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Yeats, Georgie - A Vision - 4 Shifting
Identifier
011845
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Shifting has no direct equivalent in the spiritual path, but its closest equivalent is the Relearning process. It is a process that can only apply to the dead. In some respects it is a continuation of the purification process as it is still a reviewing of the past life of the person. The objective is to understand good and evil by reviewing past events again, it is about the closest Georgie's 'instructors' came to describing a form of Judgement day.
We are not alone in this process, we have help spirits who have attained levels of balance and equanimity and knowledge greater than ours. Yeats calls them 'thirteenth cone' spirits
A description of the experience
W B Yeats – A Vision
At the end of the second state, the events of the past life are a whole and can be dismissed; the emotional and moral life however is but a whole according to the code accepted during life. …................
I think of a girl in a Japanese play whose ghost tells a priest of a slight sin, if indeed it was a sin, which seems great because of her exaggerated conscience. She is surrounded by flames, and though the priest explains that if she but ceased to believe in these flames they would cease to exist, believe she must and the play ends in an elaborate dance, the dance of her agony.
….........................
Called the shiftings, the spirit is purified of 'good' and 'evil'. In so far as the man did good without knowing evil, or evil without knowing good, his nature is reversed until that knowledge is obtained. The spirit lives – I quote the automatic script – 'the best possible life in the worst possible surroundings or the contrary of this; yet there is no suffering; 'For in a state of equilibrium there is neither emotion or sensation'.
In the limits of the good and evil of the previous life.... the soul is brought to a contemplation of good and evil; 'neither its utmost good nor its utmost evil can force sensation or emotion.
The victim must, in the Shiftings, live the act of cruelty, not as victim but as tyrant; whereas the tyrant must by a necessity of his or her nature become the victim. But if one is dead and the other living they find each other in thought and symbol, the one that has been passive and is now active may from within control the other, once tyrant now victim....
The souls of victim and tyrant are bound together and unless there is a redemption through intercommunication of the living and the dead, that bond may continue life after life, and this is just...
The expiation is completed and the oscillation brought to an end for each at the same moment. There are other bonds, master and servant, benefactor and beneficiary, any relation that is deeper than the intellect may become such a bond. We get happiness, my instructors say, from those we have served, ecstasy from those we have wronged.................
In the phantasmagoria and in the shiftings [the spirit is in the presence of ] those summoned by the thirteenth cone and the celestial body respectively