Harmful Acts, Law Breaks, Integrity
Procedure for the Cleaning of Relationships
Procedure for the Enhancement of the Responsibility Level
Recommendations and Hints for Successful Mental Training
Confessional -- Acts and Omissions -- Role of the Listener -- Personal Code of Honour -- Cultural Programming and Personal Integrity -- Categories of Reasons for Feelings of Guilt -- Local Laws and Personal Integrity -- Quiet Support -- Personal Learning Process -- Abuse and Violence
In mental training we don't assume - like in the Christian teachings -, that the spiritual being is spoiled by the "original sin" and thus bad by its nature.
Quite the opposite! The spiritual being is basically good. He is ashamed of every negative deed and sub-consciously tries to stop himself from doing something similar again. Even if he has harmed another without intention, he will withold himself even more from there on, in order to make sure that he will not again harm or hurt anybody.
This mechanism is often strongly repressed into the sub-conscious, but it even works in extremely hostile people. On a conscious level they might harm and terrorize others, but sub-consciously they work against themselves - or better, against their evil intentions. They have accidents or become sick, or find other ways to stop themselves from doing more and more harm.
One of the most important roles which you can play for your training partner is that of the father confessor. Only very few things come so close to a spiritual being and are such a burden like the harm which he has caused - with or without intention - to other people.
Nevertheless we don't recommend to work in this area alone at home without any previous education in the subject. The necessary subtle way of dealing with questions and answers, the "dynamic presence" which is required so that your training partner can really feel safe - but also the necessary procedures - cannot be learned without a few weeks or at least days of work with an experienced coach.
Despite of that, listen patiently if your training partner comes to you with a "confessional" on his own - but recommend doing a course for these things later. Here are only a few informations on this subject, so that you have some reference for emergency cases.
The subject of such a "confessional" can be active deeds. Your training partner can have set his neighbour's house on fire or stolen clients from his business companion - but maybe also only done small things, like keeping the pen of a visitor.
It could also be that he is concerned about omissions. Often the omissions are weighing heavier than the active deeds. Your training partner can have failed to help a girl who got raped, because he was a coward. He can have failed to teach the fundamentals of ethics to his kids. Maybe he was only too lazy to carry the shopping bag for his mother. Nevertheless he feels guilty.
Even omissions towards himself - like for instance bad hygiene or delaying the study of the basics of a healthy diet since years - can cause bad feelings to your training partner. Your task in this consists of allowing him to talk these things off his mind. Don't try to argue, to explain or to educate him. Just listen and acknowledge.
When you are working at these things, you don't want to imitate the role of a priest in the confessional box, quite the opposite. In mental training we are not interested in enforcing onto our training partner our own ideas about what in his life has been right or wrong, or in declaring him a sinner who has to repent.
What we are going for is to assist him in getting back his original spiritual reach. Alarmed, he has pulled back himself from the person or the location where he has made his mistake. With that, he lost the ability to be causative in this area.
If in the safe environment of the mutual session he can manage to "touch" this person or this location again, his spiritual energy field expands again to its original size, and he can start to make up for the damage, correct the whole matter, and learn from it for the future.
Every human being has their own, very individual code of honour. No church and no state can replace these private, inner life precepts by their prescriptions. If you really want to help your training partner to work at his personality, you will have to accept these very personal rules as laws, and use them as guidelines for your mutual work.
It happens frequently that the personal honour concepts of a person get "overridden" by his cultural programming - the education in his childhood and the example of his environment.
He might for instance feel deeply inside that that ideal way to deal with people would be a boundless love. Yet his culture has burned into him that only one person may be loved boundlessly - his current life partner. Or maybe he would want to run around in the clothes of his wife - but our current culture considers this to be insane, and so he has to forgo this expression of his personality.
These are only two of many possibilities.
Cultural Programming and Personal Integrity
In earlier decades and centuries this cultural programming was even more cruel. Today for instance it doesn't happen anymore that a woman kills herself - or that a girl gets thrown out of the house -, because they are expecting an illegitimate child.
Only a few decades ago, something like that was a nearly unbearable personal catastrophy. Only the courage of countless individuals, who protested against the merciless behaviour pattern of "the society" with their "civil disobedience" - unmarried mothers at one side and parents at the other side - could educate our culture into a more mild and tolerant behaviour in these questions. An enormous accomplishment of personal integrity in thousands of individual cases.
Categories of Reasons for Feelings of Guilt
If your training partner tells you about his guilt feelings, please keep this example in mind. Make a careful difference whether a "sin" that he tells you is violating his personal code of honour, or breaking a cultural (religious or legal, written or unwritten) rule, which in itself maybe doesn't really describe the ideal form of inter-personal relationships.
Distinguish between the following classes of activities, which all can lead to feelings of guilt:
- Harmful Acts (or omissions): one or more persons suffers physical or spiritual harm or a disadvantage that doesn't get balanced by a big important advantage for the whole family or population. Harmful acts or omissions can concern the person himself too.
- Law Breaks: Somebody has broken rules which are not necessarily his own. A harmless example would be the church's rule to not work on sundays. In some cultures though such transgressions can be deadly dangerous. In islam cultures for instance it would be very unhealthy for a woman to show her face or her legs, and in other countries one single drug trip gets punished already with the death sentence. No matter how one sees these questions privately, it would be thoughtless to disregard the reactions of the society in which one is living.
- Integrity breaks: Your training partner has violated one of his own, self-defined rules, broken a promise, or violated his personal code of honour in another way. These events will probably hurt most.
Local Laws and Personal Integrity
It can happen every now and then that it constitutes an integrity break for your training partner, to comply with a law of society (which he feels to be obsolete or wrong) and to not break it. In such cases, your role as a listener is extremely delicate.
Conflicts of this kind have again and again led to a progress in our society, because people with utmost self-conquest demanded from themselves to be loyal to their inner truth, even if they were facing very real threats. Just think of the dangers that Martin Luther exposed himself to, when he rebelled against the corruption of his church at that time, or of the early Christians during the time of the suppression by the Romans.
No culture is safe from making errors - and the bigger the error, the smaller is normally their willingness to self-critically question their own course. Perhaps we too are living in a fatal error in our here and now, which we refuse to realize? Most times such things are not discovered until very much later.
During the course of history the rebels and "law-breakers" have often led society closer to the truth. If these people had not existed, Earth would today still be flat, and the sun and the stars would orbit around it.
Today for instance everybody would admire a woman who would tear off the veil from her face right in the middle of Teheran, loyal to her inner truth, but breaking the country's laws.
Who could encourage her to do such a thing? Who could advise her so, knowing that this well-meaning advice could cost her her life?
Who would want to be responsible for the consequence, that in the next moment a howling mob is turning upon her and she gets stoned - even if this heroic act at some later time leads to the fact that women in Iran can proudly show their faces again, and a hundred years later a memorial is built for the lonely martyr?
Nobody else than she alone can make such a decision. Please stick completely to the role of a listener in all such cases. Don't encourage and don't discourage. Just express that your friendship will stay the same, no matter to which decision your training partner will come.
An opposite situation can also develop if a still immature personal integrity motivates a person to activities, which are unreasonable from a bigger viewpoint, or in the long run will cause him more harm than benefit.
Young people often find themselves in such a situation during the time where they emancipate from their parents and make their first own experiences. They feel that they "must" do something crazy, just to prove to themselves that they are strong enough to see their own will succeed.
For you as a training partner it would be a mistake in this phase, to make them wrong for a wild love life for instance, or nights which they are dancing through. Of course you also should not encourage them to try every designer drug which is available on the black market one after the other.
Stay neutral in all such cases. Don't try to strengthen or weaken the decisions of your training partner by your own opinion. Express that your friendship will stay the same, and you will respect his personal freedom, no matter where this will lead him to, without necessarily sharing his viewpoint.
The only exception from this rule we would consider to be the (sexual) abuse or the violent treatment of children and other helpless persons, and of course all crudely criminal actions in which others are involved (where he doesn't just harm himself).
In such a case you should not hesitate to get energic and set limits: "That far, but not farther!" Otherwise you would make yourself an accessory to his crime, and with that you help neither your partner nor anybody else.
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This page last changed on: 30. Mrz 13