Notes on the day for 2022-02-23:
Many meetings today, stressful. I started eating too early in the day and ate too much.
The following I believe to be a teaching from my inner guru:
Do not think of forgiveness as a chore. Do not think of forgiveness as something that must be done. Forgiveness is an opportunity to be free. It’s an opportunity to drop the bonds of anger and fear and allow ourselves to commune with our true nature.
The first step in forgiving others is to learn to forgive ourselves. When we have feelings of guilt or shame, we can recognize that these stem from anger and resentments that we have towards ourselves. For example, if we were to lose our temper and yell at someone or strike out at them, later we may feel guilty or ashamed of this behavior. If we were to break a promise to someone and misbehave, to do things we promised not to do, we may later feel guilty or ashamed by this. Guilt and shame are resentments we hold against ourselves. These feelings are driven by judgments we take upon ourselves and sentence ourselves to. They stem from the fear-based thinking of the ego. Guilt and shame are no more than an ego trip that we impose upon ourselves.
We must recognize the unskillfulness of our actions. They may be things we did that we wish we hadn’t or they may be things we vowed not to do but did anyway. The subsequent feelings of guilt and shame cause us suffering as a result. When we recognize the unskillfulness of the ego mind, we put into perspective the true cause and effect of this unskillfulness and suffering. It is the ego mind’s inability to love without measure and its desire to control love in a selfish way, to attain more of what it wants and destroy that which threatens it, that is the root cause of its unsatisfactory manifestations. This attempt at measuring love is also a measurement of unlovingness. When we are unloving, we suffer through guilt and shame. When we recognize this, it becomes easier to forgive oneself and be free from this pain.
Once we have mastered the act of self-forgiveness we can apply this to the unskillfulness and suffering of others. It may be someone close, someone we love or it may be a distant figure, a well known person or politician. The relationship does not matter, if we can recognize the behavior of others and their unskillfulness and then recognize the suffering and dissatisfaction they experience as a result, we can recognize in them what we recognize in ourselves. Just as we had judged ourselves and then were freed through forgiveness. We can now see equivalence in these judgments. Just as our unlovingness towards one’s self causes suffering, our unlovingness towards others causes the same suffering.
You may respond, “But my actions are not the same as theirs, the actions of the others are far much worse than the unlovingness that I exhibited”. This is understandable as the world in which we exist is one of measure and degree. Others are compared and deemed better or worse based on our subjective judgment at the moment. It is important to recognize that unlovingness is the same, whether we witness it in ourselves, we witness it in others, or we create it from fantasies in our mind. We may perceive differences in the form of unlovingness, but in truth, there is simply no difference. The cause is the same, the ego mind’s flawed design, its desire to control and apportion love. When we recognize this equivalence and cast away the perception of difference as delusion, we can forgive others as we forgive ourselves. This is how we can be free, this is how we can know the peace which transcends all understanding that has been spoken of.
Zen Momentum 