Steps to forgiveness - some more thoughts

[Guest guest]

Hi everyone,

 

I was thinking a little more about forgiveness, and wondering how that ties into

non-duality, or one-ness. How does one live the intention of one-ness if it is

not yet a felt reality? how does that apply to forgivness?

 

I have shared a method for forgiveness in earlier posts, and one way that I

understand it working, is that suffering begins when we reject, deny or judge

and experience, instead of allowing the experience to be there. There is the

experience, then the reaction to experience, which can create suffering, or

attachment if the experience is very nice. I like defining suffering as

'resistance to what is', (suffering = resistance + pain). For example, if i

feel pain because someone lied to me, I feel angry at the person and so I reject

their behavior becuase it hurt me and I dont want to feel hurt. Fundamentally, I

am rejecting my experience of the person, because what I am experiening

conflicts with my boundaries with which I identify my seperate self and within

which I try and find happiness and survival. Still, like it or not, I have the

difficult experience, and as long as I try and hold onto my self-boundaries, i

will continue to suffer as I reject an aspect of my experience.

 

There may be many levels to the root of the pain, and the reaction may be a

result of a past experience, as some posts have suggested. Still, returning to

the point that if everything is Spirit, if its all one, and realizing that

one-ness is the end of suffering, then how does that apply to forgiveness?

 

For me, ts the acceptance that the difficult person or experience is also Spirit

arising, and even though it may not feel like it and I may be contracting

against it, I can hold the intention to realize the perfection of manifestation

beyond my personal preferences, within my consciousness which is also the

'sinners' consciouness. Christ said 'resist not evil'. I take that to mean to

deeply open to our experiences of evil, and to find them within ourselves, and

to open to them, letting them arise within the free awareness that is primary

consciousness. I do that through the process I talked about before, which is

trying to be and feel and see the world through the perspective I am rejecting.

The same witnessing awareness that sees evil in others sees me in my good and

bad points, and if I have confidence in that awareness, I can open to any

experience and not be threatend by it. One way to look at this is that I am

simply opening to my experience of another, and allowing myself (my experience)

to be accepted and held present no matter what experience I have. That, to me,

is an act of self-love, born through a power (consciosness) that is greater than

the seperate ego sense.

 

I just wish to make a little point that 'opening to evil' doesnt mean giving

people carte blanche to do what they want. It just means being big enough to

hold both light and dark my consciousness and not be theratened by it, and from

that place of acceptance, I am free to choose the future I want to create. Part

of that future may include, from a position of love, stopping others from doing

bad things, upholding laws or not allowing oneself to be pulled into certain

dramas. The trick is that if I am caught up in the story, if it keeps spinning

round in my head and if I feel a strong resistance to the situation, then that

is when I most need to 'be that which I reject'.

 

In my experience, that intention to 'be and feel' that which arises, is an

important step in honoring the oneness of all things and being that oneness..

 

love

Bruce