifice and walked with their Jewish parishioners into the Nazi gas chambers. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. It is also completely banal and naïve to suggest that everything in God’s world is good and that it is all a matter of perception. Faced with the reality of a three-year old child being sexually abused, it is simply not possible to make such a statement and be moral. It is in facing reality, not denying it, being in our hearts, that we grow and become wiser. At the same time I fully appreciate how difficult it is to be fully present to suffering. For some people it is overwhelming because it triggers their own pain. But sooner or later on the spiritual path we have to develop the courage and strength to stay stable and loving when faced with these horrors. In the words of Carl Jung: One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
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