By D Witte

I don’t know your experience, but as a Catholic growing up, I was focused on not being a sinner, not so much learning how to be virtuous. It was obeying the ten commandments, avoiding the seven deadly sins, going to confession and doing penance.  While I may have been exposed to virtues, it was the “deadly” sins I recall the most. Imagine the dismay I felt when I realized I had to learn how to practice virtues.

 It happened one evening when my spiritual teacher, suggested a set of “Virtue Cards.” I asked, “why I would want them?” He responded, to learn about them. I was puzzled by that, since I had never been encouraged to learn about them. I assumed that virtues were something you came by naturally. Something you were born with, like sin. I’m embarrassed to admit when I learned this, I was well into adulthood and thought I had mastered my life by sinning less and confessing regularly. Little did I know that was only half of the picture. How about you?  What is your experience?

Now, it is remarkable to me to realize my religion only taught me about my shortcomings, my sins and didn’t focus on how I might be better. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to learn virtues? Or did I somehow miss it? It’s a puzzle.

Since then, I’ve noticed that some other people have no concept of practicing virtue either. Maybe you’ve noticed too, the way some people seem to be more focused on self-interest than the common good.  Now, I can see how that happens. Like me, they probably weren’t taught to develop virtues, they were taught about making money and being powerful and self-serving.

That reminds me of what Oprah often said, “when you know better, you do better.” But, of course, you must know better and be willing to do better, for that axiom to hold truth.

Since I got those virtue cards, I’ve studied them in different ways. I remember that the primary virtue, I focused on for one year, was acceptance. It’s a virtue, I find I can always improve.  For instance, I’ve come to accept that others are the way they are and it’s none of my business they do with their lives. It’s not my “job” to improve them. But acceptance is more than that, it’s learning to accept myself and my mistakes and learning to move beyond them.

The most significant way I’ve learned self-acceptance came when I learned about how we have all learned to judge ourselves. That goes all the way back to a story about when we first incarnated as souls, many lifetimes ago. Every soul has experienced it, and it was a singularly traumatic experience.

This is my condensed version of a story of “The Fall.” It begins with how as a soul in heaven, we were “bored” and had an inner desire to want knowledge. So, we were delighted when we learned about the opportunity offered by Sanat Kumara, the soul of the planet Earth, to experience life in the physical.  We signed the contract giving us free choice and a chance to learn compassion and other things in the physical. It would be an exciting experience. Joyfully we sailed down to Planet Earth. However, we didn’t check the fine print in the contract, so when we are born, we were separated from God and the perfect life we had with him. We fell into the darkness of Earth, (that’s why they call it “The Fall”) and the imperfection of Earth. Can you imagine how we felt when we first arrived here as a soul? The darkness, the sense of abandonment, the separation? Yes, the darkness, because we, as a soul, were forced into a body that was foreign and confined, not at all like the freedom and light we had experienced as a soul in heaven.

Imagine the painful process we went through trying to get this body to operate in a way that we could understand. We were in the foreign dimension of the physical. In the physical dimension we had to learn to use the body we found ourselves trapped in. To learn to use our eyes to see and our ears to hear. To learn through trial and error how to simply survive in this environment.  Not only that, but the body also seemed to have a mind of its own to find food and sleep and have sex and excrete and all the other things bodies do instinctively. We felt victimized by the Body.

In response to this trauma, we felt God had utterly abandoned us and there was no explanation, other than we had done something wrong. Something terribly wrong. It was, in that moment of panic and terror that we first began to judge ourselves and understandably, we continue doing so to this day.  As a soul, we were perfect, so, we began judging our bodies for everything and then ourselves, as souls. As humanity organized into societies and created religions, this judgement was incorporated into them and the impact stays in our psyche through the “collective unconscious” referred to by Carl Jung.

Of course, these developments took thousands of years. This short story doesn’t cover the many lifetimes we each had to grow and evolve, physically, mentally and emotionally. It is said the physical body has now evolved to its intended perfection but the task before us now is evolving spiritually. One critical way is to evolve past our self-judgements. We’ve been told stories from the ancient past of how we can redeem ourselves by both religion and philosophy. Religion teaches about the Fall as the choice Adam and Eve made to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Original Sin/Knowledge) banning them from the Garden (heaven). Then, philosophy offered the trials of the Hero who is a savior and rescues us. But those explanations still leave us being judged. We still experience suffering and pain. What is the answer from a Soul/spiritual perspective?

Assuming this is a true story or at least plausible, what do you feel? What do you think? When I first heard this story, I felt heartfelt compassion toward my whole soul/body. I finally understood how the critic in my head evolved and how naïve I was as a Soul/Thinker when I arrived. I realized what a difficult experience life itself really is. I found myself feeling “I did the best I could” and SIN (self-inflicted nonsense) is an unnecessary judgement. “The Way it is, is the Way it is” is the ultimate virtue….acceptance…self-acceptance.