Any being who can recognize what they have done to create the mess they are in can change that mess into an opportunity for success. Beings, in or out of bodies, who cannot recognize the mistake they made, are stuck in hopelessness or have to blame others for the sorry state they are in. In either of these latter states, the being has no hope of recovering from this state unaided.
We have found that helping a being to recognize what confusion existed and what mistake was made as a result will help the being to regain control of his life and move on. The recovery is almost instant even when the hopeless condition has existed for many, many years.
Not all confusion and resulting mistakes will cause a being to become hopeless, only those where the being is not prepared to take responsibility for breaking agreements by his actions.
An agreement is basically an arrangement as to a course of action. You are or have been party to many agreements in your past and very few of them were ever documented. As a child, you were expected to behave in a particular manner at home or in school. At work, you are expected to behave in a particular way in terms of production, attendance, and behavior toward others. As a citizen, you are expected to behave in an appropriate manner depending on a number of factors.
Since most of the finer details of your agreements are not defined in writing, only by past behavior, it is entirely possible that other members of your family, school, or other groups have different understandings of what the group agreement covers. People often discover unvoiced parts of the group agreement when they embark on new adventures and get reprimanded or punished for violating an agreement they never knew existed.
Some of the unvoiced parts of group agreements are hatred of certain other groups or beliefs and a violent aversion to some behaviors that are never discussed publicly. A child developing a friendly relationship with a child of other beliefs or racial backgrounds can discover that they have broken an agreement they never knew existed. People of all ages can discover a cause that they wish to support and discover that their dearest friends and family now consider them to be deranged or actual traitors.
People who spent their lives helping others have been burnt at the stake or crucified because it was considered that they broke agreements that were vitally important to others. The group had decided from past experience that certain activities were dangerous to the group and forbade any group member from doing this kind of activity. When some adventurous person comes along and observes for themselves that this activity is actually beneficial and does it freely, this will galvanize the group into punishing the foolhardy individual.
When the punishment is sufficiently severe, the offender cannot recover from that memory and their attention remains stuck on the incident from then on. Depending on the severity of the punishment, the humiliation and loss can persist for many lifetimes and the person is never quite the same again because a portion of his life force has been captured in that incident as long as he has attention on it.
Their attention is stuck on the punishment and the apparent unfairness of it all. Directing the person’s attention to the existence of an agreement and the confusion that caused the person to break the agreement will release the person from their fixation on the incident and allow them to see their contribution to the incident. If they are willing to look at the sequence of events, their attention is freed and they recover their ability to create a future. If they are not willing to look at the sequence of events, even with caring communication and skillful counseling, there are probably earlier incidents of a similar nature that will require investigation.
We have found that a person introduced to the true facts of a painful incident will almost always find relief in seeing how they caused the incident to happen. This also provides them with an understanding of how to handle future incidents of a similar nature. One of the benefits of resolving painful incidents like these described is the increased awareness of the agreements we are likely to break when adopting new ideas.