There are so many us who feel overwhelmed by our current circumstances. We feel powerless, detached from the decision making process. And to make matters worse, we are unable to gain access to those who are making the decisions for us. It seems like the stock market, unemployment, home foreclosures, bank bailouts, health care, and so on are spiraling out of control and there's nothing we can say or do about it. And for the first time in some of our lives, we are truly beginning to understand what it feels like to be victims.
For some of us endowed with societal credentials and its ancillary attachments, we are too proud and embarrassed to believe we could ever become victims. We we equate victims with failure, illiteracy, poverty, and dependency. Some of us even rationalize our own internal suffering as something other than being victims. We believe internal suffering is a part of life and something we must manage in order for us to become successful.
Similarly, for those of us overcome by intense suffering, we don't perceive it as being a fatal flaw in our social armor. We have institutions and people available to assist us with our suffering. We can go to religious places and people or to psychologists and psychiatrists to heal our suffering. We can hide our internal suffering from others. And similar to a toothache, we live with the pain until it becomes unbearable.
Our lives mirror our bodies. We can have some type of virus in our bodies and live with it for months, even years without ever knowing that it's there. While we recognize that overeating, drinking too much alcohol and soft drinks, smoking too many cigarettes, and taking too many prescribed and illegal drugs will ultimately cause us great suffering, we continue to deny this to ourselves. And like the victimization process, we continue to engage in it until we can no longer withstand the suffering. It's at this point that we become ready to seek treatment.
Meanwhile, whenever we seek treatment for anything that's ailing us, we do it to remove any obstacles preventing us from achieving our goals. For most of us, the most important things in our lives are our goals: the things we desire to have. Whenever we set goals for ourselves, we become participants in the power game of victimization.
This is a game where we demonstrate to ourselves and others the power we have to achieve things -- education, money, fame, material possessions, and so forth -- that elevate us beyond the wretched of our society. It is our things that prevent us from thinking of ourselves as victims. The more things we have in our lives, the less we identify with the internal suffering metastasising through our bodies and minds. Consequently, there's little or any need to work on healing ourselves.
The day we begin to understand powerlessness and its effects on our actions is the time we begin to seek solutions to change how we think and live. The healing process for victims is a long one. It takes a significant amount of surgery and recovery time to overcome the cancerous psychological disease of victimization. And, unless we catch the disease in time and begin the treatment, most of us will succumb to its pernicious effects.
The primary cure for healing victims is to establish a goal for achieving enlightenment. This is important because it provides us with the vision to identify the end results of the mind-body treatment program we must undergo. Some of the salient components of this program, which some of us refer to as empowerment solutions, are as follows:
"1. Vision: This is the stage of development where you sit quietly with yourself and imagine what you want to express in your life. It takes some time to form a vision that is free of lack, limitation, struggle, doubts, and thoughts of unworthiness. This means you must continue to clear your thoughts so that you are able to perceive yourself with the power to express your greatness.
"2. Embodiment: After you have created a clear vision (without victim beliefs) of yourself existing with power in the present moment, you must assume the identity and behavior of the new person, You must immediately act as if you are what you have envisioned yourself as being or have what you have envisioned yourself as having.
"3. Acceptance: You accept yourself as the source of your power. You and the intuitive power within your mind created the vision of yourself with power. This recognition and acceptance of yourself with power is what you need to nurture your idea (vision) through the necessary time interval between conception of the vision and its expression in the visible world.
"4. Action: All change requires action. It takes action on your part to form a vision of empowerment, embody the vision, and nurture it through the necessary time interval. You must develop a daily action plan to work on your vision of empowerment. This means that you focus all your actions on the work you need to transform yourself into a new person."
These four steps are outlined in "Seeds from the Ashes."
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