Tag: freedom

Mastering the act of forgiveness: How to stop perceiving forgiveness as a chore and to begin to understand it as a tool of liberation

zenmomentumLeave a comment

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.

How relinquishing our desires can free us

zenmomentumLeave a comment

I wrote this about the day:

I started out the day meeting with friends from my Sanga,  “listened” to John Cage’s 4’3”.   I thought about the Zen monk who taught a single word of Zen by just raising a finger and enlightening a student.   I shared this with friends.   What a powerful idea,  to play music without the sound of music or to teach using a word unspoken.   Both of these methods can “trick” the mind into awareness and hopefully, at some point, the observer becomes aware of the awareness and the process of enlightenment continues.   Instead of viewing this as a path towards realization,  we can also see it as the falling away of egoic identity.  Each goal is the same;  as the false self put forth by the cognitive mind dissolves, realization of enlightenment becomes more apparent.   This can be a long and arduous process for the householder who still clings to the vestiges of the manifest objective self out of fear of losing one’s grip on what has been attained or what is yet to be acquired.   Yet this path too,  the path of desire must be fully examined before we can conclusively say that its end is always the same: fear, suffering, and unsatisfactoriness.

The following I believe to be a teaching from my inner guru:

Another approach is to simply lose oneself to the truth of desirelessness.  This has always brought with it a sense of liberation beyond that which any coveted object has ever relayed to the possessor.  Our brother knows this to be true yet still clings to the idea of creating a better something or destroying that which hinders progress.  Neither formation nor eradication is necessary to find our way home to the peace where we reside.   Simply know that you are there and that nothing is necessary for you to share in the joy of this moment but your willingness to let go of the yoke of what is.

In our seemingly endless quest for that which is better than this, we will find ourselves always falling short of the goal that we desire.   This undefined pinnacle,  a precipice of great price, will never be as we expected nor satisfy the ego’s desire for more.   Put away the tape measure of the mind and come and be at peace with me.   I have never wished a punishment upon you nor evoked condemnation of your being to suffering of any length.   Length itself is but an illusion and you, my child, are always welcome at home where elements in dimension and degree are met only with a joyful laugh and sympathetic knowing.  That knowing is the boundless love that I would share with you in this very moment and that moment is now.