Forgiveness, Love, and Other Things

Forgiveness Is Choosing to Love

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You are smart enough to see that if you act out your anger, if you dump it on the person who hurt you, it is going to perpetuate the cycle of suffering—for yourself and the other person. You might feel a certain pleasure in acting out your anger, but so long as you remain attached to your self-righteous story, you will continue to attract people who offend or hurt you. In the end, you come face-to-face with the cold, hard truth of the matter: You might practice kissing or waving goodbye to it, or visualize wrapping the anger and hurt in a silk cloth and tossing it into an imaginary fire.

Do whatever works for you. Ultimately though, it always comes back to the direct path. You become supremely present, relaxed in your body, your heart open. You are right here in this moment—aware, alert, awake. Through the power of clear, present-time awareness, you reconnect with the true beauty and vastness of life. You feel the energy of the universe moving through you again.

You realize you are one with the universe. You are the universe.

In this oneness, all feelings of separation, hurt, and anger eventually dissolve and are replaced by clarity, light, presence, and a great feeling of peace…. As you do this practice of being the loving awareness you are, a wonderful, relaxed feeling of ease, spaciousness, and wellbeing may unfold within you. It is your natural state. If you feel yourself contracting—getting caught in conflict, stress, or upset—it is your cue to come back to presence. It is in presence, in the awareness of being here right now, that you rediscover your true universal nature.

But to fully and completely awaken, you must inquire into who you are. You must investigate the I. You must look deep within to find its source or origin. Your I, your ego, has no reality in and of itself. Only consciousness is ultimately real. This is the great liberation those who have awakened come to. This is the key to unlocking the secret of inner freedom.

Toward the end of my time at the Zen Center, I felt much better, much clearer, more truly in a place of love and forgiveness. I processed all my feelings, and by and large, they fell away. The falling away or letting go is the essence of forgiveness. In the space that opened up, a whole new creative energy began to pour through me. The book is about her studies with a Sufi master in a small village in India—all her trials and difficulties, her amazing energy experiences, and her insights and breakthroughs.

Love as Consequence of Authentic Forgiveness

We have to empty ourselves of everything—our egos, personal histories, our stories of suffering and blame—and then we can, at last, open to the flowering of love and forgiveness. Then love and forgiveness can move through us. In most traditional spiritual paths and in the psychological approach, this emptying happens progressively as you practice releasing the past and forgiving those who have hurt you. Through doing the practice of freedom , and through contemplating the teaching, you realize if you can observe the stories, beliefs, and images causing you to suffer, you cannot be them.

October 1973 General Conference

You are the vast, timeless awareness that observes and experiences. Be who you are, then. Dwell in the freedom, clarity of mind, and openness of heart that are your true nature. Then the love and forgiveness flowing through you will always be unconditional for there is no you in it, no ego-self laying down rules, expectations, conditions, or agendas. You just love because you love, plain and simple.

What others do with your love is up to them. Those whose hearts are sufficiently open and whose levels of trust are deep enough will accept your love, appreciate it, and reciprocate. Those whose hearts are closed will not be able to receive the gift you have to give them. Remember, there are no conditions on your love. Maybe they will be ready next time. The freer you are and the more your heart opens, the more naturally you feel compelled to reach out and connect with your fellow human beings.

I remember British novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley saying something beautiful about the interconnectedness of all people. The Upanishad teaching is a profoundly nondual statement. It is saying that you and God—That—are one. You and the divine energy, the consciousness behind creation, are one. To see and understand this with the whole of your being, you have to see it from the perspective of consciousness, the vastness of your true nature. This is why I say there is something more important than love. That something is consciousness itself. After all, without consciousness, what is love?

Without consciousness, love is always conditional. It is not pure. It has an agenda behind it. It can turn to coldness, dislike, even hate. But with the light of consciousness and timeless awareness behind it, love is always unconditional. Look at everything in life, then, from the Whole, rather than from the parts. Get the big picture. Take the unconditional perspective, and your love will be unconditional. Or, as Kunihiro Yamate put it: One of the main barriers to spiritual awakening, enlightenment, or self-realization is our unhealed relationships with our parents, whether they are living or not.

If you have an issue with a parent, bring him or her into your daily meditations too, just like you learned to do with other upsetting situations in the practice at the end of chapter one. If your parents evoke resentment, anger, guilt, abandonment, regret, blame, or fear, again, learn to welcome it because it is showing you where you are not yet free.

If the relationship brings up a lot of intense feeling, you may have to breathe deeply and slowly, very consciously, to stay present with it. If it gets to be too much for you, take a break and come back the next day. Ultimately, though, you want to be the spiritual warrior you are, and face this demon—the unhealed relationship with your parent—within you. Visualize yourself being with your being with your mother or father work with one at a time in past situations. Allow whatever wants to come up to come up. Notice the stories you have and the feelings triggered, and see that you are not the story, but rather the luminous, ever-present consciousness that is always here, now.

This is the essence of forgiveness: This practice paves the way for others you may need to forgive. Bring them into your meditation , and follow the same process. Or maybe there is someone you have wronged, done harm to, and you need to seek forgiveness from him or her.

Two Practices For Eye-Gazing

Bring that person into your meditation. Surround him or her with love, light, and goodwill…. Forgiveness really does start within. Simply insert the appropriate words: Say it as often as necessary, in a whole-hearted, self-embracing way, until you really have forgiven yourself for that particular failing or fault. And you are not your story… You are always this beautiful, clear, conscious being who is reading these words right now! The most accurate gauge of how present and inwardly free we are is in our ability to connect with not just our parents, who may have hurt us, or people we may have harmed, but anybody, without fear or judgment, in a relaxed, nonthreatening way.

Our look is open and welcoming. We have nothing to hide or prove. We can apologize if necessary. Most people spend time looking in the mirror, so this is the perfect practice for helping you awaken to the truth and beauty of who you really are—to the empty mirror experience I wrote about earlier. Simply gaze at yourself in the mirror, paying attention to any self-judgments or self-criticisms or any other negative thoughts that arise.

Then do the practice of freedom around these criticisms. The ultimate goal of this practice is to be able to look at yourself with total acceptance, love and forgiveness, with genuine kindness. For that to happen, your ego, the little me, has to be out of the way. You have to have completed the fourth step of the practice of freedom. As you gaze at yourself in the mirror, one positive saying, or mantra, that can help is this: The ultimate test of love is forgiveness.

When someone that a person loves hurts him, the response is the true record of that love; if there is true love here, the person will not hold a grudge, become resentful, or fill the heart with bitterness. None of these responses connect with true love.

It blocks that emotion. So what should the response be: The Oxford English Dictionary defines forgiveness as to grant free pardon and to give up all claim on account of an offense or debt. True forgiveness is doing the complete opposite of what the emotions tell a person to do. Forgiveness to be real must be unconditional. It does not mean that the hurt that has been experienced is minimized. Forgiveness cannot be earned, bought, or bargained.

It has to be absolute. There are two hurtful situations that occur between people who love each other: The wound does not require forgiveness. It was unintentional and accidental. Time and patience will take care of this situation. The other situation though is a different story. A wrong is when a person knows that what he is doing will hurt the other person and does it anyway. It is a moral dilemma that the person faces and fails.

Forgiveness is instant; but trust must be built over a long period of time. Forgiveness takes care of the damage done. It lets the person off the hook. However, the true test of love will be how the person works to rebuild that loving relationship. Forgiveness may be the single most difficult act of love. The brain never lets the person forget, but the heart will give forgiveness.

While people who love each other can forgive more readily than most, and in more severe circumstances, I don't think that for example victims who profess to "forgive" their abusers in any circumstances are doing that from a position of love. It is hard enough to profess love for your fellow man with all the normal foibles that people have; harder still for a person who is wilfully abusive, murderous, or otherwise subjectively evil.

I think it is harder to hold people accountable when they are related; consider the idea that you must take in a sibling because of their relation. To forgive a person, it is not necessary to love them, only to understand their position and accept that they felt their actions necessary. Consider this case; a drunk driver killed a man's wife and children, and the man has forgiven him and they now work together to raise awareness. I don't know if the man loves the drunk driver, but he has offered forgiveness, allowing them both to have a life beyond the tragedy.

Here are some quotes about forgiveness. Forgiveness is a manifestation of love. People who truly love each other, whether in a marital relationship, as friends, or as family members, as examples, will forgive one another because of their outgoing concern for each other. Forgiveness is one way of expressing love and commitment to another human being. When we love someone, even though it may be difficult sometimes, we ultimately desire to forgive them for any perceived wrongs against us.

If we do not ultimately wish to forgive someone we say we love, then we're fooling ourselves, and them, as we do not truly love them. Not extending forgiveness is putting ourselves first, well ahead of the person we claim to love. We are seeking our own desires and are not taking into account theirs. We are acting selfish and are not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt - or another chance. If we love them, we will forgive them and try to set the relationship back on the right track.

Forgiveness and love go hand in hand. To be able to understand and go on requires love because I don't think anything else would be enough to enable you to accomplish keeping the relationship intact. Many would say that religion or God teaches us to forgive and to love one another which is true; however, practice is much easier said than done.

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