Now what we are doing now?

Insanity rules many of the institutions of the world; that includes university departments that teach psychotherapy degrees and get lost in their petty insecure ego arguments while pertaining to be places where sanity is championed. The important thing to master is this: people can outright abuse us, but we must learn to see it as cry for love, and not judge, but instead practice forgiveness, for our own healing and corrections of misperception in this world of illusions.

"You look for permanence in the impermanent, for love where there is none, for safety in the midst of danger; immortality within the darkness of the dream of death. Who could succeed where contradiction is the setting of his searching, and the place to which he comes to find stability?"

In the Psychotherapy department at the University of Edgehill the professors were swept up in their activism and insecurity, which manifested as attacks on free speech and malicious projections.  They said they were focused on ending the victim mind. What they were doing was the complete opposite of this. What they were really teaching was weaponised false victimhood based on gender, race etc. The question was asked about how to create "safety in the group." Nathan inputed that safety is the child of ending attack and defence thoughts. This is indisputable. But insecurity ran the affairs at the university and that insecurity dominated like a runaway train. The ego, whether it's an academic ego, a spiritual ego or a normal ego, loves scapegoats and justification of wrath; this was no different with the academics and students that formed their crucifying mob. This is a common problem in a world that is stuck on the surface of the mind. All Nathan could do was walk away and file complaints against a corrupt administration. The complaints process continues to this day. 

A Story from Iran

It was an autumn Tuesday. The day had not broken yet. Samereh stood outside the gates of Nour prison, in a strange and suffocating darkness, among the crowd. She hadn’t slept last night. Neither had her entire family. Balal was to be hanged before the daybreak. Balal, the one who had stabbed her son Abdollah to death.Both were 18. They were friends. For years, they played football most evenings in Iran's northern Mazandaran village, by the Caspian Sea. 

One evening. One sudden brawl. A tiny mad moment. Balal stabbed Abdollah. 

As Balal's execution date drew nearer, Abdullah began appearing to his mother in a series of vivid dreams. The boy in the dream was asking his mom not to take revenge. Two nights before Balal’s execution, her son appeared again in Samerah’s dream. This time he just stood looking at her, refusing to speak. In that strange hour of the day, the prison guards hooked a rope around Balal's neck. He was made to stand on a chair blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back. Iran's law allowed Samerah, the victim’s heir, to kick the chair away. An Iranian mullah read from the Qur'an. Then they looked at Samerah. Standing on the chair with noose on his neck, Balal wept out: "Please forgive me, at least for the sake of my mum and dad.”

Samerah’s youngest son had died in a motorbike accident when he was 11. She was mad at God. She was mad at men. She was mad at the whole big world. Samerah, weeping, shouted back at Balal. “How can I forgive, did you show mercy to my son?" Balal fell quiet. As the crowd watched in anguish, suddenly, Samerah clambered up on another stool and slapped Balal across the face and climbed down bursting into a flood of tears. Then she did something that astonished the whole land of Iran. She called out for her husband and simply said to remove the noose from Balal’s neck. In moments, the rope from Balal's neck was untied and the boy was officially declared pardoned. Balal's mother Kobra, weeping madly, fell on Samerah’s feet and kissed them. The Guardian reports: “Arash Khamoushi, a photographer for Iranian news agency Isna, captured the extraordinary scene in a series of pictures that flooded internet sites, newspapers and television sets across the world. Among the most poignant images is of the mothers, facing each other for the first time, holding one another in their arms.” Then Samerah and her husband drove to the cemetery where Abdollah was buried. She knelt at the grave and wept away her grief and thanked him for appearing in her dream with his request to pardon his killer. 

“Identify with love, and you are safe,” says the same voice of Love in ‘A Course in Miracles’.

“It is sin’s unreality that makes forgiveness natural and wholly sane, a deep relief to those who offer it; a quiet blessing where it is received. It does not countenance illusions, but collects them lightly, with a little laugh, and gently lays them at the feet of truth. And there they disappear entirely.”  'A Course in Miracles'.

"The more something upsets you, the more it is meant for you. When it no longer upsets you, it is no longer needed because its lesson is complete."
Bryant McGill

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