By Cathy Eck

Letting Go

Letting go is so very simple … too simple for our complicated, modern minds.  People analyze their mind, talk about it, and contemplate it.  Those are tools that fuel the false self.  You can’t fix the false mind, you have to let it go.

You can’t get to the True Self perspective by way of the false self.   No belief system will take you to your True Self.  The True Self has no beliefs.  At best, belief systems create a nice clone of the True Self.

If you want complete, permanent freedom, you must let go of the false mind.  To do that you must know this:

All beliefs are lies (the word lie is buried within the word belief for a reason). Beliefs that are judgmental or harmful to yourself or another generate emotion.  That emotion is saying, “Let the belief go.”

When you let go of beliefs, only the True Self perspective remains.  All emotional charge is gone because you’ve eliminated the false.  If you are ill, healing can now take place.

An Example

It’s rarely the big events in our life that confuse us — those are obviously wrong.  It’s the little events that often trap us in the false world of beliefs.

When I was about four years old, my grandparents were driving on a Sunday afternoon; they stopped by our home unexpected.  My mother had planned a simple dinner; but now that my father’s parents were visiting, she got out the china and made a nice dinner.  However, she didn’t have anything for dessert because we didn’t usually eat dessert.  She whipped up some Jello; and when she served it, my grandmother said, “Jello, that isn’t dessert!”

My dad was dumbfounded, and my mother ran off crying.  I sympathized with my mother — big mistake.  I rubbed her back and talked to her like I was the mother and she the child.

I’d often contemplated that moment with lots of whys.  Why did my grandmother say that?  Why did my grandmother’s comment upset my mother so much?  Why didn’t my father defend my mother?  Why did it still bother me decades later?

The answer to the last question is that I hadn’t yet seen the memory from the True Self perspective.  We hold memories in mind, along with the emotions they generate, until we see them from the True Self perspective — free of beliefs.  If a memory has no beliefs, it has no emotion.  It feels like a dream when we think it.  It has no future attracting power.

Slow Motion

I went back to the event and replayed it in very slow motion.  I didn’t try to fix the event or change it…it was what it was.  I saw it this time with the single eye of truth.  My grandmother said, “Jello, that isn’t dessert.”  That felt neutral to me and probably to my dad.  My mother, however, heard the same words and a belief arose in her mind that generated emotion.

My mother was now deep in psychological reversal.  She went into an old pattern of low self-worth, not good enough for my dad, or just plain bad.  What she was thinking clearly felt bad to her, but she took that emotion as a sign that her belief was true.  That error in her thinking was the cause of all her pain.  It’s the primal error that keeps the illusion alive in all of us.

As a four-year old, I believed my mother; so I fell into her illusion with her.  Sympathy does that — that’s why it’s considered good in the illusory world.  My fall into her illusion was the cause of my emotional pain.

At the time, my mind said, “My grandmother hurt my mother.”  I believed it as a child.  But now, it didn’t feel good, so I let it go.  Remember letting go is moving out of right and wrong so this isn’t about whether Jello is or isn’t a dessert or whether my grandmother was socially correct.  In truth, my grandmother spoke words and triggered an old wound in my mother.  In truth, my grandmother didn’t hurt my mother, she exposed a belief in my mother.

Then I thought, “Why didn’t my father defend my mother?”  Now I noticed that under my question was a judgment that he should have defended her; that felt bad too.  All should’s feel bad.  Defending isn’t necessary for a True Self.  If my mother wasn’t lost in her baggage, she probably would have laughed and said, “I’ve got your fat son on a diet.”  Then my dad would have had to deal with his beliefs.  At which point, he’d probably have pointed out that my grandmother already had enough dessert on her fat ass.  Everyone at the table had wounds, and it was only a matter of who’s wound got exposed first.

In most situations, the one who blows the fuse is the one with the most inward-directed beliefs because they’re the most sensitive.  We often call them the black sheep.

If my mother had desired freedom (instead of looking good), she would have used that exposure to find her own emotional pain’s causal belief.  My grandmother exposed her wound; she didn’t cause it.  She did, however, have responsibility for the Jello since she created a chubby son.

The voice that says “You hurt me,” is from the false self.  The True Self knows that if something that someone says feels bad, it just isn’t true.  The person who said it isn’t evil, they’re just stuck in a false belief system.  Thus if you get rid of the false self, you no longer believe other false selves.

This little example shows how we undo our psychological reversals.  Once I let go of my OWN erroneous beliefs, I could see the memory clearly.  Now I saw the simple solution that my wounded family couldn’t see — the Dairy Queen at the top of the hill.