These past days a Finnish word ”sovitusuhri” has popped up in my mind. It has insistently tried to tell me something, something immensely important, I have felt. I tried to find the English translation of the word, but could not google it the normal way. In Finnish ”uhri” is sacrifice and ”sovitus” is atonement! This I found out just now when I looked up the word! Etymologically atonement comes from at-one-ment, to be one with something. What could that One be?

I have for a long time felt that I had, sometime in the murky past, done something abominable, something I was still feeling guilty for. I had never been able to figure out what this basic deed was, even though I knew I had hurt specially my many wives and my four sons by divorcing and leaving them in my search for my atonement or oneness, which I could not maintain with any of my near partners. I had tried to be one with them, to support them by all means possible and found that it drained myself from life. My reason for divorcing my wives always seemed to be a feeling of having been used in one way of another, of having been a doormat for the will of another. That could not be the true sense of oneness I was searching for, not my atonement.

During the past weeks these feelings of having been used have arisen again, my new marriage, just like all the others, is giving rise to such emotions. Then suddenly one day I was taken by a sudden and terrifying vision or feeling. I saw myself doing something terrible to a woman? It was so easy and simple. – I was scared! What was this image? Where does it come from? What does it mean? I have never felt anything similar.

I had read news about the recent throat-cuttings in the Middle-East. I had also bought two sharp tomato knives and chopped the top my ring finger off with one of them while cutting carrots. The finger bled profusely. Why all this bloodletting?

I fought the terrifying image for a couple of days, it felt so terrible and so strong that I could not think of telling about it to my wife. It kept on coming back, I could not push it away and I was determined NOT let it direct my action. Then one morning I was brave enough to calmly relate the vision for my wife. She listened without comments, and I felt myself free from its burden.

The word ”sovitusuhri” kept on popping in my mind. Was the vision a reenactment of my original sin, the cruel act upon which I have been sacrificing my life for so long in seeking to be one with the women near me. I was in a state of atonement for having once wronged one of them so cruelly.

I had spent the past months diving into the history of Germany, which as a nation has after the 2WW been in a constant state of atonement, trying desperately to do good for the sake of the guilt amassed during the 12 year period of Nazism. Germany has in its state of atonement been led by outside interests to become a mere motor of industrial production. This is the fate of the cultural and ideological heart of Europe, the heart which still 70 years after the war is occupied by 100 000 troops from a country, whose president in a secret talk to the troops recently said: ”Germany is an occupied country and will remain so.”

Have I in my secret guilt let my nearest and dearest to occupy my mind, my independent will? Have I by trying to live for them been able to ease my pain? My pain and my yearning for at-one-ment has been a constant feature of my life even though occasional moments of love, joy and laughter have also sometimes filled my mind. But the baseline has been my hidden guilt and the yearning to atone it by any means possible provided by the people around me. In my sense of guilt I have rarely in personal conflicts dared to trust my own will as it has most often led to some kind of conflict or disaster. I have grown to be vary of myself.

What happens when I see all this? What happens to my relationship to my wife when one important energetic aspect of it dissolves? What happens in my life when I am not guilty anymore? My ancient anchor of guilty atonement has dissolved when it was finally seen. From that chaos of nothingness a gentle new sense of being is slowly arising, forming my mind to receive it. A joyous sense of true at-one-ment is growing within my mind and my world. I am becoming one with the One, the eternal background of all Life gently enfolding me like all other living beings in its loving embrace. I am remembering that I have always been one with the One, that all my search for atonement for any sins has been just a creative adventure, which I myself have created for the fun of the One, for the evolvement of the whole. I am the One.