Lesson 134: Let me perceive forgiveness as it is
One of my favorite techniques to use when I get caught up in feeling offended, hurt or otherwise slighted by the people around me is a phrase Brene Brown talks about using when she has a conflict with her husband: “The story I’m telling myself is …”
We all get caught up in our “somebody done me wrong” stories. Our ego eagerly fabricates all kinds of reasons why someone would treat you badly and tells you how right you are to be offended, to hate them, to scold them for being such awful humans and why they should come groveling back to you begging for your forgiveness.
Ah, forgiveness. The ego uses it as a powerful weapon. We deign to forgive others to show how spiritually superior we are to them and we beg others to forgive us because we feel they are spiritually superior to us. Such forms of “forgiveness,” this lesson tells us, are a distortion “that entails an unfair sacrifice of righteous wrath, a gift unjustified and undeserved, and a complete denial of the truth.”
We love our grudges. We love our stories about how others are doing us wrong and why they don’t deserve our forgiveness, but we’ll “overlook” their sin this time. However, we love to keep on reminding them about all the times we’ve forgiven them for their past slights, which, of course, keeps those wounds wide open.
The ego’s idea of forgiveness is like everything else it produces – a poor substitution for the real thing.
In truth, forgiveness isn’t needed in God’s realm, since sin doesn’t exist. Nobody has to make up stories about how wrong others are. Instead, in God’s realm, we understand that no one can actually offend us, because if the world is an illusion, so are all the offenses we conjure up.
In this bodily world, of course, our actions have consequences, and we are called to mitigate suffering and seek ways to help those who have been harmed by the actions of others. However, we should never use the harmful actions we see in this world to create stories about how much we hate those who perpetuate the harm we see and feel. True forgiveness allows us to look beyond the grievance – to see that those who commit such acts are simply asleep in their own ego dream. We can have compassion on them, forgive their acts, seek to end the suffering such acts may have caused, and still love the “offender.”
The lesson offers us a tool whenever we feel like holding a grievance. We should ask, “Would I accuse myself of doing this?”
Of course we wouldn’t, our ego tells us. We’re not like those horrible people at all. Except, of course, we are. If there is only one of us here, then, yes, whatever we accuse others of doing or being is exactly how we are. We are all susceptible to the temptations of the ego. We don’t like to think we’re bad people, but those we accuse of doing bad things don’t think they’re bad people either. It’s all about our perception.
Before we accuse others of being dastardly and mean, we must examine our own impulses to be dastardly and mean. It’s there within all of us because we all carry an ego around with us. Given the right circumstances, we could all commit some pretty heinous acts.
So, this lesson asks, if you accuse another of a sin – you simply accuse yourself of the same thing. We are one. What we do, say or believe about another simply reflects what we believe about ourselves on some level. If you don’t want to be dastardly and mean, stop accusing others of such things and use forgiveness to see beyond the acts of all us sleepwalking in our egos to the innocent dreamer who is simply in need of awakening.
That’s a story worth telling ourselves.
Photo by Timon Studler on Unsplash