The Last Barrier to Inner Peace and the Compassion Machine.

I was hospitalized last Thanksgiving Day due to mental illness. That's the official story anyway. I like to think of it as more of a spiritual emergency. I know this is not necessarily a spiritual group, but I wanted to mention it here because my last hospitalization, the first in 15 years, precipitated a spiritual conversion in me that has been the most healing thing to happen to me in my life. It's not about religious dogma. It's just a sense that there is much more to us than ordinary consciousness presents, and that there is a greater force at work in the universe, and it is benevolent.

Now I'll get into my breakthrough- my good news. Changes have been occurring in me rapidly since that last hospitalization. Things are happening that I used to think were impossible. A series of events happened to me over last weekend that brought to fruition a process that was started 25 years ago. Once I tell you what has happened, you may be perplexed as to why it took 25 years to happen, but we are all going as fast as we can in our development. It's really not possible to speed up the process of psychological growth. It simply occurs at the rate that it occurs. We just have to let the process happen and try to hang on in the mean time.

I was at work a couple of nights ago and I began to feel this heavy sense of guilt. It started out in response to something I thought I had done wrong, but once I realized that, the feeling of guilt started to grow in me and become very dense and heavy. I soon realized that this was at the core of my being, and that it was responsible for my psychological troubles. It was an overwhelming, very deep sense of guilt and shame. I felt guilty simply for being me. It was as if the act of simple self-expression produced this guilt.

I began to ponder this as best I could under the circumstances. Where was this guilt coming from? I used to think that the source of my illness might have been pre-verbal in nature, happening to me so early in life that it rendered the possibility of resolution unlikely. But as I looked back, I realized that wasn't the case.

I became angry at my parents when I was 35 and blamed them for all of my troubles. That didn't last for very long. I tried to forgive them and move on as best as I could. More recently I thought of my troubles as karmic in nature, like it was all a part of a plan that stretched back into other lifetimes. I think now that there is an aspect of truth in both views.

My folks divorced when I was 7 years old. It was a traumatic thing for me, and had a lasting impact on my life. Some of my sense of guilt might be rooted in that, but I don't get the sense that that is the totality of it. The greater part of it developed with my relationship with my step-father, whom my mom married when I was 8. He hated my father with a passion, and my step-father not being a very evolved man let his hate boil over onto me. It's the old red-headed step-child syndrome. I look very much like my father, of course, and have no resemblance to my step-father. And with my step-father being a shallow person, that certainly did not help matters. He made me feel terrible growing up- simply worthless. It was as if I did not deserve to exist, and by doing so my very presence was a matter of guilt.

My relationship with my step-father didn't register in my consciousness back when I was 35. Back then, I looked strictly at traumatic events, not an over-arching pattern of behavior that lasted many years. Traumatic events are bad enough, but when you are consistently treated poorly over a long period of time, I think it has a greater impact on psychological health.

So at 45 I finally realized why I felt so terrible and guilty about myself, to the point that it hobbled the very act of self-expression. My mode of being was to feel unworthy. That's the baseline emotion.

Now I am going to run this through my compassion machine. My step-father had a rough early life. His family was poor when he was growing up, and his mother was a mean person. That, no doubt, affected his relationship with me. I also believe that this is all a part of a greater plan that was conceived before either one of us came into this world based on past life experiences. That is, there is also a karmic element. The roles may well have been reversed in previous lives.

I think this is the breakthrough I've needed ever since I was 20 years old. The old negative thought patterns are starting to unravel, and in their place there is developing an abiding sense of peace. Bless you, my friends, and I hope you can find peace as well.