It’s All About Forgiveness
Happiness
Do you want to be happy? Well, then there is just one thing you need to learn how to do and learn how to do well without compromise. And that thing you need to learn how to do is forgive. It is all about forgiveness.
The Road Less Traveled
Every time an opportunity to forgive appears in your life, there is a fork in the road. The quicker you choose forgiveness, the quicker you choose the high road and that makes you evermore happy. If you choose not to forgive, then you choose the low road and that just makes you evermore miserable. Most of the people who end up in a rotten place like prison are people who consistently fail to practice forgiveness.
Unforgiving
I read about an incident that happened in a parking garage in Gainesville, Florida this past weekend. It happened after the Florida State, Florida college football game. A man was trying to get out of a parking garage, but some people in a blue car were talking to a man and blocking the road. So the man who was waiting yelled to the people in the blue car to move. The man talking to the people in the blue car had an issue with being told to move though. So that man walked up to the man who was impatiently waiting and shot and killed him. So, suffice it to say, there wasn’t much forgiveness going on in that parking garage.
Two things happened in that parking garage incident. The one man’s minor lack of forgiveness in the form of impatience got him killed because of the other man’s major lack of forgiveness. While lack of forgiveness leading to murder is an extreme case, lack of forgiveness nonetheless always leads to some degree of misery.
Attack
You cannot harbor thoughts of attack against another, nor can you actually attack another, without making yourself miserable to some degree. That is because the prerequisite to attack is guilt. People attack as an attempt to pass on their own sense of guilt. The more guilty a person is feeling, the more prone to outbursts of attack that person is. Although we insanely try to convince ourselves otherwise, the truth is that attack is never justified. You can’t stop war with war.
Pressing Buttons
There are few saints in this world, and thus almost everyone has a series of buttons prone to setting them off if pressed. No matter how good of a mood they start out in, most people can be lulled into a state of minimal forgiveness. Everyone is filled with gobs of guilt. And pushing people’s buttons boils that guilt to the surface. Some people’s buttons are easier to press than others are because some people’s guilt is more prominent than others is. And people deal with that guilt in different ways. The most common way is by trying to get rid of it and projecting it onto others. The person who cusses people out or starts fights is the kind of person who desperately tries to get rid of it. The irony is though that such behavior simply feeds the guilt. It is impossible to attack another without making yourself guilty.
I have my own particular buttons. And when those buttons are pressed and I let myself get lulled into a state of minimal forgiveness, I usually either turn into a major smart ass, or I simply withdraw. If I turn into a smart ass, then there are usually consequences and it just makes me miserable until I make peace. When I withdraw, I usually avoid external consequences, but I still have to deal with the stuff in my own mind until it goes away.
Ideally, a person wants to get so good at forgiveness that it is a natural reflex with no lag time. I’m personally usually good enough at forgiveness to not act out on unforgiving thoughts, but it still often takes me a bit of time to forgive those thoughts. It is frustrating how sometimes I know better on one level to not act out and instead just forgive but still go ahead and cause trouble anyway by acting out my unforgiveness in the form of being a smart ass. And when that happens, I usually am able to forgive what set me off fairly quickly but then I can’t rest until I make peace with the person who took the brunt of my smart ass actions. Unfortunately, I often am not easily forgiven, which on one level shouldn’t be my problem if I’ve really forgiven myself, but I never seem really able to forgive myself unless I feel I’ve made up with the person upon whom I directed my unforgiveness.
Dream Model
If we all just learned how to forgive consistently, this world would quickly become a lot happier. And eventually there would be no need for the world. My preferred model of the universe is the one that says that the universe is basically a dream of duality, of separation; that it is a false reality and true reality is oneness. In that model, the universe is a dream of my own mind and so everything in the dream is really just my own thoughts (thoughts of duality and separation). What started the dream was an idea of an opposite to oneness, which was such a fantastically mad idea that by having it I felt like I destroyed heaven, oneness. And so my dream world is a hiding place where I try to hide from my guilt over my belief that I destroyed heaven, oneness. The only reason I don’t realize it is a dream is because I’ve disassociated myself from myself and split myself into a plethora of dream characters. In reality, all those dream characters are as much me as the one I call me, but in my dream state, I keep that fact unconscious. And so when I don’t forgive someone, I’m really just not forgiving myself and thus I’m keeping myself lost in a dream of separation and disassociation, keeping alive the false belief that other people are separate from me.
The value of holding onto the dream model of the universe is that it is a model where forgiveness is promoted and completely justified. When you hold onto that model and you hear someone say something like, I will never forgive this, you are able to realize that what that person is really saying is, I want to stay in hell forever. Which of course sounds pretty damn foolish.
True Forgiveness
You don’t forgive a person because they really did something wrong, that is false forgiveness. You instead forgive yourself for making up that person and that that person did something wrong. When you withhold forgiveness, you attempt to play the role of innocent victim. And when you are the innocent victim, that means someone else is the guilty one. And if someone else is guilty then victimizing that person is seemingly justified.
Calling Dr. Sane
Make no doubts about it; this world is an insane asylum. And it is in desperate need of doctors. The best way you can become a doctor and heal the world and thus yourself is by becoming a master at forgiveness. I’m personally not a doctor yet, but I’m at least an intern. I’ve got the brains, but not the experience of properly putting my brains to action.
The ultimate purpose of life is in honing your forgiveness skills and following the impulses of the part of yourself that is committed to oneness. It is really that simple. A person doesn’t need to worry about getting really smart and mastering a bunch of psycho-spiritual-babble and hyped scientific twaddle of pseudo profundity (although I did). A person just needs to appreciate forgiveness and practice it without compromise. Holding a model of the universe that justifies forgiveness can be extremely helpful, but it’s not really necessary.
So forgive and play it cool. Your happiness depends on it.
The Psychology of Fractal Time
Fractal
Do you know what a fractal is? It is something that is self-similar at varying scales, like a fern made of ever-smaller ferns (see pic). Time, like the fern in the picture, is fractal. If you think of time subjectively (as something within your own mind) instead of objectively (as something outside your mind) then time is an idea. And the idea time represents is separation. There was but one instant of time and it only still seemingly exists now because we hold onto it in our minds by constantly dividing it into fractals.
The Fall
Psychologically, time is the idea of an opposite to eternity. Thus, it is the idea of something separate from eternity. Time is a dimension of separation. What you truly are is one with eternity (complete love), but you are seemingly here because you are lost in a dream of separation. The dream has no reality except to you who made it up and currently believe it. Every body and every thing you see out there in the dream is simply a disassociated part of your own mind. You carry on the dream because you believe it. It was born of a crazy, scary idea (separation) and it will continue to repeat that idea until you realign yourself with the part of your mind that never fell asleep and is committed to oneness instead of separation (duality).
The western creation myth of the fall from Eden touches upon this theme. The myth’s fatal flaw though is that it attributes the fall as a punishment by God. God didn’t do it, you dreamt it all up and so it isn’t really real. A better myth is Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son where the son takes his father’s inheritance, goes out on his own, squanders the inheritance, is afraid to return home, but finally does return home only to find his father completely forgiving and welcoming.
Yesterday
You know the old song by the Beatles, Yesterday? It is a good song, but to me a very sad song. To me it touches upon my own very deep and persistent sense of time as being a separation from past theoretical happiness. Here are the main lyrics of the song:
Yesterday Video Link
Yesterday,
All my troubles seemed so far away,
Now it looks as though they’re here to stay,
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
Suddenly,
I’m not half the man I used to be,
There’s a shadow hanging over me,
Oh, yesterday came suddenly.
Why she
Had to go I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.
I said,
Something wrong, now I long for yesterday.
Yesterday,
Love was such an easy game to play,
Now I need a place to hide away,
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
The whole plight of existence is summed up in that simple song. We all carry the basic baggage expressed in that song every moment of our earthly lives. Deep down we feel we’ve done something wrong, which led to separation, which makes us want to hide away and long for yesterday–whether we are willing to consciously admit it or not. If we aren’t conscious of it, that usually just means we’ve projected the blame on someone or something else. But there is no one else really–just you.
Consequently, time thought of psychologically goes something like this:
1. Past is the mistake that seemingly led to lost unity and started the dream we call the universe.
2. Present is guilt over the past mistake and consequent sense of loss.
3. And future is fear of punishment over the mistake.
Time Intervals, Time Fractals
Take multiple periods of time from your life (multiple time fractals)–your whole life, the last seven years, the last seven months, the last seven weeks, the last seven days, the last seven minutes, the last seven seconds… Examine all those intervals of time and within them you will be able to identify some sense of past mistake/loss, present sense of regret/guilt, and future hope mixed with fear tomorrow will be worse than today. The smaller the time interval, the harder it is to pick up on the pattern, but it is still there. If it wasn’t there, you’d no longer be here experiencing time.
Now
The whole popular idea of living in the now stems from the fact that the smaller the time interval you deal with, the less aware you are of all your “time baggage†so to speak. Living in the now is a fine practice, but inevitably, it solves nothing unless you deal with healing your sense of past and future, which is the belief in separation.
Past Happiness
People often have an overly optimistic and thus very warped view of past happiness. And that fact is something that has perplexed science. The reason for it is not really scientific though. The reason people tend to often have such a warped view of past happiness is because, in the mind, the past inherently represents Eden, heaven. Relative to the present, the past represents a time before the fall and thus loss. The past is thus a fractal of Eden and the consequent fall. The future on the other hand, is an insane mixture of “I can rebuild Eden on my own on earth†and fear that “it only gets worse.â€
Life Cycle
In the course of an average human lifetime, the womb represents Eden. Birth is the beginning of the fall. And by the time puberty starts up, the fall is in full force. Once puberty levels off, it is usually a slow burn until death, which is the inevitable punishment for the past mistake of being born to begin with.
You don’t really die though, it is just symbolic and meant to reinforce the erroneous belief that separation is truth instead of merely a dream. You can no more die in physical reality than you can die in a dream; it’s all illusory and simply the repetition of an insane belief.
What to do?
There is a part of you that never fell asleep. And that part of you knows how to ease you out of nightmarish dreams of separation. The awake part of you is committed to oneness. The sleeping part of you is committed to separation. It is all about learning to discern between the two and choosing appropriately. If you want to wake up, you must inevitably accept that you are a dreamer and that nightmarish dreams were never true.