Once upon a time in old Japan there lived an experienced Samurai! He was one of the deadliest warriors of his time and numerous enemies had met their deaths through his sword! As he grew older, he knew his next battle could be his last, though his skill was still unmastered, his body started showing his first signs of age. He knew it would be just a matter of time, before he would meet his maker…

That is when he started having nightmares! In his dreams all his victims haunted him with the feeling if shame, guilt and despair… One day he was in small fight with bandits near a mountain lake. Legend had it, that a very wise shaman lady lived on top of the mountain, and in the forest below, just when he beheaded the last two standing thieves with one single swing of his bloodthirsty katana, it happened again, but this time in broad daylight, with him being wide awake: all his victims started crawling out of the trees and the earth of the forest, accusing him for taking their lives too early and leaving their families without protection. He knew he was hallucinating dew to his many days of hardly any sleep, but the faces and bodies of the victims felt so real, so terribly real, that he screamed in fear and agony and started running uphill! He ran through forests, jumped over mountain streams and climbed like a hunted animal all the way to the mountain top losing all his armor except his sword on the way… scratched and wounded he reached the hut of the shaman in panic and desperation!

The shaman lady took him in, put bandages with herbs on his wounds, and let him rest on a bed of wollen bearskins!

When a awoke he thanked the beautiful old woman in bearskin as she gave him medicine in a cup of bitter tea! 

“Are you the shaman, of whom everybody speaks of her knowledge of all worlds in the here and there? “

“ I am just a woman who lives on a mountain, and likes to speak to the trees”

“ Tell me wise mother! Is there a heaven or a hell, after we die?”

“Why do you wish to know that?” she replied

“I am a warrior, who took many lives, so many I cannot count them anymore, and now they come to me in my dreams, and I am afraid, so afraid, that I will have to pay for my sins, that is why I need to know. Is there a hell or heaven, or nothing after we die??”

“You should have thought of that before you fed those poor souls to your sword, and now come crawling to me like a beggar without honor, hoping for absolution.. what kind of a warrior are you anyway? Did they not teach you courage and virtue in samurai-school?” here voice was stern and her eyes cold.

But the eyes of the samurai became even colder as he drew his sword in anger and hatred

“Watch your tongue old hag, how dare you call me honorless?? Do you know who I am, and how many lives I have already taken in my career?”

“ And now you want to add the life of an old woman to your pile? How much bravery is in that? Tell me, how much?? This does not seem to me as an act of bravery this is the mere work of a self absorbed coward!”

The samurai eyes were filled with rage, he lifted the katana with both hands ready to strike her down, as she held her left hand high, changing her expression to kindness again and saying:”This is HELL!”

Suddenly he realized, what he was doing, his eyes filled with tears, his hands started trembling.. he sank to his knees holding on to the shamans feet and sobbing 

“ Forgive me please forgive me !”

She held his head in her lap, like a mother comforting her baby boy running her finger through his hair and gently whispered in his ear: “And this is HEAVEN!”

It is not our FEELINGS that torment us, it is the JUDGEMENT and the MINDSET we have in connection to those feelings! 

Even the worst feelings like hate, shame & guilt, are just energies floating through your body until you start labeling them as something bad and unworthy to have and feel… and that is when all HELL breaks lose for YOU!!

An interesting EXPERIMENT measured the electromagnetic energy running through a human body in different circumstances: 

Under many different results two stuck out, with almost the exact same amount of energy in brain and body cells: one was of a massive full body-ORGASM and one a soft ELECTROCUTION (teaser) …. the first one was labeled as “absolutely awesome” the other as “absolutely terrible”, although the bioelectric-ENERGY in the body caused pretty much the SAME things to happen: letting the body shake, sweating, heavy breathing, sighing, moaning, screaming and causing a short black out! 

What has to be CLEAR to us, that the label and the judgment we have concerning certain feelings and emotions is a CULTURAL and a CONVENTIONAL one, like the big topic of HONOR the samurai has in the story above… This can also very clearly be observed with TABOOS in societies, like the following story from Albert Schweitzer, a doctor who volunteered for medicinal programs in Africa, shows with brutal clarity: He once had a patient with a taboo (tabu- forbidden, unholy) for bananas, who came into the clinic, with high fever and under nutrishioned, his body rejecting any kind of food, except mashed bananas… the patient did not know what he was being fed and responded well to the mashed banana diet until he almost recovered completely… this is when he found out what he had been eating in the last three weeks, his religious feelings of SHAME and GUILT kicked in towards what he believed was unholy, forbidden fruit, that was now in his body, that he DIED the next night in a FEVER dream! 

The Bananas did not kill him, what killed him was his CULTURAL and CONVENTIONAL mindset of having done something wrong by eating the forbidden fruit, and the connection to a religious feeling of guilt…

The feeling of being nourished was good until he knew what nourished him and had to DECIDE to label this feeling as something bad, and all the feelings he had during his recovery, which turned everything from “yea I m alive” to “ I am not worthy of being alive”! 

What has to be said clearly: Not all taboos are bad, not all conventions unpractical… In fact most taboos in society were created in order to make society function BETTER! However, as our stories show us, they also have been a field of controlling the mindsets and behavior of members of this society, in order to uphold power and loyalty to religious or political rulers. As long as we are aware of this fact, we can allow us to CHANGE a CONVENTION, if it is not practical anymore.

How we can change these conventions,… we will talk about in the next article..

If you have any questions, contact us directly!