Into The Mystery Podcast Ep. 11: Self Betrayal

We can betray the true Self in many ways, both consciously and unconsciously. As the spiritual Awakening process unfolds, we are called to identify and heal parts of ourselves that we have abandoned in our quest for love, safety, and belonging in the physical world. Doing so is not for the faint of heart, for it requires deep inner work and a fearless ability to shine light into our own darkness. But once that darkness is illuminated, what we may discover instead is an unshakable Truth.

Transcript

This week on Into the Mystery we're talking about self-betrayal.

It's a concept that many of us will encounter in the course of our awakening work as we begin to identify and heal the many places that we have directed our loyalty away from our divine true nature in order to align ourselves with people,

Societies,

And concepts outside of ourselves.

It involves some deep inner work,

Which we'll talk about,

And we hope you enjoy.

Well maybe we start with the idea that self-betrayal is sort of the state that we are by default in before we embark on a spiritual path.

I mean if we're raised in the world,

If we're devoted to the things that the world has shown us to be,

You know,

That it holds valuable and we have dedicated ourselves to pursuing those things and use them to reinforce our sense of who we are,

Then automatically we've betrayed our divine true nature.

Yeah I would say that we,

In upholding consensus reality through our mind,

Through our actions,

Through our perceptions,

Through our desires,

Through our fears,

There's a latent self-betrayal that's happening that we're relatively unaware of.

Yeah,

It comes as kind of a shock in the course of our work on the path when we finally do begin to see the ways that we've abandoned ourselves and betrayed ourselves.

At a certain point along the way we become aware of this essential self-betrayal that has been an underpinning of our experience from very,

Very early on.

So it reveals itself at a certain point.

Yeah,

It's something that you know on some level that you're doing or that is there.

I mean it's kind of always lingering in the background as we feel the impulse,

You know,

That inner drive and that inner longing to try and discover who we truly are,

You know,

What our true identity is.

It's almost palpable that there's something that holds us back from that.

And for me at least that had to do with sort of participating in,

As you say,

You know,

Perceptions of consensus reality that didn't ring true and yet everybody around me was doing it.

And you know this drive for career or fame or money or whatever your particular preoccupation happens to be or you know certain behaviors that are expected by your social circle or your family.

The adherence to those things where it diverges from what you know God would have us do,

That creates that kind of inner tension,

That kind of conflict that I think eventually becomes so uncomfortable that it almost propels you onto the path when the opportunity presents itself.

I think it can if we're astute enough to realize it.

I mean I remember sitting around a table with a group of teenage guys and I must have been 17 and there was a lot of talk that I just didn't agree with.

The sort of attitude that was being,

Well in this case it was a disrespect toward women in the way it was being spoken and I had this very clear moment that stood out and said,

�This isn't right.

� And it wasn't like,

It wasn't so much the material of what was being spoken but the general atmosphere that I was involved with and it felt gross,

It felt bad.

This is not what life is,

This is not what true relationship is,

This is not what true communication was and it was enough to propel me to quit those relationships entirely and seek out something much more authentic.

Now that's obviously a very sort of adolescent version of coming to this awareness but yeah,

It's like at a certain point we wake up,

We snap out of whatever mode of being that we have taken up that just isn't truthful,

It's not real.

I think adolescence is a critical time for that conflict to kind of come to a head because as a kid we just love everybody.

As a young child until the world has taught us differently,

At least I think most kids,

This was my experience,

Everything is exciting,

Everything is new,

Unless you have a reason to dislike or distrust somebody you just kind of automatically love them and then gradually experiences begin to teach us that the world is not always so welcoming of that or so supportive of that.

Adolescence is that point where we're kind of balancing between the innocence of childhood and the,

I don't want to say jadedness,

But we're becoming informed as more adult humans in the world and those things have to be resolved.

Which way are you going to go?

Are you going to choose to remain aligned with this view of the child as life being a place to express love and excitement and enthusiasm for things or are you going to get cynical?

Are you going to become a mean girl or a boy who misperceives women as an object?

It seems to me that cynicism is actually an improvement upon the naiveness of a child,

But it's not a good place to end because in some ways cynicism is the result of being disillusioned with the world as we thought it was,

The idealistic version of the world that we imagine or hope for as children.

It's inevitable that we're going to at least taste some cynicism for the loss of that idealistic version of reality and yet if we stop there,

The rest of our life is marked by an endless striving to find meaning where there isn't any.

I think there's a call and this is the call that understanding our self-betrayal points to.

It's a call of a return to innocence,

But with the maturity of the adult and not the naive disposition of the child.

It seems to me that cynicism,

And I remember being very cynical as a young adult,

Cynicism kind of arises as a response or a backlash to the naivete of childhood because after you reach a point in your life where you're not being sheltered from the world anymore by your parents or teachers and begin to see some of the ugliness that exists out there,

There is not only a sense of having been duped in some way,

But this need to protect yourself from further disappointment.

I think that's kind of where cynicism becomes this shield between the tenderness and sensitivity of the child and trying to fend off anything that might be coming at you from a world that's not necessarily kind.

Yeah,

And there's the self-betrayal.

When I refuse the innocence and tenderness of my own heart and cover it over with shields and protections and armoring,

That's the self-betrayal.

We move away from that intrinsic heart and core of absolute love and generosity and innocence into this place of being hard,

Cold,

Distant,

Removed,

Avoidant,

At war with.

Yeah,

Competitive with.

And of course at that age,

As you're moving into young adulthood,

You're beginning to embark on relationships and then we get into that whole dating,

Sort of jousting thing that people tend to do where you're simultaneously trying to approach and yet protect yourself from another human ever being able to find you.

It doesn't work so well,

Does it?

No,

It doesn't work well at all,

But it takes a long time to see that there is an alternative to that.

So we either don't,

I mean just speaking for myself either,

Speaking as someone who's done a lot of preemptive rejecting of people so that they couldn't reject me first,

We kind of set up situations where we can have the trappings of love without the risk,

Without the exposure.

And that's a self-betrayal because that is preventing us from experiencing the love that actually is available in a real open,

Vulnerable,

Mutually supportive relationship.

Yeah,

That's what's difficult is that we don't think of it as a self-betrayal,

We think of it as protection and until that bubble has been burst,

Let's say,

It's not available to our conscious awareness that we're actually in a state of betraying ourselves.

We actually think that we're on our side protecting ourselves and yet it's the deepest form of betrayal.

Yeah,

The ego is like,

Yeah,

I'm killing it over here,

Like I'm in control.

Maybe I said this before,

But Gangaji said it so brilliantly.

She said,

In order to prevent having our heart broken,

We live in a state of brokenheartedness and that protection is,

It seems to prevent brokenheartedness.

It seems to keep us sheltered from hardship and war and violence and being taken advantage of,

But that protection comes at a cost and it's the cost of losing our innocent,

Pure heart.

A lot of what I later saw to be ways that I betrayed myself had to do with expectations and dynamics that were foisted upon me.

That's a strong word.

I don't want to imply that I'm not taking responsibility for participating in it,

But were kind of taught to me by my family of origin,

Which was a very shame-based,

Manipulative,

Performative group of people who did not know how to connect from the heart.

There was not a lot of vulnerability and or honest giving and receiving of affection in my family.

It was all very much about appearances and the ways that you proved your worth and loveability by performing certain tasks for each other.

I just remember the sense underneath that it didn't have to be that way.

There was something raging inside me that said,

This is wrong.

I couldn't have articulated this to you at the time,

But just this feeling that I was supporting some system that was just so backwards or upside down from what reality should have been.

Because it was empty,

And it was toxic,

And there was not a lot of love in it.

There was just this emotional maintenance of what seemed like the household equilibrium.

Well,

Let's appreciate for the moment the predicament that a child is in when they can sense something isn't right,

Something isn't true,

And yet they have very little power or authority to execute that knowing in a way that is effective.

Maybe we're all children of society in that way,

Where we're surrounded by consensus values and we feel powerless to do anything about them.

Of course,

We're not powerless,

But our predicament is such that we feel like our only – as a child would feel – we feel like our only opportunity or our only possibility is to betray ourselves so that we can get along,

So that we don't get beat up,

So that we don't get harmed by our parents or our society.

That's the betrayal.

This feeling like we can't be true and we can't honor that knowing which knows something isn't right here.

So,

What's our alternative but to turn against ourself?

You can see just in society in general,

There's this sort of atmosphere of,

You know,

Don't be too weird.

Don't get too – don't color outside the lines too far.

Here's your lane.

Stay in it and obey these rules,

Except that nobody ever really tells you what the rules are.

So,

If you're somebody like me and I'm an Enneagram Five,

So it's like we have to know everything because we were never told what the rules were in childhood.

I mean,

Books and books,

Hundreds of self-help books have been written to kind of explain why things are the way they are from a million different perspectives.

I think that just demonstrates our hunger for,

Like,

How am I supposed to be in the world?

Because we've been taught not to trust the way we want to be from inside,

But the feedback we're getting from the people outside.

When those things are in conflict,

You know,

It creates a chaotic internal state as well.

So,

It's not just the world or your family atmosphere that's chaotic that you're having to deal with,

But the turmoil and the inner tension that that generates.

Yeah,

Well,

It's to be expected in a world that is increasingly disconnected from spirit and spiritual values and virtues because the more we depart from that,

The more arbitrary these lessons become.

It becomes more and more obscure as to what is the proper mode of being.

What is the way to live in this world properly?

And it starts becoming a make-it-up-yourself journey.

And we sort of,

In our modern society,

We tend to believe very strongly in this.

But there is a proper mode of being,

And if we don't adhere to it and we betray it,

There's an immense price that we pay in our heart for that.

And we often,

You know,

What we do in our betrayals,

We look to the world for different models.

I mean,

Take for example,

A person who enters a university and is looking for how to develop themselves and live in the world in a way that is proper and true and upright and solid and has integrity,

And yet the values that are given by the university don't teach that at all.

Not at all.

Right?

And so,

A person leaves the university,

Which is this very important transitional point between childhood and adolescence and mature adulthood with nothing empty-handed,

But a new set of ways to betray oneself,

In essence.

So one thing I wanted to talk more about was the ways that we betray ourselves.

We've talked a lot about self-betrayal and why it happens,

But we haven't really dived into what that looks like.

There's so many ways that we do this.

We can betray ourselves on behalf of another person,

And I think that's maybe the most common thing to do,

But we also do it,

As we discussed earlier,

In order to fit in with a group,

Into a collective.

There are several layers here to this,

Because there are the self-betrayals that go on with the people around us,

And there are subtler forms of self-betrayal that go on solely within us.

When it comes to talking about techniques for self-betrayal,

This is where I like to talk about the Enneagram,

Because one way of viewing the Enneagram would be to say that they are nine different forms of self-betrayal.

And so you can sort of look at self-betrayal through the lens of the Enneagram and see how self-betrayal happens for each type.

Because each one is an essential betrayal of some core part of ourselves,

And that betrayal of that core part of ourselves manifests in a specific form of behavior.

I wonder if we should explain,

For people who aren't familiar with Enneagram,

Just very quickly,

It's a sort of a personality survey.

I've heard you refer to it as spiritual psychology,

And it divides us into nine personality types with a variety of traits and psychological habits through which we view the world and interact with it.

And I think what I hear you talking about here is that each one of those nine,

It has a holy idea associated with it,

A particular aspect of divinity that's been distorted where it would otherwise have been expressed purely.

And so I think maybe in a sense that's the betrayal we're talking about.

Yeah,

I think so.

That's pretty accurate.

And I would add to your explanation that not only are the Enneagram types representative of our personality,

I would say it goes a little bit deeper because our personalities,

Even two personalities of the same type can be very different.

So I'd say that the Enneagram addresses also our core fixations and our core delusions that feed into our personality.

And I think that gets a little bit closer to what you're talking about,

Which is that turning away from certain deeper dimensions,

The holy ideas within ourselves.

In that betrayal,

We come up with a replacement strategy,

A compensation for the loss of that part of ourselves and that's a betrayal at a very deep level.

Can you give an example from one of the types?

Like for example,

I know you're a combination of four and five,

Correct?

Well,

Yeah.

I mean,

I identify primarily as five.

So for a five,

The way I might say this is that there's an aspect of our divine nature,

Which is essentially pure knowing and sometimes we refer to that as omniscience.

It's pure knowing and it's clear and it's transparent.

And the way that gets distorted is that when we lose touch with that clear knowing that is innate and intrinsic to our divine nature,

We gradually replace that with the intellectual formations,

The mind of knowledge,

The mind of information.

And so we learn to fill that gap,

That hole with information and intellectual knowledge,

Philosophical understanding and of course,

It can be very useful in certain spheres of life but it doesn't actually replace that core knowing.

So there's a betrayal that goes on in that.

There's a betrayal of the inner knowing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

As a fellow five,

See now I always thought you were four,

So I'm surprised to hear you say that.

But as a fellow five,

Yeah,

I can see where at least from my own experience,

The self-betrayal comes in because I sought knowledge outside of myself and relied on that as a sort of a guide or something that I trusted to show me how to be in the world or to give me even an advantage over other people in the world rather than relying on the inner knowing that each of us has.

And that over-reliance on outside knowledge kind of blocked me from feeling other truths that were available to me.

So in that sense,

I ignored the God within,

Betrayed the divine nature within in favor of something of the world,

Something man-made,

Especially when we both had our atheistic phases in our lives.

And that was the thing that I relied upon when I was denying God entirely,

Like consciously and thinking that that made more sense because I could point to things in books or I could point to something that science had come up with and said,

Well,

That can be proved.

And therefore,

Anything that I'm feeling within me that's contradicting that is not to be trusted,

Which is exactly the opposite of what we would do if we were not betraying ourselves.

Yes.

There's two things you said there that I would love to maybe unfold together,

Which one is trust.

You said trust because I think that if you look at the mechanics of self-betrayal,

One of the ways that it happens is that it happens through where we point our trust.

And in self-betrayal,

We learn to point our trust away from ourselves,

Whether it's to somebody else's opinion or somebody else's understanding or somebody else's assessment.

And in that,

There's a loss of the trust in the core.

And I think that's a very important thing to talk about when it comes to betrayal.

And the second,

Which is related to that,

Is what occurred to me as you were speaking is that our betrayal of self,

We betray God,

But God is not the one who's hurt and offended by the betrayal.

We are.

We are.

And that's a very difficult thing to understand because I think in a lot of religious understanding,

There's a subtle notion that if we betray our divine nature,

If we betray God,

That somehow God is offended.

But it's not God that's offended.

And this is why we can speak about self-betrayal and the betrayal of God as one and the same.

Well the Course in Miracles makes that clear over and over again that God is beyond our nonsense as humans.

We are always loved and always forgiven for our mistakes.

I mean that's just another level of self-betrayal then to imagine that God would be offended or that we wouldn't somehow lose the love or be deserving of punishment,

For example.

Which is a strategy that religions sometimes use to enforce behavioral standards.

And it's possible that we end up on either side of that in our betrayal,

That we end up on the side of punisher or punished,

Oppressed or oppressor.

Yeah.

Either one is a betrayal.

I love something you said last week.

You said that ending self-betrayal requires us,

Quote,

Confronting this belief that we are responsible to the people who are tyrannizing us.

And if we're speaking purely about something like a relationship or a family situation,

There's this loyalty to things like narrative and structure that we think we're beholden to and that we're somehow being nourished by as a reward for our self-betrayal.

I don't know how many movies of the week I watched in my early life that sort of was based on a theme where there was some rift between a parent and child or brothers or something and then it was ultimately healed by the end of the 90 minutes.

And you know,

I saw myself over time incorporating those same sort of dynamics into my own experience where I would allow people,

I would even cling to people who were not good to me in ways that I was fully aware of but could not really like admit to myself and would continue to hurt myself because I thought I was getting the narrative that was required or I was getting some unspoken benefit that was just assumed as a result of being part of the system.

And a big hurdle in my journey was looking at that directly and seeing where I was actually kind of attacking myself in that way or hiding from myself in that way because I thought I was applying or acquiring something quote-unquote good in my life or being part of something that was sustaining when it was absolutely the opposite.

And that was kind of devastating when I first recognized it.

It really,

Really hurt.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

I mean,

Self-betrayal hurts.

It hurts and it doesn't hurt in a way that it hurts to take on some formidable task that's meaningful and worthwhile and that you would die for.

It's a different kind of hurt.

It's the ache of having turned away from yourself and having turned away from God.

And there again,

You used the word loyalty as you were speaking and that points to trust.

The question is what are we pointing our trust at?

Are we pointing our trust in the approval of someone who's abusing us?

Are we pointing our trust in being acceptable in the eyes of society?

Where are we placing our trust?

And I think it could be misleading here in thinking,

Well,

We should only trust ourselves.

And that's not what I'm implying.

But what I am implying is that there's a lot of things that we end up being loyal to that don't deserve our loyalty.

Whether they are people,

Movements,

Ideologies,

Ways of being,

Whatever they may be,

We end up being loyal to those things and they hurt us.

They hurt us.

So once we identify that,

Once we identify a situation where we begin to understand that it's toxic,

That it's not in service of our true nature.

I don't know if service is the word I want to because I don't want to imply that we're only looking for situations that can benefit us in some way.

That's not always.

.

.

Yeah,

That's a good clarification to make,

Yeah.

Yeah,

That's not always what we're about.

But you know,

And some situations that are difficult are actually good for us because we're learning how to be true to our nature in them.

But at the same time,

I think there are some skills and there are some ways of being true to ourselves that as we strengthen them over time,

Give us more of an ability to stand sovereign in the face of a system or a person or a collective or whatever happens to be coming at us that would co-opt our loyalty in a way that's not true.

I love what you just said.

Oh,

Thank you.

Tell me more.

Well,

Sovereignty.

Let's look at sovereignty not in the way that one might interpret that as self-contained,

Isolated,

You know,

Volition and will,

But sovereignty and walking with God,

Walking with love,

Walking with truth,

Walking with peace.

And if we look at sovereignty through that lens,

That's the opposite of self-betrayal,

To walk with true sovereignty.

Right,

Right.

To be able to stand with a whole army firing at you and understand that you can't be harmed because you're in your truth.

And I was thinking as I first started talking about this,

I was thinking of course of Jesus being able to stand in his truth regardless of what they threatened him with or regardless of what they promised him and ultimately did to him and never wavering because he knew he had not self-betrayed.

Yes,

And that's the Christ-like logos.

That's the Christ-like way of being and many of those who followed him followed the same pattern of standing for the truth to the point of being killed for it.

Or even of Al-Hilaj Mansour who was a Sufi who basically went out into public and he said,

I am the truth.

I am the truth.

He had realized his God nature and he was told,

You better take that back or we're going to do something bad to you.

And they cut his head off.

They cut his head off.

I wasn't familiar with that story.

But here's an example,

He's venerated as a martyr and a saint because here's a person who realized his inner God nature and refused to betray it.

Refused to betray it even if that meant death.

I was thinking about this the other day,

The way societies sometimes seem to save their most horrible punishments for those who pose them absolutely no threat.

Yeah,

Well,

This is why we have to understand that I'm going to say a very powerful thing here and it deserves probably its own episode,

Society is evil.

Oh,

Yeah.

Same one.

Well,

Look at what happens to those who do good.

Look at what happens to all those who are possessed by love and prophecy and beauty.

In this world,

In this society that we live in,

You are rewarded for being a liar.

You are rewarded for being deceptive.

I think a lot of that comes from,

As we spoke earlier,

The inability to accept one's inner darkness and if you haven't accepted it,

You tend to project it onto another and when another stands there in front of you and says,

I am truth,

You're like,

No,

That can't be true.

You're evil.

You've got to,

You know?

There's this inability to,

If you're not,

If you haven't accepted yourself fully,

If you haven't done your inner work,

There's almost a resentment at looking someone else who can just stand there naked and say,

I am truth.

You can't harm me.

And it conversely kind of triggers this need to destroy it because it's such like an affront to the ego.

Yeah.

You know,

If we look at self-betrayal as having many levels,

The utmost level of self-betrayal is a tyranny on innocence,

A willing to destroy innocence.

Yeah.

And that's,

I mean,

If we look at,

We can look at that at multiple levels from the innermost where we have this innocence in us,

We have this purity and beauty in us that we trample on and then we do that in our relationships and then we encourage that at a sort of global or societal level as well.

That's like innocence is seen as something to be taken advantage of rather than celebrated.

Yeah.

Do you think that in some way that's a reaction to the ways our own innocence was trampled on as children?

We seek to avenge that in some kind of twisted way.

I think that's part of it.

Yes.

Yeah.

I do.

Yeah.

I think that's part of it.

I think there's something in us that when our own innocence has been betrayed,

We feel the sting and the pain of that and if we don't know how to go in and face that and contend with it and bring light and love to that part of ourselves,

We will project it and that will be projected as attack.

Yeah.

I do think that there's this dynamic of something that we perceived as a weakness in ourselves that we see in others we want to destroy because we think that it harmed us.

Right.

We're always looking for a sort of excuse to somewhere to blame that self-betrayal.

Maybe that's what you could say blame is.

Blame is the displacement of self-betrayal because literally when we really get down to brass tacks,

Nobody can betray you unless you betray yourself.

Yes.

Right?

Yeah,

In that way I have found that doing your inner work and sort of meeting your demons and loving them,

Alchemizing them by loving them or at least shining some light there is it almost gives you a superpower.

You know,

There's a way in which once you understand,

I don't want to say understand,

Okay,

Because that implies too much mind.

This is me being a five again.

Well,

Yeah,

Let's use understand.

That's appropriate.

Okay.

Well,

Once we've come to an equilibrium maybe with them is a good way to say it,

There's nothing to defend anymore.

You know,

There's nothing to attack because you've already realized the vastness of what you are and that you can hold those things without being harmed by them or being harmed as a result of them.

You know,

Your weaknesses,

Your vices.

Your passions.

Yeah.

Passions.

So,

Your weaknesses don't rule you no longer do and once they cease to rule you,

No one else can use them to rule you either.

Right.

Well put.

Yeah,

Exactly.

So,

I mean,

You can see the lure of self-betrayal then.

It's like to take for example,

If you love yourself,

It'll be very difficult for anybody to deceive you by loving you.

Now if you don't love yourself and someone gives you a little praise and a little coddling and tells you how wonderful you are,

You're going to go to sleep.

It's going to hypnotize you,

Which means that if that person has some ulterior motive with you,

It's going to be executed perfectly because you have gone to sleep.

You will have not seen the seduction because when a person who really loves themselves,

They'll be actually suspicious of someone who comes showering praises upon them.

Right.

I mean,

I know to most egos that would sound like perhaps crazy,

But it's true.

It's true because you have no need of that.

It's not feeding anything in you.

So there would be nothing to compel you to betray yourself because of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you don't love yourself and think of yourself as unlovable,

But someone comes bearing that love,

All of a sudden it's like,

Here's this savior come into my life and then I think you become willfully unable to see after that.

I think you don't just sort of passively fall asleep.

There's a part of you that's like,

Oh,

I don't want this to end and so I'm not going to do anything to jeopardize it.

That includes looking at it and seeing it for what it is.

Yeah.

Well,

Therein lies one of our really key ingredients here is that almost all forms of self-betrayal take place out of a deep and desperate desire to be loved.

To be loved.

You said something that I want to follow up on.

We were talking about how hatred and fear represent the absence of God and those are the places in ourselves that we need to shine the light on in order to heal them.

And what you said was love is the alchemical fire.

Yes.

Nothing can remain dark when the alchemical fire of love has been applied.

Just to bring that full circle,

I think we can conclude that if we look at those parts of ourselves that we don't think are lovable,

Maybe our first job is to begin to love them,

Begin to look at them as the abandoned children that we may have been.

Well,

We're first going to have to cut through all the many defenses that we find around such things because we'll often feel quite ashamed about certain parts of our being that we have discarded or turned away from.

And so that's what makes healing self-betrayal so difficult is that we'd like to think that it's just,

Oh,

I've been betraying myself,

I'm going to stop doing that.

Now I love and accept myself and I'm healed.

No,

No.

I mean,

There's going to be an incredible journey into our shame and self-hate and this grotesque turning away from ourselves and toward something else and not even knowing why we've really done that.

And if we're willing to shine the light there and bring that fiery love to those parts of ourselves,

Then there's a good chance we will heal this self-betrayal.

Yeah.

So we can do that through our practice.

And one thing I want to recommend to listeners if you're looking for just a simple practice for helping to heal the things that may come up as you become aware of them,

Because this takes place over a period of years probably for most people.

It's not like you,

As you said,

It's not like you wake up one day and you go,

I'm not going to betray myself anymore and then everything's great.

They will present themselves as appropriate in the unfolding of the ego.

But you recommended to me one time that I burn things up in the heart.

And I have found that to be so valuable.

Any kind of emotion that arises or any kind of part of myself that I suddenly see that I don't want to look at,

I will just visualize exactly that.

You know,

Place it in the heart space and almost as though there's a furnace there and just as I breathe with it,

Allow it to expand and contract.

I've done guided meditations with this and it seems to be really effective,

Not just because that's what those energies naturally do in the heart center,

But because it gives the mind a way to work with things on a level that it can be comfortable with.

Even though ultimately we're relying on grace and so many other aspects of our energetic progression to kind of help us handle these really difficult parts of ourselves.

But just that one visualization has done so much for me and I still use it to this day.

Daishi Yeah,

Absolutely.

Part of the reason why we talk about the heart,

The heart's fire is that on one very deep level,

Self-betrayal can be felt as a sense of rage and rage is like fire.

Deep down we are rageful about having betrayed ourselves and we need some of the energy of that rage to be transmuted into love for this transmutation to take place.

The fire of the heart,

Yeah.

Yeah,

And that's a good point because the power there is so intense.

If you connect to that power and realize in the moment that it can fuel anything.

It doesn't have to be an angry,

Destructive thing,

But it can have that force and do good and send love out and heal.

It's just a matter of what your intention is around it.

Daishi Yeah.

It's like it's why we see that image of Christ where his chest is torn open and the heart is on fire.

It's not surrounded by cotton clouds.

It's on fire.

It's on fire.

It's a fiery heart.

Heather Teys But let us stand in that fire and be transformed.

Daishi Yep.

Well even if we understood our own hell,

Our own hellish nature as the fiery love of God felt from the mistaken point of view.

We put ourselves through hell when we betray ourselves and that hell is actually part of the fire that is there to restore us to ourselves.

Heather Teys Oh,

I love that.

Yeah.

Do you want to read your reading?

Daishi Sure.

Let me say a thing or two about it if I may.

It's really very short and it's something when I first heard it,

It's roomy.

When I first heard it,

I think I had to listen to it about 10 times because this was maybe I don't know,

15 some years ago and I didn't get it right away,

But over the years I think I've got it.

I don't want to explain all of it because I'd actually like just to let the listeners have it and let it seep into their heart.

But one thing I'll say about it is that I think roomy here is touching on sort of from the inside of our self-betrayal,

What the necessity is in us to confront these forces,

Many of which we've spoken of in this podcast,

The forces that support turning away from ourselves,

Whether those are society or school or religion or whatever they may be and the need to sort of turn and face those things.

So it's very short,

But I really like what he says here.

He says,

�When school and mosque and minaret get torn down,

Then dervishes can begin their community.

Not until faithfulness turns to betrayal and betrayal into trust can any human being become part of the truth.

� What I hear him saying here is that our blind faith in the things that we trust in must come to a point of decay.

And when the things that we have pointed our trust and loyalty to begin to decay and we see the fault in our relationships or our schools or our society or our mosque and minaret,

Let's say,

There's a way that that faith and loyalty break down and in that breakdown,

There's a possibility then to really understand where to point our trust.

And I think that's what he's giving us a formula for is to where our trust is properly pointed.

Can you read that one more time just for me?

When school and mosque and minaret get torn down,

Then dervishes can begin their community.

Not until faithfulness turns into betrayal and betrayal into trust can any human being become part of the truth.

I think I get it,

But I can see why you had to read that.

Yeah,

Yeah.

It's a tough one.

It's a tough one and I chose this one because it's a tough one and it means like you have to look from the inside of your betrayal to understand what he's getting out here and the way that that betrayal has always been a loyalty and a trust that has pointed.

I think many of our institutions are responsible for this.

Our schools,

Our mosques and our minarets.

I would agree with that.

That's good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Reviews

Wonderful and timely. This resonated so deeply.

WOW❗️ This is such A GREAT and IMPORTANT TOPIC of discussion! I found it very THOUGHT-PROVOKING and WELL DONE❣️
This is now one of my FAVORITES . 😊🙏🏻💕