PERSPECTIVES: COMPASSION FOR EVIL, 2019 Workshops

Published: Sun, 02/10/19

PERSPECTIVES

Newsletter of Shepherd Hoodwin and Summerjoy Press

2019 Europe Workshops!

I’m thrilled to announce my 2019 workshop schedule for Europe. Here are PDF brochures, which go into detail, in English and German. Please spread the word and let me know if you have any questions.

There will be four three-day Level I workshops, in Munich, Zurich, and Moscow. They give an overview of the Michael teachings and focus on the top (Essence) half of the Michael chart.

New this year is a week-long expanded Level I with André Hintermann at a hot springs resort near Venice for those who speak German: Using the Potential of Your Soul: A Week of Personal Growth and Spirituality. You are welcome to attend even if you already attended a Level I; some people find the review helpful, and it includes other topics, such as learning to get in touch with your essence.

Sneh Schnabel and I are also offering an exciting new workshop in Freiburg, Germany, Connecting with Your Inner Wisdom: Working with Spirit Guides, Channeling, and Intuition.

If you attended one of my previous workshops, I'd much appreciate it if you would write a testimonial about your experience (in either German or English). You might be interested in attending the Level II workshop in Vienna in October. It focuses on the overleaves, which we only covered briefly in Level I, and has more constellations and other processes.

André Hintermann has translated some of my work in Journey of Your Soul into German and added other material. It supports German-speaking people in better understanding their Michael chart. It is available here.

If you are interested in organizing or attending a workshop anywhere, please contact me.

New Ebook

This issue of Perspectives contains excerpts from my new ebook, Compassion for Evil. It explores the nature of evil from the soul's point of view, and how we can skillfully deal with it as lightworkers.

The genesis of this book was a channeling I did on the subject two decades ago. I knew then that I wanted to publish something on this topic, but it has proven to be a tough nut to crack. In 2010, a shorter version of it went out in Perspectives. When I revisited it, I did a great deal more work on it, and this is the result.

I hope it helps you find greater peace in dealing with life on this challenging planet.

The full version, about 8000 words, is available on Amazon Kindle for $2.99. As always, if you prefer a PDF that you can print out, email me. In the future, I plan to convert all my ebooks to Amazon's print-on-demand for those who want a perfect-bound copy. Below I excerpt about 1700 words.

Contents

FREE WILL
THE SOUL
ANGER AND FEAR
THE SURVIVAL INSTINCT
US VERSUS THEM
REVENGE
RELEASING ANGER AND FEAR
THE DIVINE SPARK
KARMA
THE VALUE OF ADVERSITY
THE MEANS CREATE THE END
THE FIELD OF LOVE
FEAR NO EVIL
ME AND MY SHADOWS
FORGIVENESS
TERRORIST OR FREEDOM-FIGHTER?
WHAT IS TRULY RIGHT?
THE MYTH OF BAD BOYS
PERPETRATORS
VICTIMS
CONSCIENCE AND GUILT
PEACE
ASTRAL SUICIDE
REDEMPTION
BELL CURVE
THE TREE OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL

CONCLUSION

MISCELLANY

I was interviewed by Simon Bown on "The Past Lives Podcast" (also available via iTunes, etc.)

Here's an article about my LA channeling last fall.

Michael Reading charts will be $75 beginning February 15.

Excerpts from

COMPASSION FOR EVIL

A Metaphysical View

By Shepherd Hoodwin

FREE WILL

Inherent in the physical plane school that each of us attends is free will, so that we are able to learn to choose and create. That makes for the possibility of evil—willfully harming others. From a higher point of view, that's not necessarily a "bad" thing because we can become more conscious of light by seeing it clearly against its absence, darkness. Polarity is an intrinsic part of our life's structure—we gain understanding by comparing and contrasting opposites. Learning what not to do can help bring into focus what to do, and why, expanding light. Genesis says that on the first day of creation, "God divided the light from the darkness." That also happens for souls here on the first plane of creation.

THE SOUL

There are many levels of self. Our core is what the Michael teachings call a spark of the Tao, which is a unit of consciousness of the All That Is. Religious people might call that "the God within." That part of self is mostly untouched by evil because it is not directly involved in polarity. It creates an essence that contains a blueprint for how we will manifest on the seven planes of creation of Earth—our potentialities. The outer layer of our essence is our soul, which animates and carries all our human lifetimes. It extends a part of itself into each body/mind, inhabiting it and giving it self-awareness. Animals also have souls, hive souls, which are simpler than human sentient souls because they are not designed to make reasoned choices; they have awareness, but not conscious self-awareness. Without a soul, a body would be vacant—nobody would be "home" other than the body's own instinctual consciousness.

Sentient souls, who learn through making choices, have varying degrees of negativity based on their choices over many lifetimes. There are some who could justifiably be classified as evil. They are those at the far end of the spectrum who have not only done a lot of evil acts but whose hearts have fully hardened, who are unreachable by love. They have no sense of connection with others or the whole—they are completely self-centered. There are few truly evil people, if we define them this way. Most souls who do numerous evil acts eventually prove to be capable of some redemption.

Nearly all of those whose hearts are profoundly hardened are younger souls who had many harsh experiences early in their incarnations and didn't properly get their bearings. It usually starts with their being victims of extreme abuse and not having the resources to rise above it. Instead, as part of their strategy to stay safe, they become stuck in a pattern of seeking power over others and exacting revenge. As they harm more and more people, they become overwhelmingly enmeshed in karma. Their heavy ego defenses keep them from recognizing their own culpability. Eventually, love may not be able to get through.

ANGER AND FEAR

To understand why people do seemingly senseless evil things, we need to understand anger and fear. They are two sides of one coin, not so much emotions but physically hardwired impulses that arise when we perceive threats to our survival. Anger is the instinct to push something away, and fear is the instinct to withdraw from it. They can be useful in the presence of real, imminent threats, mobilizing us to act. Anger is masculine (outgoing) and fear is feminine (incoming). Some people react more with anger, and some with fear, but behind anger is fear, and behind fear is anger—they are inseparable, like the male and female sides of the yin/yang symbol. It is easier to sympathize with people who are fearful than with those who are angry, because angry people can be prickly and dangerous, so it is helpful to recognize the fear behind anger.

Humanity could quickly evolve a great deal if we learned how to constructively deal with anger and fear. Certainly that's an important part of the growth of anyone on a conscious spiritual path. We all have some stuck anger and fear in our subconscious stored when we were powerless to act on it, including during early childhood and past lives. Some of it doesn't belong to us: we all pick up energies from other people and from the mass consciousness. Releasing this backlog as much as possible can help us become happier—it is a heavy burden. Ideally, we would learn not to store them in the first place but instead release them when they arise and the opportunity to take constructive action passes. In the wild, many animals do this instinctively, such as shaking out stress after an encounter with a predator.

Like food, anger and fear spoil with age. The nature of energy is to move, and when it is stuck, it causes damage. Letting it fester and obsessing about "getting even" can destroy many lives, including our own. However, we are unconscious of much of our stored anger and fear, which can lead to many physical and mental health problems. Sometimes they erupt as an overreaction to current events that remind us of them and trigger us. That is an opportunity to become aware of them and heal.

We can only do that if we don't identify with them. A core meditation technique is to observe our thoughts and feelings and let them pass through us without attachment to them. There's a saying, "Don't believe everything you think." We might add, "and feel." This non-attachment is a key to spiritual awakening. Ultimately, only love, truth, and beauty are real; all the rest is illusion, if sometimes quite convincing. If we recognize what isn't in harmony with them as things needing to be healed and evolved, we can neutralize our stored anger and fear. Those who do evil identify with and justify them rather than observing them from a higher vantage point. They invest so much energy in trying to preserve their physical body that they cannot perceive themselves as being anything more than that, let alone an eternal soul.

Anyone who seeks healing can find it, but those who deliberately harm others are probably not yet at the point of seeking it; they may not know yet that they need healing or that it is even possible. Maybe they don't have a vision of another way to be. They also likely don't have tools to deal with the intensely compressed energies seething within them.

THE SURVIVAL INSTINCT

Anger and fear mostly originate in the body's survival instinct. If we didn't have a survival instinct, it would be too easy to walk off cliffs. The human animal we each inhabit is hardwired to blindly do whatever seems necessary to survive, on autopilot, without thinking. We rarely make the best possible choices on autopilot—it provides crude, "one size fits all" solutions. A main reason we incarnate into these bodies is to learn to blend soul with animal, to unite "heaven and earth." That brings "adult supervision." The more we advance spiritually, the more we navigate our instincts with skill, like a master rider on a spirited horse. We apply reason and loving wisdom to our choices. We neither repress or express our anger and fear, but instead view them as useful information that we can act on in the most constructive way.

US VERSUS THEM

Our survival instinct guards against strangers and is suspicious of the "other." This is where the us-versus-them paradigm that fuels so much evil comes from. Hunter/gatherers lived in small clans and didn't know if those who lived beyond the clan's control meant ill. Some of that caution remains useful, but once the facts are ascertained and new people are vetted, it makes sense to let it go. However, those with stuck, excess fear don't easily allow in new information, leading to the xenophobia (irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries) so common today. Politicians exploit that fear to get people to follow them.

The viciousness that can be exhibited by predatory animals is sometimes used to excuse human evil and an "every man for himself" ethos. However, wild animals aren't necessarily a good role model for humans, who have the intellectual capacity to make reasoned choices. Animals have no choice but to act out of their survival instincts when they feel threatened; we do. Furthermore, the internet is full of videos of animals lovingly playing together who might have been enemies in the wild. If they can do it, certainly we can.

PERPETRATORS

Having compassion for perpetrators is not easy to do, but it is well worth the effort—hating perpetrators increases our own negativity and brings us down. As with addicts, those who do evil could be seen as having an illness, their actions a sort of insanity, even when they go about them in a cold, calculated way. That only indicates that their insanity has hardened.

CONCLUSION

Looking for people's humanity, even when it seems scarce, can help reinforce it, whereas engaging with negativity reinforces that. At the same time, it's smart to be realistic about the limitations of the people we deal with. If they are not open, nothing we say or do will likely have much immediate effect, although wise words and/or a positive example may plant a seed for the future.

We never know what the result of loving unconditionally will be. However, we don't do it for a result, but simply to be aligned with love. We have compassion for those who do evil not because of who they are but because of who we are. Increasing the vibration of love in humanity is the only way it can be healed.

Humanity has taken itself to the brink of total destruction. In our era, we have the opportunity to shift onto an easier path of growth. We do that first by facing ourselves fully with love, both the good and evil, the evolved and unevolved. Healing and integrating our shadows allow us to discover our true nature of love, truth, and beauty. Then we can offer that to others.

We're all in this together. With compassion for all, we can be a source of healing, helping find true solutions and bringing darkness to light.

Shepherd Hoodwin

https://shepherdhoodwin.com

[email protected]