Shani, Ego, Marriage Conflict & Forgiveness

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
- Shakespeare ( Portia's Speech - Merchant of Venice)

Prologue
Most of us are unconscious victims of the tremendous traffic of thoughts which parades through the human mind minute-by-minute and hour-by-hour. The average life is, unfortunately, quite wasted in the effort to follow one's thoughts. Many incarnations are spent completely, in a frenzy of urgent desire, without any moment of "awakening" into enquiry. How many of us even begin to wonder about the suspicious origins of these urgent "mandates" and "directions" emitting from the Mind.

The single greatest threat to human peace of mind is -- not hatred, anger, or guilt -- but rather doubt. You have the intelligence and the self-discipline to make a practice of becoming aware of the presence of doubt and negative expectations. If habitual, fear-driven thoughts of failure, ignominy, and zero-option despair are caught and identified at the mental level, then they can be dealt with quickly. They might not be able to be completely extinguished because they are the result of past-life karma. They will have to be understood and accepted before they can be eradicated.

The conscious human has less control over the flow of events, and more control over how one reacts to those events. Hence, if one is able to capture and consciously work on to cancel the negative thought process at the level of direct mental perception, one can be spared much unhappiness. If the negative thoughts are not recognized at the mental level, then the information will be passed on to the next gross particulate level of the astral plane, where it will try to gain one’s attention

The astral plane contains a huge "ocean of emotion". On the astral plane, the negative thoughts will manifest in a roller-coaster of emotion that surges from wild fantasies of total redemptive love to blackest despair of abandonment and total rejection unto death. The astral plane is not governed by time, so one might experience violent fluctuations of feelings - from bright to black and pure merging love to total isolated death - in a matter of minutes.

Holding onto the negative mental process of resentment, guilt, anger, & sorrow from the past, is a psychic disaster. It takes a huge amount of creative energy to manage our detailed inventory of past hurts & grievances. The more deeply one invests in the commitment to hold the perpetrator until they are properly punished, the less energy one has to do anything creative at all.

Shani

Shani's job is to inculcate personal responsibility (without guilt) and neutral acceptance of the karmic process. Shani's mission is to convert ignorant error into calm wisdom. Shani will do "whatever it takes" to command the native's attention. Shani will recall the native over and over to a central difficulty, a repeating failure, or an insurmountable obstacle.

Shani's job is to bring forward the people we have inadvertently harmed in past lives, give them the opportunity to enter into a negative relationship with us, harm us in return, and thereby allow us (in the best case) to consciously realize that we attracted those people into our lives in order to learn a lesson about compassion. This is a painful and frustrating process but it is really the only way to balance the karmic ledger. Spiritually, there is no advantage to having Shani-evoked troubles magically evaporate. To the spiritually aware, there will be deep gratitude for having been offered the chance to suffer consciously, and consciously forgive. This is the single greatest achievement of the human soul.

Shani's impact on life experience is painful and frustrating but, in the end, extremely beneficial. The pain can be reduced dramatically through neutral awareness and acceptance of the role one plays in creating one's own destiny. Once one has established a pattern of calm and non-judgmental reaction to the flow of events, Shani's job is done - and the pain stops! (The events continue but they just roll past...)

The faster one can achieve neutral awareness of one's own negative expectations, the faster one can eliminate the pain. Unfortunately for the slow learner, Shani will give all the "time" necessary to repeat the lesson. For those of us who live a bit behind the curve of total wisdom, it is valuable to be aware of the most acute effects of Shani. With forewarning, one can address these "scheduled" negativities, as they arise, with consciousness. One can meet each well-timed disappointment with a deeper commitment to acknowledgement, forgiveness and release.

Ego & Marriage Conflict

In each life, certain intimate partners are permitted access to the soft, childlike, sensitive ego core - or very close to the core. Often the marriage partner has permission to press our buttons, criticize our practices, question our validity, and rattle our cage. These are the partners with whom (against whom) we negotiate our core identity.

These intimate partners are pre-assigned. They enter our current life by invitation. These intimates are souls with whom we have built a shared inventory of both trust and grief over many lifetimes. They know us well. We all can handle a professional attack pretty well, but an attack from a loved one hurts horribly, coming from a person with whom we have entered into a loving promise to love and protect.

The ego identity testing ground is marriage which in turn is the true testing ground for forgiveness. Unless the two parties are enlightened beings, the negotiation for valid ego identity in marriage can get pretty intense. The more fragile the two egos, the more desperately anxious the negotiation.

Essentially, "edits" of the marriage script require the power to "forgive" the other spouse for their supposed transgressions against what we believe to be good and true about ourselves - i.e., offences against our ego structure. Hundreds of these offences occur during each day of married life. Tragically, they are the primary cause of "irreconcilable differences" leading to divorce. In any relationship - but especially the queen of all relationships "marriage" - resolution of conflict requires dissolution of false ego.

The pain of ego-damage and the terrible anxiety caused by threat of ego-collapse is very stressful. Letting go of the ego is easier said than done. Once the crutch of Ego is gone, what happens to the mind when it has nothing to do? No values transactions (your way; my way or the highway; compromise) No negotiation. No discussions, agreements, or balance to strike, No conflicts to mediate, when there is no self to represent “Me” at the arbitration table?

The Ego does not go quietly. It goes berserk. It likes its dominant position in your consciousness. It likes its control. It goes on a rampage. It wants its job back. It goes on protest mode, insisting on its self-evident, constitutionally guaranteed "right to work

The threat of ego-collapse is enough, for some people, to force consideration of forgiveness as a survival strategy in marriage. Marriage often forces the reluctant ego to at least “try” the possibility of forgiveness. The pain of ego invalidation, coming from the person closest to us in this life - the spouse - is often unmanageable. Some souls are driven to the final extreme - forgiveness - in an effort to free themselves from a huge accumulation of toxic anger, humiliation, and grief acquired during failed identity negotiations with this most significant Other.

Forgiveness

It is not normal & natural to forgive. It is normal & natural and rigorously socially enforced, to store up offences and wait to get redress. It requires considerable consciousness to forgive our spouse for being a unique soul who is different than us, for exposing our faults, and for forcing us into levels of awareness that our sleep-walking egos did not want to achieve.

Forgiveness does not mean condoning or justifying the harmful acts done by others. The laws of karma ensure that those who do harm will themselves be harmed, when their time comes. Forgiveness does not erase the memory of the transgression. Rather, forgiveness "gives back" the unsuitable (ego-assaulting) energy to the original sender, which gives the spouse permission to be a separate person, have their own tastes and values, and make their own judgments. The trick is that their values and judgments are divinely theirs, not ours - and thus, we are completely freed from conflict and criticism in the marriage

The decision to forgive, especially for really grievous emotional wounding, is a desperate act parallel to radical cancer surgery. No one in their "right mind" would start taking apart their ego, which is the instinctive core of our social survival.

Forgiveness is not noble. We only do this in complete desperation, when all negotiation with the partner has failed. When we are incapable of discussing the matter; exhausted in our attempts; have no new ideas; have reached a total Waterloo; and furthermore are in deep psycho-emotional pain. Only then is forgiveness the way out of suffering.

The only useful motive for forgiveness is utter desperation.

If this is happening to you, you may be blessed to look back upon your troubled marriage and your hurtful partner as the best problem you ever had in your life. Because, skillfully handled, the anger (ego-threat), pain, anxiety, and sorrow caused by marital conflict can force the spirit who is ready, into a much broader campaign of forgiveness which encompasses not only the spouse but all the "usual suspects" who have harmed us in this life.

Marriage Conflict – Childhood Wounds and Relationship Traumas

" Out Beyond Idea of Wrong Doing and Right Doing, There is a Field... I will meet you there..." (Rumi)

Everyone has marriage stress. Marriage is socially comfortable but psychically demanding, because marriage demands awareness and conscious change in response to the partner's needs. That's the way it is and that's the way it's supposed to be. What we need to accept and understand is that conflict in a relationship is natural and is supposed to happen. Its the way of nature. Conflict needs to be understood in terms of the psyche trying to survive to get its needs met and become whole.

The good news is that we marry people who have the "keys" to our own spiritual growth. Therefore even when relationships aren't easy, they are purposeful & productive. Marriage is the single most powerful spiritual path there is. The spouse is a mirror into our soul. If we don't like what we see in the mirror, its time to get serious about changing our perceptions.

Often folks believe that if they are having problems there is something fundamentally wrong with the marriage. Not so! It is fundamentally "right" for a every marriage to have problems. Ignorant of the process of healing childhood wounds through conflict in current relationships, society has made "incompatibility" grounds for divorce. This arises precisely out of a childlike wishlist for conflict free relationships which is a distortion of the natural process. Divorce does not solve the problem. We may get rid of the partner but we keep the problem, carting them into the next relationship.

One of the major healing functions of marriage is to heal childhood wounds and we "should" learn how to find the middle path of peace by constantly negotiating with our partner "who is a completely different person" than ourselves. The conflict starts in this life where it left off in past lives. The person you marry knows you very well, from past lives. Having reconnected "where we left off" we can from the present-life start point, consciously, start to make progress again. Each marital conflict is a step up in self knowledge. Each conflict is the next lesson in finding agreement, building trust, healing old wounds, and learning how to love.

We don't really understand "love" until the end of marriage, after we have resolved hundreds of intense conflicts, and learned the path of tolerance, acceptance, compassion, & trust in the Divine. So, that's why marriage must have conflict and lots of it!! Everyone has the specific marriage conflict which they uniquely need to work on, to build those compassionate, loving, tolerant, spiritually aware conflict-resolution skills.

Everyone gets the partner they have asked for. Everyone gets the partner they deserve! The key to "enjoying" the conflicts is to appreciate that only conflict carried through to resolution can build "conscious" peace as opposed to passive conflict free peace. We can get unconscious peace through denial or suppression. That's always an option but spiritually it's a waste of a lifetime. Many of us were raised to believe that conflict in marriage is wrong; that everything should be peaceful & in agreement all the time. That's actually impossible, given the deeper purpose of marriage. If you want to do the most meaningful spiritual work of your life, get married and work consciously through each conflict, as it arises.

Humanity’s yearning - whether man or woman, is essentially the same. All of us seek connection. We cannot experience life in its fullness unless we have an intimate relationship with another human being. Each person needs a “Thou” to become a fully realized “I”. But in our Hurly burly, mad dog-eat-dog world, the individual ego transcends the relationship and therefore we have more of “ Me vs You” instead of "I and Thou".

Most people experience their first relationship difficulty in the first years of life. In order to experience strong and safe connections with the parent as a caregiver, children need attuned parents. Attuned parents hold you when you need comfort and physical connection. You are fed when you are hungry and you are soothed when you are irritable, afraid or in pain. The attuned parent also allows you to express the full range of your emotions, joy, playfulness, frustration and anger rather than suppress them. Children raised by attuned parents are more likely to create satisfying love relationships in adulthood. Because they had such a safe and nurturing bond with their caregivers, they are not swept away by exaggerated fears of abandonment and engulfment.

Regrettable many of us had unattuned parents and we bring the resulting unmet demands and fear into our adult relationships. Not only did we experience disconnection from our parents we feel disconnected from our innermost emotions. In the broadest sense the unattuned parents either neglected us by failing to attend to our needs or they intruded upon us by trying to meet their own unmet needs thru us. An unhappy childhood where the yearning for the caregivers love was unmet by parents too preoccupied with their own world, leads to fears and an active discomfort in adulthood in acknowledging feelings of love, dependence and vulnerability. The sense that nothing is truly stable, that circumstances can change in a heartbeat stays with them. The unhappy child turned adult still yearns for a close love relationship but also fears it, the feeling of becoming dependent on another person makes them uncomfortable. They are unable to fully trust the partner driven by a deep seated fear of abandonment that plays on their mind. Hence two people wounded at childhood cannot connect if they are constantly defending themselves against a barrage of negativity or they live in fear of being abandoned by their partners. They are likely to be friendly and relaxed on the outside but inside have deep psychic wounds that cause them anxiety within the relationship. This psychicly wounded child turned adult constantly puts their partner thru "tests", trying to discern whether their partners love is real or ephemeral. This untrusting behaviour can do serious damage to an otherwise perfectly good relationship.

Soothing the pain defuses the anger that no longer intrudes on the relationship. Mirroring is a powerful tool for creating an I-Thou relationship. To mirror your partner you have to turn down the volume of your own thoughts so you can LISTEN attentively. You have to switch the channel from “me” to “you”. In effect you are telling your partner I am no longer the sole person in this universe. I am acknowledging your separate existence. Your thoughts are important to me. Many people spend much time and energy trying to get their partners to think the same way as they do. It is important to understand that one does not have to agree with the partner. It is important that you affirm the logic of your partners thinking to see your partner as the other and not as an extension of yourself.

To unattuned parents, who could not transcend their own world view, the fact that different points of view could be equally valid was beyond their comprehension. Whether or not we were understood was dependent entirely on the mood and presence of mind of the adults around us. They could diminish what we had to say, ignore it, counter it and also shame us for even daring to express it. So conditioned are we to receiving such behavior that we carry these images into our adulthood and sadly perpetuate this pattern in our daily lives. Mirroring stops this destructive behavior in its tracks. When you mirror each other, you both get to experience what it is like to have someone pay close attention to what you are saying, understand what you have to say and honor your uniqueness. And because the brain does not differentiate present from the past, your unconscious mind perceives the attention you are receiving as coming from a caretaker not just from your present day intimate partner and the rupture in the connection just got a few stitches as repair. The partner’s keen interest in our thoughts helps repair those feelings of neglect from long ago. This in turn helps us to feel safer in our partner’s presence and we then discover parts of ourselves that had been hidden from us since childhood.

Love Heals all is a well known sentiment and it can heal even the deepest emotional wound - the ruptured connection between you and your caregivers. But it needs to be a mature and patient love that does not manipulate and distort and needs to take place within the context of an intimate Relationship. With this comes the realization that one is just as important as the other and has an equally valid view of the universe. Yet together they form a greater whole, kept connected by the pull of mutual love and respect. They Mirror the interconnected universe.

The Karmic Clean up

Countless rebirths lie ahead, both good and bad. The effects of karma (actions) are inevitable, and in previous lifetimes we have accumulated negative karma which will inevitably have its fruition in this or future lives. (His Holiness The Dalai Lama)

First is ignorance - not knowing the truth and not realizing that we do not know. Second is materialism - the belief that there is nothing but the physical. As spiritual beings, we long for the Divine, but we lose contact with this source of truth if we trust only our senses.

We all have unfinished business from past lives, in the unfinished cycle of action-reaction caused by karmic ignorance. We all are given all opportunity to clean up our act in the current life. Life force is arranged in such a way so that we re-encounter the same set of people, the same scene and forces that created the previous action. Only now we are given a chance to make a better choice.

When we inadvertently harm others out of karmic ignorance, the karmic machine is set in motion. The Life force of our current life is so positioned so that the native receives precisely in the same proportion we once gave to others in a past life. The karmic group being the same from life after life, the harming agent is precisely that person we hurt in our previous life.

People reincarnate in karmic groups over and over, specifically to facilitate this karmic payback. Although being in a dysfunctional family, marriage, or workgroup doesn't feel very pleasant, it's actually how we liberate each other. And Shani (Saturn) is the Karma planet that is the exacter of punishment or retribution. The transformation that shani forces upon us is ego-challenging, brutal but purifying. Shani's job is to force us to chip away at our karmic backlog. We all have a certain amount of debt to repay. Shani is the very definition of your karmic resistance: the acceptance and release work you have set for yourself in the current life. Once the native is able to fully comprehend the import of his past life errors that are the cause of pain in the present life, this spiritual attention and awareness is half the battle won. Once we recognize and own up to these errors we CAN overcome our bad karma through a simple release process. Standing outside of the situation in a neutral non-judgmental stance and accepting moral responsibility for the situation helps to create positive karma and release. Making amends to the persons involved may be helpful, but the essential chemical in the release process is simply gratitude. Once ignorance is transformed into wisdom (read awareness) karma is dissolved.

Shani's job is to bring forward people we have inadvertantly harmed in past lives, give them an opportunity to enter into a negative relationship with us, harm us in return and thereby allow us to consciously realize that we attracted those people into our livesin order to learn about compassion. This is a painful and frustrating process but really it is the only way to balance the karmic ledger.

Trust the pace of progress under Shani to be perfectly timed and entirely appropriate to who you are - and who you are becoming - in the big picture. By developing a knowledge of life outside the ego - by learning to think and perceive "outside the box" of material senses - Shani's suffering can be seen scientifically, as a real but impersonal phenomena of karmic clean-up.

Sai Baba of Shirdi spoke eloquently of Rinanubandh (the karmic association which tie two people together over many lifetimes)…Sai Baba said that even though there are those that enjoy a happy life in the current, even so man must think of the next life while performing virtuous deeds in the current life…in our lives my friends and my enemies have to be equally addressed to, as both have been created by me and are mine. Since both of them have been created due to karmic bandhan (Rinanubandh) it is our duty to neutralize the effects of both in this life so that we don't carry forward the seeds of cause-effect to the next life. Herein the karma theory says that a friend returns the pleasurable experience(s) as we had given same or similar pleasurable experiences to him in past life. Similarly an enemy would pay back the unpleasant or painful experience(s) because we had given him same or similar painful experience(s) in the past. When facing a situation of unhappiness created by the enemy we have two options to deal with him-either by going through painful experience(s) we neutralize its effects or by reacting adversely we carry forward a chain of reaction to future lives. Sai Baba has advised his devotees not to react sharply and adversely towards enemies with equal and opposite negativities but to allow negative effects of past karmas reflected through the enemy to neutralize gradually.

Marriage is the key karmic work of our era. Marriage is the core social and emotional bond of adult life. Marriage is a powerful yoga! For most people, ego-attachment to the marriage partner's body/personality is second only to ego-attachment to one's own body/personality. From a karmic point of view, physical separation and divorce is the result of a marriage contract having become “saturated” when this life's karma in the matter of marriage relations is completed, but like most forms of dis-enchantment, the divorce experience can willingly serve the spirit's hunger for karmic rectification. Two people who are divorcing each other are providing each other an important spiritual service, whether they recognize that or not. Material separation through divorce alienates the partners only on the temporary material plane of the current incarnation. It does not alienate the two souls eternally. Actually, the separation will be caused by past-life karma and will be precisely what each soul needs in order to advance its wisdom in the current lifetime.

In fact, there is no success or failure in marriage. People come together for the highest work that their mutual awareness will allow. When the work is completed, they move on. You will reconnect with your current spouse again in your next life. Our reincarnation groups are remarkably small. The karmic group consists of people who batch together for intensive interactive psychic work, over and over again. You can be certain that you have been married to this person before, and quit likely will be again. You have also been their mother and father before, been their child and boss before, their guru and their student before. Interpersonal psycho-emotional work is not any easier or more amusing than the work of physical or social survival. It is just another level of karmic backlog that is sitting there waiting to get worked out, i.e., ignorance transformed into wisdom. Nevertheless it is an earned privilege to reach the level of material luxury, which allows even the possibility of multiple, voluntarily chosen marriage unions.

Some people have chosen fast-track incarnations where they are healing a huge amount of old karmic backlog, by reconnecting with multiple serial monogamous partners. The key indication of success in a multiple-marriage lifetime, is whether one can remain neutral friends with the former spouse. Many people are able to enjoy good relationships with former spouses these days. The social judgment of “failed marriage” runs off them like water off a duck’s back. Many would bow to accepting the conventional social wisdom that it’s better to build character by staying with one difficult partner rather than indulging in multiple sexual attractions. Society very much criticizes change of any kind, particularly changes in caste, level, or power such as change of marital status. Social control judgment will punish you with criticism of “failed marriage”. But the spirit itself has only one simple goal: transformation of ignorance into wisdom.