Betrayal

When we are genuinely interested in the truth, the whole truth, we realize with a greater sorrow that this betrayal from the outside is less terrible than another betrayal: we come to understand that we have betrayed ourselves. We realize that when our environment betrayed us and abandoned us, with varying degrees of insensitivity, we felt alone and abandoned, with no one relating to us. To be real meant being isolated from the environment, living in another universe, a universe not seen by our parents, not acknowledged by them, even not known by them... so we learned to pretend, to be like them, to join them in their world, the world of lies, the world of the shell, the conventional world. We became what they wanted us to be, what they paid attention to in us, what they preferred in us, what made them relate to us. Through this process of accommodation, we abandoned and rejected what they could not see, the parts of us they did not relate to. Since our Essence was the element they recognized or understood least, our Essence was the central element we disowned. We ended up abandoning and hiding our most precious nature. We hid it finally even from ourselves; most of us eventually forgot it altogether. (The Point of Existence, pg 319)

The great betrayal

Stop striving after all kinds of things; stop dreaming, scheming, planning, working, achieving, attempting, moving, manipulating, trying to be something, trying to get somewhere. You forget the simplest, most obvious thing, which is to be here. If you are not in your body, you miss the source of all significance, meaning, and satisfaction. How can you feel the satisfaction, if you are not here? We miss who we are, which is fundamentally beingness, existence. If we are not here, we exist only on the fringes of reality. We don't sufficiently value simply being. Instead, we value what we want to accomplish, or what we want to possess. It is our biggest mistake. It is called the "great betrayal." (Diamond Heart Book 3, pg 12)

Betrayal and survival

The development of and identification with the self-representations is, of course, not simply a result of the student turning away from her essential self. Many other factors determine this development. However she has participated, wittingly or unwittingly, in the process of going to sleep, of turning away from the aspects of her soul that her environment could not or would not recognize. She did it to survive, because the loneliness and hurt were intolerable; nevertheless she did participate. Understanding her choiceless choice, her extreme dependence on her early caregivers, helps her now to acknowledge her part in the betrayal and feel compassion about the untenable position she found herself in early childhood. (The Point of Existence, pg 321)