
Conditioned behavior
(Concluded from yesterday.)
I’m seeing my conditioned or patterned behavior now but I’d never have seen it as long as I was committed to the way of being Werner Erhard called “resist, resent, revenge.”
According to that way of being, “having the goods on” everyone was the name of the game. Living life from that angle produced only flatness, superficiality, and lack. And shame and numerous health problems.
The more I venture into the domain of forgiveness, the more I anticipate confronting my conditioned behavior related to resistance. I begin to relive moments as an old grump, an angry man, and every other vasana-related record in memory. Again, self-forgiveness becomes a critical healing event.
I know from experience at Cold Mountain Institute that there is an end to both vasanas and pain. It gets easier and easier to raise the vasanas to awareness (so less painful) and vasanas in any one area don’t go on forever.
Three months in an encounter group and we were at that moment as free of vasanas as people could ever expect to be, short of Ascension. (1)
***
Today I’ve been confronting which of these statements will turn out to be true, as I travel what Kathleen calls the Forgiveness Road: (A) The more I forgive, the less there is to forgive. Or (B) The more I forgive, the more there is to forgive.
I can give you my take on it. Neither or both.
The more I forgive, the more I’ll have of some things to forgive and the less I’ll have of others. But I think my internal state – which is what we’re all concerned with, is it not? – will definitely improve.
Forgiving is a growth industry. Soon we won’t need to talk about it because we’ll be living in an ascended state of consciousness.
In the meantime, I can see the usefulness of especially self-forgiveness for untying the Gordian knot of our own shame and self-hatred. We weren’t taught in school to forgive ourselves.
But self-forgiveness releases an awful lot of energy, tied up in maintaining a false front, built on “resist, resent, revenge.”
As I forgive each person, I forgive an entire thread, as do we all. The fewer threads I’m following, the more space I have for other, more valuable things, like loving.
The more loving I am, the fewer my thoughts of injury and victimization. The fewer those thoughts, the less relevance forgiveness comes to have for me over time.
When we’ve drowned ourselves in the Ocean of Love, as we’ve always wanted to be, in a process we call “Ascension,” what’s left to forgive? Absolutely nothing.
Footnotes
(1) Our vasanas or core issues only disappear completely with an event that could be described from various angles and traditions. We call it “Ascension to the Fifth Dimension.” The afterlife literature calls it accession to the Mental Plane. Hindu literature calls it Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi, moksha, and mukti (liberation).
Christians call it Eternal Life, Salvation, and Redemption. Buddhists call it Buddhahood. By whatever name we call it, it means passing beyond the need to die and be reborn into what we can think of as physical bodies.
We “live forever ” after that and change our bodies at will if we wish to. However, we’ve always been immortal. We’ve always survived the deaths of our many physical bodies.
Only at that time are our vasanas burned to a crisp. Until that time , we have to work pretty rigorously to scrub them from ourselves.