Witholding Forgiveness 2

Withholding forgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.

Sailing to the edge of the known world, past consensus reality to discover something greater that our selves, our little, fearful selves and contact our greater Self, the Self that is all of life: human, animal, vegetable and mineral, and then returning, bringing that ‘something’ with you to share with the rest of Life, is what Joseph Campbell called ‘the hero’s journey, and requires letting go, opening to something new, faith and trusting your own experience.

I found that I had to do all these things simultaneously. But, trusting your own experience is a good place to start. Trusting your own experience means, among other things, understanding and learning how your inner power works and using it to have a stronger more meaningful connection with that power Itself, within yourself and outside yourself, in others, and to manifest more of what your vision suggests and less of what diminishes it.

What supports Life is life. What supports Love is love. Means and ends must be congruent. It is a sad and horrible confusion of inner and outer, self and Self, reality and Reality, to think that Life is created through Death. That we have to burn people at the stake to save their souls. The truth seems to be: As above, so below; What goes around comes around. We can not use fear, horror and terror and not be fearful, horrible and terrible. We can not use shock and awe and not be shocking and awful. Life does not come from death but from Life. What goes around comes around.

Its horrible and terrible for me to contemplate this truth, much less believe it, because, as an American, I see that my nation does use shock and awe and then stupidly wonders why other nations find us shocking and awful. But I am also proud to be an American because we have our ideals, our Constitution. I want us, long for us, to be more about our ideals and less about our fears. We didn’t win the Cold War by being more Russian than the Russians, by using their intrusive, totalitarian regime, we won it by sticking to our ideals, by being Americans. So, let’s trust our own experience, let go of our fears and false beliefs and have faith that living up to our ideals will work.

We have to bet it all on black, so to speak; to resolve to renounce means not congruent with the ends we seek. If we are about Life, we resolve to use only Life affirming means. If we are about human rights and democracy, we resolve to renounce strategies, policies, and tactics that deny human rights and are undemocratic. This will not be easy, because it is inner work, about taking responsibility for our own and our communities’ thoughts and actions and for being in integrity and living up to our highest and best.

If we are Christians, we want to choose love and compassion – the heart of Jesus’ teaching, not only for other Christians but for all God’s creation, the entire earth – land, sea, animal, vegetable and mineral. But doing the inner work and following Jesus’ teaching is too demanding, too difficult and we have grown lazy and complacent, would rather blame others and look for ‘solutions’ outside of ourselves.

For me, I’m stuck at the point of thinking: ‘Bring the guilty bastards in so I can forgive them!’ As I rely on my small mind, my earthly ego mind, I think I know what needs to be done and become quite angry and upset when almost no one else sees it the way I do. I’m like, ‘lead, follow, or get out of the way!’

But that’s not working for me, never really worked for me, though I’m fairly ‘successful’ as the world defines success. But I know if anything is going to change for the better, I have to change, first. I have to trust that if I get my bloated nothingness out of the way, set an intention to realize my connection with all that is, then think, feel, live and act from that place of connection, I will know what to do; and what I do will not only be good for me, because if its only good for me, its not good enough, but for all of Life. It will build not only a world that works for everyone, but for every thing, as well.