Colin Tipping - Radical Self-Forgiveness: The Direct Path to True Self-Acceptance

Bearing in mind all that we have achieved in evolutionary terms since the time we walked the earth as an apelike species, you would think we would be feeling pretty good about ourselves in the twenty-first century. Apparently, this is not the case. When the human psyche is examined in depth, it appears that deep down we are all afflicted with a profound and enduring sense of self-loathing.

The twentieth-century Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, and many others who have since followed his lead, has shown that both individually and collectively we have repressed a huge amount of guilt and shame about ourselves. Jung referred to this as our shadow. Each one of us has an individualized shadow, of course, but in addition we all share a collective shadow, deeply buried in the collective unconscious. And we absolutely do not wish to face it or recognize it. We are in complete denial about it, and we hate it in ourselves. It is the very root of our self-loathing.

However, just because it is buried deep down in our unconscious mind does not mean that this shadow material is inert or inactive. Far from it, in fact. The truth is that its constantly trying to come to the surface to be healed, but our fear of facing it is so strong that we often resort to forms of projection and other defense mechanisms. When we unconsciously project it onto other people, we make them wrong for whatever it is we hate in ourselves. This is so common that even political groups, religious organizations, and countries do the same thing. They find enemies on whom to project their shadow material by waging war on them or attacking them in some way.

When we examine conflicts that have occurred in the past and even those that are happening today around the world, it becomes clear in many cases that the very accusations one country expresses against another turn out to be a pure reflection of the formers own crimes and indiscretions and, thus, shame and guilt from past incidents. In my book A Radical Incarnation, I made the case that America saw an opportunity to project its shame and guilt about the ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the Native Americans, and many other crimes against its own people, onto Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. In both cases the ensuing wars were opportunities for America to heal its shadow. However, those opportunities were missed as we now know.

From a more spiritual standpoint, it has been suggested that this extremely deep-rooted self-hatred comes from our belief that we took it upon ourselves to separate from Godthe original sin. At the moment of separation, so the story goes, we believed that God was very angry with us and would one day catch up with us and punish us severely. This created enormous guilt, and the only way to deal with that guilt was to repress it, and then, if it started to reappear, project it onto others.

Even if we dont wish to believe this story, and Im not sure that I do, it still largely holds true that much of the wrongdoing that we recognize in those we see as our enemies is nothing more than projections of our own internalized self-hatred. This is still true no matter its cause. The purpose of this book, therefore, is twofold:

Insofar as we know, when one person makes a significant change to his or her consciousness, it causes a significant ripple effect throughout the collective and contributes to the mass healing of human consciousness. With these practices, you will, in fact, be helping me achieve my mission, which is to raise the consciousness of the planet through Radical Forgiveness and to create a World of Forgiveness within the foreseeable future.

Yes, I know this is a grandiose mission statement, and to be honest, when I put it down on paper back in the early 1990s, I really had no belief that it was possibleespecially since I had targeted 2012 as the time it would happen. But consciousness has shifted in the intervening years, and I can now envision it occurring quite soon, so long as we keep progressing by raising our individual vibrations day-by-day. And the most successful and expedient way of achieving that is to use the Radical Forgiveness and Radical Self-Forgiveness technology.

It has been suggested to me many times that surely we need to forgive ourselves before we can forgive others. That being so, why would I have waited almost a dozen years after writing the first book on Radical Forgiveness to write this book on Radical Self-Forgiveness? Shouldnt it have been the other way around?