A Healing of a Belief in Deprivation and Loss

One of my earliest memories was accompanying my father to his job after supper. I joined him in sweeping out the offices of a local oil company. I saw the look on his face of humiliation touched with bitterness as he emptied wastebaskets and dusted desks. I did not know until much later why those grievous looks appeared on his face. I just knew I didn’t like them.

It was 1933, and America was deep into its economic depression. Some say poverty is a disease; my father certainly thought he was an afflicted victim of it. He saw himself as a skilled artisan, and indeed he was. Before he lost his job with the Pullman Company, he was foreman of a nine-man crew that installed fancy wood inlays in the Pullman car interiors. He had built himself a house in a small Illinois town, prospered, and seemed on the way to a successful life as a skilled craftsman who took great pride in his work. But now he was reduced to being a janitor.

For the Depression had struck and he lost all: his job, his new home, the mortgage which he could no longer pay, and all his carefully garnered assets. Worst of all, he lost his sense of self-respect. A defeated man, he chose to return to the town of his birth to face his parents and siblings. He chose to see himself as a failure, as a victim betrayed by the Puritan God in whom he believed; i.e., a God who blessed with prosperity the faithful, those who worked hard, were pious, and who diligently obeyed the laws laid down by that God. I do not believe he ever recovered from the disillusionment of those beliefs. He thought he had kept his part of the bargain (and bargain was what it was), but his God had not kept his.

Another memory is one of my standing beside my father as he stood in line, waiting to be given a free bag of cornmeal that the government in Washington had sent by boxcar to feed the unemployed. Once again I could feel the shame and humiliation my father felt at being on the dole. I must have been eight years old, and I think it must have been at that moment as I stood with him on that railroad siding that I made the firm decision to do all I could to avoid repeating this same experience in my life. Hence quite early I chose to deeply believe (of course wrongly) that money brought security, self-respect and peace of mind. I listened to the ego’s idea:

You really think you would starve unless you had stacks of green paper strips and piles of metal discs. (ACIM, Workbook, 70, 3:2)

A third memory I have involves stealing those “stacks of green strips.” When in my teens, I got a job to work beside my father on Saturday mornings. So we got up very early to journey to his workplace where he stripped wood furniture with paint remover and refinished the pieces with spray lacquer (again, not the work of a skilled craftsman). The stealing came in this way: we would arrive an hour and a half before other employees, punch the time clock, and then sleep until the other employees arrived. We were thus paid for sleeping. This was my first experience of conscious guilt (and fear as well), for I dared not question my father’s decisions. His anger could be terrifying. (Also I did so much like those extra “piles of metal discs.”)

My final memory concerning the ‘value’ of money came upon my father’s death. For the first thing my mother asked me to do with her after we returned from placing my father’s body in the ground was to go down with her into the basement where my father spent most of his free time. Her intention was to seek hidden monies that she was certain he had withheld from her and stashed somewhere among his tools. Together we tore the place apart, but alas, to her disappointment, we found nothing.

All the above is a preface to the following ego attack that I recently experienced.

* * * * * *

Most of our guilt is unconscious, and in this case it most certainly was. In the last few months I had been feeling especially generous. So much so that I had recently set up educational trusts for my four grandchildren. And I had set up another trust that enabled one of my daughters to maintain and pay the taxes on half of some island property that I was about to give to her and her brother. (Having fibromyalgia, she has been unable to summon much energy to maintain that property herself, nor work with much constancy.) I had also helped another daughter set up a solar/wind electrical system for her home.

I had been feeling good about these matters (a sign I was listening to my right mind). But I had also been concerned about the health of a third daughter who had been ill with walking pneumonia for the past ten or twelve weeks. Since she, lacking the energy, had been unable to work much, I expected a request for money from her. Although I had not been resentful of past requests of help from her, curiously, this time I began to dread her call.

This was a warning sign to me that I was listening to the wrong side of my mind. I made the mistake of not taking this evidence seriously. And not making a correction.

When she called requesting money to pay for her mortgage I replied: “Sure, I’ll drop a check in today’s mail.” However, what next came roaring up from my unconscious (and which I spoke aloud) was the hateful attack: “I guess I’m supporting you too.” Instantly I was stricken with guilt. Where was all that good feeling of generosity now? In place of perceiving her truly, as a daughter I loved, I saw her in that moment as my victimizer, exploiting me.

I knew I had to get to work fast on my insane and hateful mind. So I did what I teach. I chose to look carefully at what I had condemned her for. I saw her as seeking to take from me what I considered mine. I saw her not as loving but exploiting me. This was clearly a twisted and distorted view of her. My mind was in chaos, and my mind was drowning in guilt. In my misery I chose to remember the fourth Law of Chaos:

This seeming law is the belief you have what you have taken. (ACIM T., 23; 9:3)

and

But in a savage world the kind cannot survive, so they must take or be taken from. (Ibid., 10:4)

I also chose to remember:

Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. (ACIM, T, Intro, 21, 1:1,2)

Now I had a way out of my misery. If I saw my daughter as exploiting me (instead of loving), I must be guilty for all my brothers I have exploited. (Projection makes perception.) All that happened in that regrettable moment when I attacked her was the result of failing to heal my mind in the hours of dread prior to her call. It was clear to me now that I must have repressed guilt for using and exploited others. It was so painful to me that I had projected that guilt onto my daughter, hoping to thereby be free of it. (Of course, as events proved, I only increased my guilt—now adding the guilt of hating my daughter. Meanwhile the original guilt remained unforgiven.)

So, again I did what I teach. I remembered: “My sinlessness is guaranteed by God” (ACIM, W-93, 8:3). And remembering all the many ways I had used and exploited my wife for fifty-five years; and remembering all the patients I exploited in the early days of my practice when I was attempting to support a wife and four children in Manhattan (patients whose needs were beyond my competence to deal with, but whom I took because they were a source of income). I lay these events on the altar of my heart and asked to be reminded that “all my sins were forgiven me.”

Immediate relief resulted and in place of the misery of guilt came “light and joy and peace” (Lesson 93). All of the above healing of my mind took under fifteen minutes. So now perceiving my daughter as innocent I called her and said: “I hope you will forgive me for my vicious attack upon you a few minutes ago. I now realize that I was dumping on you my own guilt for exploiting others over my lifetime.”

It turns out I left that on her answering device, for she had not picked up. Later in the day she called me, thanking me for my call. She said it had helped her heal her own mind. She ended the call with the words, “I love you, Dad.” So this story also illustrates the following quote:

And so you let yourself be healed; you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you…you are never healed alone. (Workbook, Lesson 134, 10:1,3).

In retrospect, it occurs to me that it is no coincidence that all this repressed, unhealed guilt arose from my unconscious at the specific time it did, for as it is written:

The ego is therefore particularly likely to attack you when you act lovingly, because it has evaluated you as unloving and you are going against its judgment. The ego will attack your motives as soon as they become clearly out of accord with its perception of you. This is when it will shift abruptly from suspiciousness to viciousness, since its uncertainty is increased. (ACIM, Text, Ch 9, VII, 4:5-7)

That is the ‘bad news’ of course. The ‘good news’ is that every time we make the mistake of listening to that part of our mind, we have another golden opportunity to once again open ourselves to the readily available healing power of forgiveness — a power that is far greater than our guilt can ever be. All that is required of us is to watch our minds carefully and then ask for help from the Source of our innocence. The result is inevitable.

Copyright 2007 Frank West

Decision for Change—A Life or Death Matter

There is an idea that today’s Physics seems to support and it is this — that the idea of linear time is an artifact, an illusion we perceive to be true. There is also a second idea— i.e., that we come into the world at birth with a script we have chosen to live out in this lifetime; also that the pre-written script can be altered by decisions we make in the present ‘instant.’ As my life draws to a close, I’ve come to believe that these ideas are indeed true. By changing our perceptions about ourselves (perceptions that are largely fearful or based on fear), we change our lives accordingly.* I have a personal story that illustrates such a change and it concerns a choice of life over death.

For some forty to fifty years, I have believed that I would die in a particular manner. I had a firmly fixed notion that my end would come in this way: that I would, while sailing alone, fall off my boat while the motor was running, and I would die by drowning as the boat sailed off without me.

Several years ago one cool November day, I was sailing alone on Long Island Sound. No other boats were in sight. The wind had been favorable, but began to diminish. So I decided to lower the sails and return to the marina. I started the motor in order to head the bow into what little wind remained so I could easily lower the sails. I sail a cutter, that is, a boat with three sails (all of which, in this case, could usually be dropped from the cockpit). On this day, however, the middle sail became fouled and was unable to be lowered. Since the seas were now calm, I thought there was nothing dangerous about going forward to the bow for the purpose of freeing the tangled sail so it could be lowered.

What I did not notice was an approaching swell caused by the wake of some large ship that had long ago, some miles away, passed down the Sound. As I bent over to free the sail, the swell lifted myself and the bow high in the air and then dropped us both in an instant. And I landed in the water, just close enough to seize the edge of the deck with one hand.

With horror I remembered my fearful script predicting my certain death in this form. At this point, two of the three factors in that ‘dark dream’** were present. Being November, I was dressed for the cool weather, and my long pants, sweater and windbreaker were all soaked, adding considerable weight to my 200 pounds. When I attempted to pull myself up the three feet of freeboard at the bow, I realized the futility of the idea. It was too high.

Then it occurred to me that midship might be easier—there the lift required was a foot less. But no success there either, despite a determined attempt. Then with relief I remembered a triangular extension just a foot above the water at the stern. It secured the backstay of the mast.

So I worked my way aft, holding to the edge of the deck. With a great deal of effort, I managed to get my body across that extension. But two and a half feet remained before I could be in that cockpit. The motor was running and I had fearful visions of the undirected boat hitting a submerged ledge and tossing me off my perch, again into the water. As it was, I was in such a position that I had purchase to raise myself only by the means of one leg.

By this time I was not only cold but tired. I was in my mid-seventies and waterlogged. But my mind was determined to change the ‘fearful script’ I’d written so long ago. So I prayed aloud for strength from that one leg to lift me the last 30 inches. Where that extra strength came from I do not know. I do know it came, and I tumbled into the cockpit, my knee in pain but my heart beating joyfully. I had decided against death and chosen life. For some 18 months a strained and painful knee was a reminder of that moment.

When I described this incident to my son, some twenty-five years younger than I, he marveled at the feat, saying that he didn’t think that he could have had the strength to do the same thing. I’m convinced that the strength was not my own alone. Rather, the strength to choose life over death — to decide against the script I’d written — came from my mind. For I had decided to align my will with the will of God in that crucial moment.

I gave up my will for death and allied myself with the will for Life. The one evidence I have for this is a thought that accompanied my final burst of energy. It was this thought that saved me — “I have more work to do here; I have more gifts to give the needy world. My purpose is not yet fulfilled! Not my will, but Thine be done.”

* “You wrote a fearful script and are afraid accordingly.” ACIM Text Ch 30, VII, 3:8

** “Your dark dreams are but senseless, isolated scripts you write in sleep.” ACIM Text Ch 30, VII, 6:15

Copyright 2007 Frank West

Beyond This World, There Is A World I Want

I have a memory of being about age 6, playing under the porch in the dirt, making toy roads for my toy autos and trucks. The vivid part of this memory, however, is not the play, not the setting, and not my age. Rather, what fixes this memory in my mind is an idea that crossed my mind during that playful moment. It was: “I do not belong here. I belong somewhere else.” There was no emotion attached to that thought, no self-pity, no loneliness or painful sense of alienation. Just a quiet, somewhat detached observation. Something akin to—“Oh, that’s interesting.”

I don’t think I focused on that idea until much, much later in my life—perhaps the past twenty-five years. And it has returned with an increasingly strong intention to focus my attention on that ‘other world,’ beyond what my eyes see here.

There is, however, another vivid memory I have, and this one occurred some forty years ago. I cannot exactly recall the date, but the context and the experience are crystal clear.

Martha and I had built a modern house in the woods above the Hudson River in the Hudson highlands—Garrison, New York. We had just moved in, having left New York City. I was attending to something or other in the crawl space under the building when the doorbell rang. Martha must have been away shopping at the time, so I ascended the ladder leading from the crawl space to the first floor. As I emerged from below, I glanced toward the front door—a huge glass door that revealed a figure standing looking in. It was a lovely woman holding a bunch of flowers. Our eyes met. I was instantly shocked, frightened and bewildered by what happened next. For an intense blue light, like a brilliant ray, shone from my eyes to hers—or her eyes to mine. I had never had that experience before nor have I had it since. I say I was frightened. My fright came from my ignorance of what that phenomenon really meant. At that time in my life I could only interpret the experience as sexual in origin. Sexual because of its intensity, and the fact that the woman was so beautiful. Only much later was I able to see that it was in reality a vivid experience of that ‘other world.’ It was an intense perception of an inner connection with another person on the deepest of levels. For as I got to know the woman, I discovered how deeply involved she was in the study of spiritual matters.

It turns out that she was a neighbor coming to visit, bringing flowers of greeting to her new neighbors. I never mentioned the blue light to her for the next five or six years, until one evening when a number of friends gathered for dinner. During dinner I said to her: “Do you remember the day when you brought flowers to our house to greet us as new neighbors?” She instantly answered: “You’re going to tell me about the blue light, aren’t you?”

I tell the story for it illustrates the truth, the truth about our purpose for living our lives here. The blue light symbolizes for me the truth that we are all connected on another, deeper level beyond what our eyes customarily see—the truth that we are all joined as one on that level. It is a level free of expectations, demands, judgments, fears and guilt. A level free of neediness, exploitation and attack. A level where “light, joy and peace abide.”* It’s a level I have chosen more often to forget than to remember. But when I do remember, I experience a sense of freedom, and a happiness that is difficult to put into words. And what brings me even more happiness is the thought that we are all capable of this same freedom, this same joy, for we are all the same at the deepest level (despite our many superficial differences in form and appearance).

Copyright 2007 Frank West