Republished © Stuart Wilde 2004 – Note from CJWild: This is a Stuart Wilde article and the views expressed in the text are not necessarily my own.

Some people don’t need redemption, they believe they are perfect. The rest of us need as much redemption and forgiveness as we can get our podgy little hands on. But in order to have forgiveness and acceptance you need to offer it to others. If you can’t, then you’re stuck. Often the hurt you felt was just people acting in a different way to the way you decreed. Their crime wasn’t really a crime, they just contradicted your ego and went the other way. Or their crime was a crime and they ripped you off but if you get stuck on it you never evolve. 

It’s vital to go past the old stuff because it just that — old. It was were you found yourself in the past. Your energy was lower, you were less evolved, and things happened. The idea that one person is guilty and another innocent is an old fashioned way of seeing light and dark. Nowadays we know everyone is a shade of grey. The innocent are partly responsible, the guilty might have been provoked and so forth. If you got ripped off why did you pull that person and those circumstances into your life? That is the question and that is the lesson to be learned. 

We are all moving to a new higher way of thinking and to do so the old has to fall away. If like me you have been beaten up mercilessly in this life time; if you have faced a solid wall of antagonistic forces, like I have; you will know how extraordinary mercy feels — the gift of it. Well, the war against the ghouls is over, we’ve won! You can have your respite, your mercy, your second chance; you deserve it, because you held fast. But first, what mercy will you now offer? We have to accept the world and love them as we find them, as we wish to be loved and accepted unconditionally as well. 

That doesn’t mean you have to condone criminality or vote for the warring party, those are larger issues. But on a personal level don’t judge people. Allow the heroin addict to shoot heroin, he might be scared or sick or both. Have compassion for his humanity. Allow the ugly neighbor to be ugly, allow the demented boss to be demented, allow your “ex” to be who they are. Let them go, you didn’t want them anyway.

Offering acceptance is a spiritual exercise, it allows you to open your heart and become more god-like. While you hold people into your anger, you trap yourself not them. You tell all the cells in your body, please pretend to be angry, I need it to feel important and get attention, so the cells do as you wish. Many deadly diseases come from untreated anger, and the root of many fatal accidents goes back to unprocessed anger. The tree is innocent; whacking it at seventy miles an hour is not a recommended anger management technique.

My old teacher used to say, “tolerate everything and keep skimming the lake” — meaning, don’t make a fuss, and keep cleaning up your life and your body. Stay healthy by staying clean. The clutter of hatred and emotion is black mud in you soul. Time to get rid of it, especially now. I’ve said elsewhere in my articles the shadow of the world is just about to be exposed, it’s already happening. If you offer forgiveness and acceptance to others you are offering it to your own shadow and when it comes out it will be less fierce.

The attack of the collective shadow is in the process of happening, and while it may be falsely represented as the attack of unreasonable outside forces on the innocent, that is just the old lack of comprehension once more; it’s always your own shadow coming after you. It may look like someone else is to blame and that you are innocent but that is hooey, its you attacking you, it’s the evil of a nation attacking the heart of the nation, its the arrogance of the collective national ego that is being humbled by collective shadow.

Your shadow needs love and attention, it wants to be brought out of hiding and be redeemed. If you can’t offer it love and acceptance and reconciliation, it will try and kill you, or it will torment you to a standstill. If you don’t come to understand it, your lack of mercy and forgiveness and acceptance of others will hurt you and cause you great pain. It might be doing so already just you don’t yet understand how it’s turning to eat you.

You think you are fighting with your nasty neighbor but in effect you are fighting with the nastiness inside you. It’s quite hard to understand at first, you’ve been taught you are right and innocent and squeaky clean, but that may not be the case. In fact, the more you are on your high horse, the more squeaky clean you pretend to be, the more darkness you are hiding, that is always the case.

Forgive everyone that comes into your life and accept them, make them “right” no matter who they are, and what they have done. Forget their crimes, love them anyway. In love and acceptance you liberate yourself from a world — a population that is doomed by their antagonism and hatred of others. Clean up and get ready to move on up the line to safety. Remember, you don’t have to condone a person’s actions in order to love and accept them as a human. One day the whole of your life will seem trivial, your achievements will mean nothing. All that will matter is did you love humanity, did you adore them? How did you treat others? Were you honest and fair? What did you really feel about them? What did you do for them? 

This, and the sound of water, is all that is left behind at the very end of it all. Nothing else.