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.
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One Response to “It’s All About Forgiveness”
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Yeah forgiveness can be very difficult if someone as you mentioned presses your buttons, even if on one level you know better. We are not perfect beings but this world could do with much more of it the moment. If one does start to feel annoyed and then angry is it not a form of energy in of itself? I mean energy is energy at a basic level could one not transmute that energy?
I experimented with it for a while and instead of exploding or storing a grudge I would go off and do something creative instead and I found after a year of this that I was happier and getting more done, a somewhat simple transformation of energy/emotion. Mind you I could be talking complete crap here…but it works for me.
You know I think the whole guilt trip thing is why I find zealous religous people hard to handle, but I guess one must forgive them either way. It’s time we really started acting like a species instead of all these seperate bickering factions that we have at the moment, but perhaps this streak is inherent in our nature? One other thing we need is a bit of compassion for each other, accept our individuality but work as a whole. We all have our individual skills but it’s in working them together that we truely shine.