JULY-SEPTEMBER 2012
VICE PRESIDENT’s LETTER by Athanasios Komianos
Our president asked me to write in the section of the president’s letter. He seems to have been worn out from the convention and the TASSO training right before that. But it is surprising that he was not terrified by my emotional speech at the opening night. After leaving from Germany and returning home I felt content. This must have been the best convention that I have attended in six years. It seems that a lot of attendants shared the same feeling. I am talking about the energy exchange and the profound experiences that we all had. Many people complained about the venue and the menu, quite rightly so. But we cannot have it all. We were at a beautiful and calm place and we had great workshops and indeed a very high quality of presentations. It is a shame that a lot of members did not make it to the convention which was indeed really successful.
We saw a lot of aspects and angles of the issue of shame and guilt. But since a lot of people approached and congratulated me about the opening night speech and since most of them seemed to really share similar ideas I thought it would be a better idea to share with you my speech in this newsletter. The reason is threefold. First, it is different when you read something; you are detached and there is a critical distance. You have the time to process and reject what is being written, as opposed to what you listen to, when at an audience, by an emotional person. The second reason is that it 
was not videotaped or recorded. Finally and most importantly, more than 150 of our members did not attend the convention and it would be nice for them to have the chance to acquire some taste of what went on. Of course they will never be able to taste or share what we experienced at the AC. They will not be able to listen to Resat’s piano playing, or to eat the vegetarian sausages, or dance at the Latin rhythms, or witness the awards ceremony by Karen and Assina with meters of EARTh Newsletter flags or hear the great jokes that circled around. They did not have the chance to meet in person with our new honorary member professor Mario Simoes, from Portugal; they did not see the EARTh/ hEART game, or the Heaven/Earth happening with the percussion playing at the closing ceremony. But enough for now, here is the opening night speech:
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Dear Colleagues,
It has been already 5 years since I joined this family called EARTh. At first it was great because it gave me a sense that I am not alone. But then I realized that even if you are with more than two hundred people that share with you the same understanding of this world, it is still lonely out here.
Here is why…
As trained regression therapists we need more qualifications than our conventional colleagues. By definition our profession brings us on the fringe of borderline science, making all other fringe researchers look at us scornfully. In other words we are the fringe of the fringe. There is a very high degree of distrust about us among them. Thus you should not be surprised if parapsychologists look at us with disdain. “Mainstream Fringe Scientists” call us freaks. We are looked upon as some New Age freaks which I hope we are not. For instance the University of Virginia studies reincarnation but discourages people to work with past-life regression. They trust children’s stories but distrust experiences that arise through hypnotic induction. The Rhine Center studies ESP and telepathy but does not accept our findings. It should not then be a surprise to you that ghost hunters easily laugh with what we do.
On the other end of the spectrum we have the conventional colleagues, the traditional psychotherapists, the mainstream-mainstream. Contrary to them we mostly use ASC’s for our work. And what we have discovered over and over again is that the presenting problem of our clients has nothing to do with what the underlying one really is. We’ve learned that the conscious babbling and prattling has nothing to do with the feelings and emotions which are flowing deeply in the unconscious. Thus presenting symptoms are only misleading us. The root, the cause of the problem is always somewhere else to be seen. But unlike our conventional colleagues we also discovered dimensions and layers of experiences that they have never addressed, simply because they do not use ASC’s. We’ve discovered that consciousness survives bodily death. We have found that consciousness moves to another level of being after death. We call it the “Life between Lives” stage, and even though there is a certain degree of disagreement on what goes on there, we overall understand the same basic things.
Not only that, we have also discovered that people have several embodiments and reincarnate. Not only do they go on as spirits but they reincarnate every so often. The deeper our research went, the deeper we found other levels of the psyche. We discovered that a spirit will not necessarily move to the light but in some cases linger around and haunt a place or dwell in a person’s aura. We call the latter an attachment. This attaching spirit can interfere with the well-being of the host. Not all of us in regression therapy accept this concept but it seems that by now the majority does. Then, as we dug deeper we found other dimensions and entities, we found non-human entities. In other words as regression therapists we came in touch with phenomena that are considered by the majority as paranormal but no matter how we define them, they occur and they are there.
In my humble opinion no regression therapist should practice professionally if they are not aware of such phenomena. Out of body experiences, Near Death Experiences, Poltergeist phenomena, apparitions, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, after death communication, psychokinesis, alien abductions, responsive xenoglossy etc. Not only should we study the literature concerning these phenomena but we should also be able to handle with competence their expression. When we work with trance and ASC’s we should expect during our sessions any of the aforementioned phenomena to occur.
In many of our conventions a lot of these phenomena have been studied and elaborated in workshops so that most of us can understand the dynamics involved in therapy.
When I first discovered these phenomena I was so eager to study them to learn everything, that I devoured all the related literature. I felt like a liberator, a carrier of a higher truth. It felt so good to have life-changing effects when I successfully released a possessing spirit. It was such a relief for my client and me…
So far, so good, but there is a turning point here and that is what we have to see. When we deal with an attachment for instance, what do we do? Do we expel the entity like an exorcist would or what? Well what we do is simply therapy, therapy and nothing else; which means that we have to deal with basic psychological issues. To expel an attachment is an easy thing. To fight with your demons is something far more difficult, but to fight with yourself and your psychological issues, is another thing altogether. What is the motive behind a possessing spirit? It is usually fear, despair, pain, remorse, revenge, and other emotions that have frozen and need to be dealt with, like guilt and shame.
“Beyond Guilt and Shame” could easily be the title of a convention (and probably has been in the past) of traditional psychotherapists rather than our own. The reason of selecting this theme should be clear by now. It is simply because it is in these issues that we mostly get stuck and it is very difficult to help those in need of our help. It is in these issues that most of us have trouble dealing with them. Out of many themes we came up with guilt and shame. I hope that in this convention, new insights, new ideas and new approaches that will help us resolve such issues, will be addressed.
According to Oxford Dictionary shame is a distressed feeling, loss of self- respect, caused by wrong dishonourable, or foolish behaviour, failure, etc. Guilt on the other hand is a condition of having done wrong or committed an offense.
Who of us have not found themselves in such a condition? Who of us have not felt ashamed for a wrong doing or guilty for misconduct?
I will paraphrase an Aesop’s fable which he used about mistakes. He said that all of us carry on us two sacks on our neck; the one which is in front of us carries the mistakes of others. The one at the back of it carries the mistakes of ours. What we see is the mistakes of the others, while we neglect our own. Is it the same with shame and guilt? I guess the answer is yes. We tend to focus on the other’s wrong doings that are shameful and we keep on not seeing ours. Who of you has not done such a thing? Shame on you!!! No more projections please. “Let him who is sinless cast the first stone.”
Shame and guilt can be social, cultural, religious as well as personal. A whole country’s collective unconscious may be burdened by guilt for wrongdoing and disasters caused by them. A whole race may be burdened. The whites enslaved the blacks and uprooted them causing trauma and pain using them in forced labor. The American Indians were deliberately exterminated by the white expansion. Western people live at the expense of the third world. Also religious practices, like confession, take place when people think they have sinned, sin; being a far greater sense of guilt, a break of a moral code of conduct, an institutionalized guilt.
In our convention though, it is the personal aspect of it that we will look into. For instance, I personally feel ashamed because now I cannot use any of my techniques in my armament to help people in my country who are in deep despair. How can you get someone desolate out of severe hopelessness? How can you support a person whose way of life has been looted and seized? Since the memorandum started we have more than 2000 suicides which constantly arise as a figure. This is our so called “collateral loss” as the new World Order imposes.
Dear colleagues, you must prepare for the coming days. Greece and the other “PIGS” are only the beginning. Unfortunately, your turn is coming as well. Prepare yourselves for those days and teach yourselves what is needed to help people deal with a crisis situation. Find ways to show them an alternative approach to their dead end.
When you boil down to it, shame is a devastating feeling that burdens our psyche like a hunchback. The challenge for us is to find effective ways of getting rid of this hunchback, of transforming guilt into understanding, and shame into a lesson. That is a way to go beyond guilt and shame…at least, I hope so.
Thank you all.
