redemption, ego, karma, Redeemer’s Club

Groundhog Day of Disappointing People

Redemption Songs Part Five

Stuart Wilde

September 2005

Continuing on the theme of redemption, here is an item to look at that may help you with discernment.

If you are kind and wise, people will come to you for help. You can listen and offer a few “there, theres” but if you are a responsible person, you will sooner or later want to help them discover the source of their pain.

As you delve into people’s pain they will be glad to talk about it and you may, if you are skillful, uncover much that they have denied or forgotten. It is the gift of redemption to release people from their agony. But in doing so, you also activate their darkness; all human pain is a form of stored darkness. Some of it may have been inflicted in childhood but most of the darkness has resulted from the ego and the turmoil it creates when it is denied what it thinks it wants in life.

So you start off as the hero on the side of the innocent child and then sooner or later you become the villain, as you have to show people how they became distorted and arrogant and how they caused mayhem everywhere they went. As you expose a person’s lies they may become extremely angry. It is as if you take them to the ‘last judgment’ decades before they expect it.

Now, if they hold steady and listen carefully they may calm down and transcend their rotten karma but usually that doesn’t happen and very soon they will start to act weird and they will want to chase you out of town with a whack in the head for your troubles. You may well have experienced this treatment already.

The dilemma is: do you continue to love humanity and help people and take the nastiness that will be heaped upon you, or do you ditch them to their fate? For donkey’s years I fell into the category of those that would soldier on regardless and then one day I woke wondering if it was worth it. Even when you are successful and you really liberate a person you get very little thanks. That is because once a person feels better they believe they did it all themselves, they fall into a litany of self-congratulation.

I could tell you a hundred tales of rip-offs and the braggadocio of the ungrateful, but if people weren’t weak you wouldn’t need to help them would you? And I am sure if you have been around a bit, you will have a few sorry tales of your own, so you will recognize these laments as something that happens on a regular basis. It is a form of groundhog day of disappointing people.

So the quandary is, do you keep helping people who turn to chew your arm off, or do you give them the Sicilian salute (va fan’ culo), while you still have an arm to deliver it with? Is underwriting people’s weakness and endorsing their corrupted souls a form of unconditional love, or is it a self-inflicted wound?

It is bloody hard to know what is right.

Then every so often, one person in a hundred maybe, turns out to be brave and decent and generous and not self-obsessed. And suddenly you imagine you were right to believe in yourself and humans all along. Redemption is a lot more complicated than just fishing people out of the icy waters of their egocentricity. You have to decide if you are fond of your arm before you go very far.

Anyway, I’ll open the Redeemer’s Club one day in the not to distant future and we’ll go on a few capers, second-to-none, while we work out how to fish people out of the black seas in the dead of night and dry them off prior to throwing them back in if they cause trouble.

Splash!