Exceprt from Truth: Letting Go by Shaman Ross Bishop

Letting Go

By Ross Bishop

"When Mansur al-hallaj, the great Sufi mystic, was about to be tortured and crucified as Jesus was, he is said to have uttered this prayer, "O Lord, if you had revealed to them what you have revealed to me, they would not be doing this to me. If you had not revealed to me what you have, this would not be happening to me. O Lord, praise thee and thy works."

When it comes to really letting go, you're probably pretty reluctant. The Creator is asking you to play in his orchestra and you're afraid that you don't play well enough to sit in. You're worried about whether or not you measure up and you are afraid that you don't or won't or can't. After all, look at your life. It is a series of failures and marginal successes. You have compromised away your deepest inner desires, you are not happy and you blame yourself for your failings. If you let go you will put your feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy to the test and you are afraid that you will be found wanting. After all, then what would you do?

You don't realize it, but everyone else in the orchestra is struggling to play well too. But of course, that really doesn't matter. When your security gets put on the line, nothing else matters. Issues of worthiness do not respond to the truth or to life experience. The thing is, of course you don't play well enough! If you did you wouldn't be here! That is what you have come to earth to learn about. This is a learning environment.

We confuse the things we do not do well with personal inadequacy. We assume that because we can't, we won't, and that we are therefore defective. This is the essence of the human condition at this stage in our evolution. It is also an expression of the dynamics of the ego, and speaks to the present level of our development in the evolutionary process.

In this chapter, we will investigate our reluctance to let go to life and the fears that support it. We will study where that reluctance originates and how it operates. We will look at flying free and why that prospect is frightening. We will see how the experiences of childhood shape and determine our fears, anxieties, lack of trust and the resistance to taking risks. We will also investigate how childhood is shaped by unresolved past life experiences. We will study the idea of differences and boundaries between things and ideas and how those get caught up in our ego process.

It is difficult to see the challenges put before us for what they are - transformative opportunities. Your soul has designed a perfect program for you. That program is called life. It is a training process designed to challenge the feelings of inadequacy you carry, help you to transcend fear and move you towards opening your heart. In the process it will also move you to profound levels of awareness.

When we function through fear and ego, we operate from a defensive posture. We make ourselves small. We see life as a series of challenges to our worthiness, and we naturally become concerned about how well we measure up. We act as though someone were watching us and grading our performance. But of course, that is what we have been taught! Remember the pictures of St. Peter at the pearly gates with the Book of Life, into which all your sins had been recorded?

First, the Old Testament is filled with stories of an angry God who went around smiting things, turning people into salt and in general judging and punishing. This was a God who sat in judgment and condemned people to hell. The confusion originates because there is a powerful dark being that masquerades very convincingly as God. Over the years he has convinced a great many people that he is the real thing. This is why God can seem to be uncaring and even cruel. This false God can be found in much of the Old Testament, but this simply is not the real thing. God does not operate as depicted in some of the old texts. He may allow chaos, suffering and cruelty but only and always to teach, never to punish.

Secondly, God is not a being separate from us; He is within each of us. You are an extension of the greater God consciousness and can no more be unworthy than God itself. He can no more condemn you than He can condemn himself! The Creator does not make unworthy or bad people any more than He makes good trees or bad trees or good frogs and bad frogs. He just makes people, trees and frogs. Sometimes people do hurtful things, but that is a different matter, and we will discuss that later. Some religions have institutionalized the concepts of unworthiness and sin and have done a great disservice to humanity, and to the Creator.

God looks at life as a series of opportunities to create greater awareness: no judgment, no report card, no big book into which all our sins are recorded, no St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. If we could accept that one single, simple concept, life on earth would become vastly easier.

Look at human life from the Creator's perspective for a moment. Our enlightenment is very important. Each of us will make a significant contribution to the development of the collective God-consciousness. Our discomfort, our pain, is a feedback system designed to make us aware of our resistance. And as painful and difficult as it might be to accept, it is a relatively small price to pay for the lessons it brings and for the achievement of our enlightenment. He does not create pain. We do that with our resistance. Your pain will vanish when you leave the body. What will remain is the spiritual growth you will have found. We create lifetime after lifetime as we need them, so what's the loss? A dose of pain and discomfort on the way to enlightenment is not only an acceptable price, as we shall see later, it is a necessary one.

Enlightenment and the transition necessary to drive it does not come from perfume and roses. In the initial stages, our learning is created from the pain, agony and despair of our "failures." These are the events that create the raw material and power for our transformation. Each painful experience builds within us a greater resource for transformation because the only thing in life that you can be certain of are the things that you actually experience. And these particular experiences have the juice, the intensity, to make change possible. Also, the most powerful way to comprehend something is to experience its opposite. That is why we learn so much more from our failures than from our successes.
As we move away from our dependence on fear and ego, the experience of the process becomes much more gentle and nurturing. I do not believe that the process itself changes, but rather that we begin to move more in harmony with it and therefore things get a great deal easier. Another way to say this is that we move to higher levels of awareness where there is greater harmony. As we progress further toward enlightenment, peace and joy become our greatest teachers replacing fear and ego.

It is sometimes confusing to people that their past lives are not a cumulative collection of skills and confidences that build toward a more accomplished or enlightened individual. This discussion could fill a book by itself, but let me simply say that the process of the Age of Karma was not intended to be about the development of skills or learning in the classical sense. It was about the generation of karmic energy and feelings of shame and unworthiness so that we would feel separated from the Creator. Now that we have completed that era, the process can move in a different direction. The Age of Awakening will be about the development of greater levels of self-awareness.

Our soul uses the ego-based wounding from the past to create friction in this life so that our beliefs, especially the negative ones, will be exposed. And because these beliefs do not reside in the truth, they must eventually be seen for what they are. The conflict between our beliefs and the God-space can then be resolved, releasing contracted energy that we have held for centuries. In the process, we also significantly increase our self-awareness.

Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth Through Time, (Harper & Row: New York, N.Y., 1990) p. 186. Sukie Colegrave, By Way of Pain: A Passage Into Self, (Inner Traditions, Ltd. 1989, (out of print).