ACCEPTANCE is one of seven possible goals in life, chosen by a soul before taking birth. It causes the personality to seek positive relationships and enjoy contact with others.
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“All you need is love”
The goal of Acceptance is all about seeking harmonious, positive relationships. As the cardinal expression goal, the focus of Acceptance is on expressing oneself in a way that brings self and others into harmony or union.
The aim from the soul’s perspective is to express (convey, demonstrate) our commonality, our connectedness, our potential for unity. It is the soul’s way of seeking to overcome the human illusion of separation and alienation.
This is a popular goal, and for good reason. One of the essential ingredients of every soul is love. It is part of our true nature, the very force which animates us. Love for one another is our natural state.
But it also one of the things we soon forget in each lifetime. One of the challenges facing us as we come into physical existence is to remember this basic truth, to manifest it in our human relationships.
Acceptance is the goal which focuses on precisely this challenge.
Without acceptance, various things tend to get in the way of harmonious relationship. There are our judgements of one another, our fears of one another, our tendency to hurt and exploit one another, and so on.
The goal of Acceptance motivates us to get past these obstacles and transcend our differences. Every relationship — every other being — is an opportunity to give and receive warmth and love, to overcome separation and division, to experience connection and harmony. It is as if one is constantly saying to others: “I accept who you are. We are the same. Let us embrace each other.”
Having the goal of Acceptance
At the personality level, Acceptance means being warm and friendly and letting others in. Those with this goal find a sense of meaning and purpose in experiencing some connection with others, and they seek to create many positive, harmonious relationships. Life is an opportunity to enjoy socialising, bonding and loving.
If you have a goal of Acceptance, you will probably experience life as a set of relationships of different strengths, perhaps something like a set of concentric circles around you, from the closest to the most distant. You probably know many people, have many friends and contacts. Your aim, or at least your hope, is to have ever more and ever stronger good relationships.
If you have a goal of Acceptance, you also probably find that other people are naturally attracted to you. This is partly because the goal of Acceptance motivates you — and in fact causes you — to look particularly pleasant and attractive. You probably have a warm and open face with a big, bright smile.
But people are also attracted to you because you are so willing to accept them. Having Acceptance as your driving force is like being a magnet — others find your tendency to be nice, warm, forgiving and open-hearted practically irresistible!
You might also find it easy to spot other people who share the goal of Acceptance, and automatically feel drawn to them. There is often an instant rapport and a mutual attraction at some level. And whenever you do meet another person with Acceptance, it’s a win-win situation — you are both happy to accept each other and accept one another’s acceptance!
Acceptance: positive and negative
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Acceptance |
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| Agape (pure love). Loving-Kindness. Compassion. Altruism. | Ingratiation. Sycophancy. Flattery. |
The positive pole of Acceptance in its ultimate form is best described by the Greek word agape [ “ah-gah-pay” ], which means unconditional love in its most perfect and selfless form.
“We use this word to express the unqualified acceptance of another person’s being as the greater part of self. We know of no other word that would be appropriate… It is the recognition that the solid isolation of the physical plane is only the personality’s faulty perception, and that in truth there is no separation — there is only one.”
– MIchael (1974)
We can also liken it too the Buddhist ideal of perfect compassion and loving-kindness. It is an unrestrained embrace of other beings, straight from the heart, given freely. Jesus is probably the prime example of this positive pole of Acceptance.
The negative pole of Acceptance is ingratiation. Basically this means constantly seeking signs of acceptance from others — trying to please or impress or suck up to others — out of a fear of rejection. “I’ll do anything for you, if it will stop you from rejecting me.” Ingratiation manifests as people-pleasing, approval-seeking, flattering, and instantly agreeing with others’ opinions without thinking about one’s own opinions (conformity).
If you are caught up in this negative pole, it is time to swing to the opposite goal, Rejection, and its positive pole of discrimination. In other words, it’s time to exercise some firm, critical judgement as to who you are trying to please and why, and to focus on speaking your own truth — especially the truth about not agreeing with everybody else’s opinions and not wanting to meet everybody else’s demands.
Although this might feel like you risk rejecting others, that’s not what this is about. It’s about you saying your truth and giving them the opportunity to accept you anyway. In a sense, it’s about you accepting that others have choice about whether or not they accept you.
Acceptance: some famous examples
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Goal: the driving force of the personality
• Contentment •
Quick question: Relaxation link is dead. What happened?
But i love reading this info. It’s thought provoking.
Ah, thanks Carl – but where is the link exactly?
Thank you for this site. You have translated and related for us all an incredible wealth of information. My awareness of the connectedness and oneness of existence is validated, and I’m glad I’ve chosen to embark on this journey. At this very moment I’m gaining a deeper respect for life and others experiencing, evolving. Intrinsically I’ve always known about the process (we all do ey?) still, thanks to you and these teachings, my small fraction of doubt has been resolved, I am confident in rebirth and my purpose this time. I can sense home…All these words, but really I just wanted to send a blessing, I cannot thank you enough.
I am so delighted that my information has been of such value you to, Jessica. Every time someone says this to me, I feel reassured that I am fulfilling my life’s task.
Many thanks,
Barry
Hi again Barry, yes feel assured you are completing your life task- I’ve thought that as I’ve studied these pages! 🙂 thank you again for all of this and thank you for your response.
Best wishes,
Jessica
🙂
Hi!
I’d like to thank you for this wonderfull site, it provided me with new insights.
I am clearly a Priest soul because i’m always looking to inspire people to change their ways for the better, a thought-provoker if you will. I’m pretty sure i’m a muture soul since feelings and relationships are important to me. At first i thought i was an old soul but i still believe this world can be saved through love and unity. I am searching for ways to make that happen.
Now, what i can’t really relate to is “my goal”.
I’m planning to climb Mt Blanc this august and i’m preparing myself since i’ve never climbed before. Me and a few friends are starting up an organization to raise money to help build schools and provide food in mainly Tanzania, Africa.
At the same time i often feel exhausted at the end of the day. I’m an introvert and i’ve been diving through the endless sea whithin since i can remember. What I do know is that I want to inspire people, as many as I can. To feel, to be, and to make this place a little better by just being kind.
I’m Swedish so please excuse any bad grammar and spelling errors.
I don’t see myself fitting whitin any of the goals. So, what do you think? What am I missing?
Hi Johannes
Well, in my case I thought about what I felt I “should” really accomplish in life, or to put it more negatively, in the darkest depths of my soul, what did I most fear about dying? I found that I could not bear the idea of dying without having known and become aware of as much as possible. The goal of growth resonated well with that.
The life goal is a broad direction, like north v south. Climbing a mountain could be a means to serve any (or none) of them. It could also be a learning/training experience that will serve you later in life on for whatever life task you are here to perform.
Not being psychic, I can’t tell you what your goal is, but by a process of elimination (going by the way you express yourself) I would rule our rejection and retardation.
If you have a bright, open, smiley face, and enjoy relationships, then acceptance is likely. If you have a stern, determined expression, and enjoy a competitive challenge, then dominance is more likely. If you have a look of curiosity mixed with bewilderment, that would be growth.
And of course, if you react to all of those with something like “meh”, then contentment (flow/stagnation) is a pretty good bet!
Cheers
Barry
Hi Barry, I was wondering if it’s possible to switch from the goal of discrimination to acceptance. I feel I am having that shift. I know you mentioned that temporarily shifting goals is a possibility. Am interested in knowing if this is the case.
-Adam
Hi Adam, and yes, that sounds likely. We deliberately “gravitate” to one goal throughout life, such as discrimination/rejection, so that we end up having the sorts of experiences and choices we want to take on this specific life. However, nothing is set in stone and – especially if you have been getting stuck in the negative pole of your goal – it can be a great relief to swing to the opposite, in this case Acceptance. For example, being hyper-discriminating or hyper-rejecting (e.g., misanthropic rants) can be very hard for others to be around, leading to isolation, loss of friendships, feeling the hatred of others. Then it would be good to swing to the positive pole of acceptance – agape or communion or fellowship – to remind yourself we’re all in it together and it feels good to belong. Or you could just decide you’ve had some very insightful experiences through this discriminating way of being, and you want to compare / contrast with the opposite way of being, purely to appreciate the balance in the bigger picture.
Hope this makes sense!
Barry
It’s my own thoughts that have guided me to be the individual I am. Before now I wondered on others for answers…
The greatest gift in my life is the knowing of hope in others sacrifices. They are the direction of the future and our makers instruction for reasons to believe in humanity
I thought on research and found only me in the end
Can you accept other if they cheat you? Can you still love them when they hurt you more than once? \Can you really endure the pain if they bring you not once but many times. We try to love them but some they just don’t response to your love. I try to shower them with love . I didn’t expect anything form them but still I get what I am not suppose to get
Ultimately, you CAN wholeheartedly accept another no matter what they do.
In fact, true love is when you “shower them with love” without expecting anything whatsover in return. True love is also a state we experience between lives, when we feel the Light showering us with love yet expecting nothing in return from us.
If you love someone in the hope that it will change them, or earn you some points, then that’s not true love. Love needs no reward.
The unconditional, freely given love is, in a way, the state we are all aspiring to. In fact, it is already our true nature – we are beings of love. We’re just learning how to know and show that in the harsh realities of physical life. Until then, conditional love s all we got.
Here’s another way to see this specific situation:
When a person resorts to cheating and hurting others to get their own way, then they are not very evolved in their understanding of who and what they and we are. They are showing their relative immaturity. And that’s alright, we all have to go through it.
You know the greeting NAMASTE?: “The divine in me acknowledges the divine in you” … and it applies equally to all, even to those who are as yet clueless about the divine in anything.
A POSSIBLE LIFE TASK?
Given the situation you describe, it is also quite possible that your task or challenge in life is to give as much love as you can … AND GET NOTHING IN RETURN.
I can see how that might be a valuable way to learn the meaning of love without expectations. If so (and this is purely hypothetical), your current lesson would be something like to understand, though raw experience, that giving love is not a game of trading favours. It’s a decision to give love/acceptance out of your own free will, rather than out of a sense of obligation or out of hoping for things to change.
You also sound like you’re probably a Mature soul, in that you don’t just want to blame him and leave it at that, but you want to understand so that things can be different – better for everyone.
I once had a personal insight, which left me dumbstruck for days, which was that “everyone always deserves forgiveness.” I’m now convinced it’s a universal law. When people do “bad” things, it’s simply because they don’t know any better. They are seeing others through a tiny, simplistic and distorted worldview. They imagine it is more important to advance their own agenda than it is to take care not to hurt others along the way.
Either that, or they have developed (over several lives) a strong, demanding, Dominance-seeking side, which has actually become over-developed relative to their (slowly diminishing) warm, caring, Acceptance-seeking side. Thus they are in a state of personality imbalance – losing all interest in relationships for the sake of always being in charge.
FEAR OR REJECTION OF INTIMACY
Some people are “incapable” of responding to love because they have a deep-seated fear of intimacy. Any attempt by an outsider (like you, say) to cross the chasm and meet them will be met with barricades, hails of arrows, and boiling tar. (Metaphorically speaking of course!)
If this is the case, there could be some childhood trauma involved, such as “When I was a baby I was very close to my mother, but suddenly she died, leaving me alone and scared and abandoned, so I must never let anyone get that close to me again.”
A friend of mine spent his first six decades of life not realising that others loved him. (And he is loved dearly by many!) He had gone through is whole childhood and adulthood without a single thought that it was possible for others to love him — that is, until he realised his true nature on an Enlightenment Intensive. After that, he started tentatively writing to close friends and asking them, “Is it true? Do you actually love me?”
AN IMBALANCED RELATIONSHIP
Whatever the underlying mechanisms at work, the relationship you have here does not appear to be one of equals (except in the higher sense that we are all of equal value and infinite potential). It sounds like you are putting up with someone who —
EITHER
is less evolved than you by at least a whole cycle (7 steps) —
OR
has lost himself in a terrible, trauma-driven perception of life —
OR
could be a psychopath (i.e. one who acts like a cold, calculating predator – not necessarily violent). And if so, maybe he have figured out how to say just the right things just often enough to keep you in the relationship, but purely for is own convenience and entertainment.
…Something to think about.
TOUGH LOVE
It sounds like Acceptance is your goal in this life. If so, as a side effect I would expect that you don’t like letting go of relationships when they might still be “repaired” and when there’s a glimmer of hope for making it work.
But the journey so far has been painful for you, so maybe you yourself need some time out to decompress and regroup? For us mere mortals, putting out Christ-like, selfless, unconditional love 24-hours-a-day is hard.
YOU HAVEN’T FAILED
But let’s be clear: not being able to do so doesn’t mean one is a failure. You are evolving towards that highest perfect form of love, like everybody else. It’s important to know that you are under NO obligation to be the perfect expression of love if you are not yet capable of that, especially if you just feel hurt as a result. Just do your best to be coming from the right place – from genuine compassion or veneration.
Remember that you always have the CHOICE to get out a bad situation like this by breaking up.
AN AGREED MONAD?
A final possibility is that you and he have agreed to complete an “interpersonal MONAD” in this relationship.
What that jargon means is: before this life you may have agreed to play these polar-opposite roles together, either because you have done it before the other way around, or because you plan to do it the other way around in a subsequent life. Typical relationships are master-student, attacker-victim, and hearer-healed. Once two souls have experienced both sides of a monad relationship with each other, they can easily merge in consciousness.
For a good account of this kind of scenario and how it gets intermingled with Karma, see this article by Tricia Sullivan: ‘What are monads like?’ at michaelreadings.wordpress.com
Is it possible to know you have characteristics of all 7 soul types and their rejection and acceptance qualities…?
Yes, in the sense that we all have within us access to the full spectrum of potential ways of being and relating. I’m a Scholar with a goal of Growth, but that doesn’t stop me from occasionally being commanding like a King, say, or choosing who to accept and reject.
I really like this website for the reasons of the seeking positive relationships and the information presented to express unity.