Forgiveness
True Self, False Ego, Marriage, Marriage Conflict, Relationships, Consciousness, & the Mind
Forgiveness is Power!
Forgiveness literally means "to give forth". In other words, forgiveness is the act of returning foreign energy, from out of your personal space. Forgiveness is a psychic mechanical action to "give it back" to them from whom it came.
Forgiveness is the single biggest gift one can ever give to oneself.
Forgiveness will release one from the psychic & emotional bondage that keeps one imprisoned in bitterness, resentment, anger, grief, & guilt.
Forgiveness is the key to creativity, energy, and freedom.
Forgiveness does not mean condoning or justifying the harmful acts done by others.
The laws of karma ensure that those who do harm will themselves be harmed, when their time comes. An eye for an eye & a tooth for a tooth, the basic tribal rules of social justice, apply in some version in all cultures.
We can have faith that justice will be done. However the timing of redress is usually beyond any one individual's control, and the karmic system allows delayed paybacks - sometimes many lifetimes down the road.
Social Justice and Its Limits
Many of us were raised to believe that we are personally responsible for making sure that justice gets done in our world. We have an admirable ethic of social accountability that commands us to stay personally involved in civilization's progress toward greater justice, fairness, & humanistic opportunity for all. These are great & worthy ideals on the large group programming level (Shani).
At the social level, material crimes against life & property, doing physical harm to another, and many types of objectively measurable improprieties (such as financial crimes & minority discrimination) can be punished for quick payback.
As societies become more sophisticated & stable, they can devote more & more attention to the welfare of their members. Social justice continues to advance & retreat on a 26,500 year time scale.
At the moment we are on the way up (believe it or not) and human welfare on a large-group scale is increasingly better protected.
But we are certainly not living in a just world. Far from it. Many crimes remain socially unlegislated, undocumented, & unrecognized. People constantly hurt each other in ways that various societies cannot yet afford to acknowledge.
There are still plenty of places where murder of wife or child is not punished. The karmic system will of course punish these murderers, but their society does not recognize the crime.
Even in supposedly advanced cultures, the social resources do not yet exist to document & punish parents who verbally abuse their children. Yet children are damaged for life after this type of abuse.
And more subtle types of harm to others such as death - how could the terrible damage which the death of a spouse, parent, or child inflicts on those "left behind" ever be legislated? Yet the agonizing loss, the crippling grief, the bitter sorrow of losing a loved one often linger for a lifetime.
There are many kinds of pain, misery, and grief which must remain deeply private.
So, due to either society's inability to recognize the crime or the inherently private nature of the damage, there are many ways for one person to be hurt by another person which may never be publicly redressed.
Karmic law works beautifully. But, because the karmic system is vastly bigger than any one person can even understand - let alone control - it is humanly impossible for any one person to control the timing of the payback.
Only the eye of the Divine can see the full scope of this huge process and only Divine Intelligence can set the perfect payback timing.
Holding onto resentment, guilt, anger, & sorrow from the past, is a psychic disaster. It takes a HUGE amount of creative energy to manage our detailed inventory of past hurts & grievances. E
ach review of a small disappointment takes a little bit of energy. The catalog of life's normal losses, deaths, & separations takes time and initiative to supervise. Maintaining the very deepest memories of catastrophically horrible abuse - whether from war, or starvation, or vicious private crimes - also drains off a massive amount of psychic energy.
If one feels personally responsible for binding the perpetrator(s) to oneself using chains of angry blame to ensure that they cannot escape until they are properly punished - then one must find the energy to maintain those chains. The amount of psycho-emotional energy required to hold negative memories is similar to the amount of electricity needed to run a massive deep-freezer.
Psychically, one is always on duty, always on guard to ensure that the prisoner does not escape.
The energy needed to maintain the deep-freeze is taken out of reserves that could be used for attracting love, developing creativity, & building wealth. Those energy reserves could fund education, travel, & romance. But the more deeply one invests in the commitment to hold the perpetrator until they are properly punished, the less energy one has to do anything creative at all.
In the end, clinging to memories of injustice is so debilitating & exhausting that it not only drains off most of our creative, joyful potential -- this clinging also robs the body's life force & makes one physically sick. (See "The List" in Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life .)
Forgiveness breaks the chains of Guilt & liberates a huge amount of energy
It may very well take more than one lifetime to see the payback, or the payback may occur in ways that we do not have the consciousness to perceive. It is critically important to let go of the guilt that says, "I have to see this through. I have to make sure that the person who harmed me gets punished."
Holding the memory, repeating the crime in one's mind over and over, creates bondage to the crime. Both the harmer and the harmed are enslaved to a bond of guilt until the perpetrator suffers an equal type & amount of pain, as the victim.
Forgiveness breaks the guilt bond.
The perpetrator is convicted at the moment of committing the crime.. They will pay, one way or another - but leave the precise execution of this rule in God's hands. Even if the crime is socially recognized and there is a trial and a punishment, there are still many levels of damage that society cannot address.
Even in the USA with capital punishment, a family whose daughter has been murdered will have some 'closure' when the murderer is himself murdered by the state - but can the state recompense a lifetime of loss, bitter grief, and rage? For all those terrible hurts and miseries that "an eye for an eye" will never address, it is crucially important to engage forgiveness.
There was a fellow speaking in Nazareth who made this point some time ago...
It only makes sense. The price we pay for trying to micromanage a system that is so much bigger than we are, is lifetime exhaustion and imprisonment in guilt and grief. The cost to give up that misery? Totally free. Just "give forth" - let go and hand the job back to the One who is suited to do it. By design.
A wonderful, practical guide to step-by-step forgiveness is You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay (orig. 1984)
Louise Hay's instructions for unloading old fear & resentment are direct, loving, clear, & complete. Louise explains how to heal even the most bitter, devastating, & severe childhood trauma -- & the diseases that this trauma will eventually cause.
You Can Heal Your Life is one of those "if I had only one book to take to a desert island" classics. If you get this book, I recommend reading two sections from the back of the book - Louise's own story and "The List" - first.
Forgiveness seems so easy... but in practice - real practice - forgiveness is very difficult indeed...
In any relationship - but especially the queen of all relationships "marriage" - resolution of conflict requires dissolution of false ego.
Note: ego dissolution is painful & tricky, and should not be attempted by those who are not spiritually ready.
If you are ready, of course, the spiritual prize is irreplaceable: priceless faith & inner peace. No one who has ever gone this route with sincerity will ever turn back. Ask them.
Forgiveness is Enlightening
Once you embark on the path of authentic forgiveness (not to be confused with the false paths of suppression or denial!) the "enlightenment" - read: unburdenment - is so satisfying, so relaxing, and so liberating - one feels so light - that everyone who is truly ready to pursue forgiveness as their primary response to the Other in relationships, is a total cheerleader for the idea.
It works great. Ask any real Christian, real Buddhist, real Muslim, real Hindu, real Jew, any honest and observant practitioner of any spiritual path. They'll confirm, this is the way.
But it is painful in the beginning emotionally, and very tricky mentally. Don't jump on this bandwagon without some serious forethought. The mind is addicted to ego-processing.
We have to be very, very skillful in moderation of forgiveness, pacing the rate of grievance-release and allowing the false identity of ego-based Self to fall away slowly.
The tricky part: don't go crazy
The tricky part is how to reliably support one's instinctive sense of Self, once the crutch of Ego is gone. What happens to the mind when it has nothing to do? No values transactions (your way? my way? some compromise?) No negotiation. No discussions, agreements, or balance to strike? No conflicts to mediate? When there is no Self to represent Me at the arbitration table?
It goes berserk of course. It does not go quietly.
Depending on how old you are (in the current incarnation, and in terms of past lives - i.e., we're all pretty old!) consider how long this mind has been in business. It likes its habits. It likes its dominant position in your consciousness. It likes its control. (Most people think their mind *is* their consciousness, yes?)
It goes on a rampage. It wants its job back. It goes on protest mode, insisting on its self-evident, constitutionally guaranteed "right to work".
This situation is mentioned in scripture of all the world's religions because it is so essential to managing ongoing spiritual practice. We must know what to do with the mind and its attachment to ego-Self before embarking on the path of forgiveness.
Forgiveness means giving it back.
Psychically speaking, forgiveness means returning the harmful energy (hatred, anger, insult, physical force, etc.) back to the one from whom it came. Forgiveness means saying "I'm not going to hold on to what you just did or said. You can have that energy back. I don't want to have to manage that thing and my response to it."
When it becomes habitual, forgiveness is an instinctive, knee-jerk back-atcchya. One labels harmful energy "return to sender" and whacks it out of the aura in a natural boomerang reflex.
The conscious person skillfully identifies incoming threats to the ego and sends these threats back out, pronto, before the threat goes deeper and the ego is forced to generate a more complex defensive response. This sounds fairly easy and it is. We do this every day by jusr refusing to "take the bait". "Just say no."
But the awareness has to be in place before one can "remember" to be on guard and swat these pesky parasites out of the aura before they can enter and breed. It takes effort to remember to forgive.
Forgiveness is not natural; forgiveness is learned.
It is *not* normal & natural to forgive (although it can become habitual over time). It is normal & natural and rigorously socially enforced, to store up offenses and wait to get redress. (Christians will recall that Jesus has something very specific to say about payback.)
Secular society (Shani) encourages its citizens to invest their faith in legal justice, and the lower forms of most religions also teach that "right" people are rewarded and "wrong" people are punished in an afterlife of some sort.
Most of us spend a good part of each day managing a huge inventory of offenses large and small, conducting internal discussions about who is right and who is wrong, with subjects ranging from the justice of holy war to matters of personal hygiene.
The false ego is an elaborate structure of moral & aesthetic convictions which determine life practice. Any adult who has different life practices (connected to underlying beliefs) is inherently a threat to the validity of our ego structure, because there just can't logically be two conflicting "right" ways of living. (Ask G.F. Hegel; he's thought about it.)
The various parts of ego-skeleton are connected with a thick, semi-rigid ligament of overarching conviction that, if I am a "good" person, then I must be right. My way of doing things, whether a result of my upbringing, my reaction to trauma, or my conscious choice, simply must be right. That's how ego works.
The ego survives like any other living entity, by refusing to negotiate its core validity. It allows adaptation via negotiation at its periphery but not at its core. All of God's creatures survive this way. It is simply not natural to allow foreign energy to penetrate one's core. The ego says: I am right, therefore I am good. I
am good, therefore I am right. Healthy people do not walk around chanting "I am wrong, I am bad." (Sick people do; in general, they are not going to last long.) We have to believe we are right if we are going to go forward in life making choices and being socially validated for those choices. In a healthy spirit of survival, we cherish our righteousness, and remain vigilant in its defense.
Therefore most of the time, when negative, invalidating energy attacks us from the outside, a healthy person can repel the attack with their outer shell ego defenses. We believe in our righteousness, deep down. Perhaps one is fired from a job or fails a college course. The accusation is bad, ignorant, incapable, incompetent.
It hurts. But work and school, as important as those functions are socially, are not arbiters or providers of core ego validation for most people. (Workaholics, other compensation-dysfunctions excepted.)
Most folks can move on to another class, another job, without major ego collapse. The boss or the professor may live on in memory forever as "wrong". The mind diligently records their offense within the elaborate memory structure of the ego (it is like a giant filing cabinet), and life moves on.
Marriage is the true testing ground for forgiveness
However very few people can blithely "move on" after severe ego conflict in marriage, because the pain of intimate wounding in marriage is almost unbearably deep.
Marriage often forces the reluctant ego to at least *try* the possibility of forgiveness. The pain of ego invalidation, coming from the person closest to us in this life - the spouse - is often unmanageable.
Some souls are driven to the final extreme - forgiveness - in an effort to free themselves from a huge accumulation of toxic anger, humiliation, and grief acquired during failed identity negotiations with this most significant Other.
What is the purpose of this searing emotional pain & ego invalidation, in the context of marriage & partnership?
In each life, certain intimate partners are permitted access to the soft, childlike, sensitive ego core - or very close to the core. The degree and quality of loving intimacy is determined in Jyotisha by yuvati bhava in radix, by the overall pattern of the navamsha (particularly D-9 lagna axis) and by drishti to Moon.
These intimate partners are pre-assigned. They enter our current life by invitation. These intimates are souls with whom we have built a shared inventory of both trust and grief. They know us well.
Often, as marriage progresses, we fear, too well. They have permission to press our buttons, criticize our practices, question our validity, and rattle our cage. These are the partners with whom (against whom) we negotiate our core identity.
The ego-self is established by the parents & upbringing, but our understanding of the Self is not fully valid until it is tested against another Self. Thus, we make arrangement to invite a (series of) testers who have permission to enter the Inner Sanctum of our personal truth.
These are our intimate partners. Most vividly, our marital spouse.
The ego-identity testing ground is marriage.
Professional identity? Important, but not essential. Most people live their whole lives without a profession. Intellectual identity? It seems important to educated people, but very few will be emotionally destroyed by intellectual critique. But attack my love, the way I love, my right to be loved.
Create some reason why I am unloveable - perhaps I am ugly, or evil, or pervasively, incurably wrong. This, hurts. It doesn't hurt coming from a boss or a teacher, but it hurts horribly coming from a person with whom we have entered into a loving promise to love and protect.
The spouse has his/her detailed reasons.
Unless the two parties are enlightened beings, the negotiation for valid identity in marriage can get pretty intense. The more fragile the two egos, the more desperately anxious the negotiation.
Exhaustion and despair can reach such heights of anxiety in this life-defining struggle that married couples lose their sense of balance. Vicious arguments over things like toothpaste caps are well known. (I remember an argument over frozen corn which almost ended one of my core partnerships.)
The pain of ego-damage and the terrible anxiety caused by threat of ego-collapse is enough, for some people, to force consideration of forgiveness as a survival strategy in marriage.
If this is happening to you, you may be blessed to look back upon your troubled marriage and your hurtful partner as the best problem you ever had in your life. Because, skillfully handled, the anger (ego-threat), pain, anxiety, and sorrow caused by marital conflict can force the spirit who is ready into a much broader campaign of forgiveness which encompasses not only the spouse but all the "usual suspects" who have harmed us in this life.
Once you build a strong habit of forgiveness, very little "sticks" to the ego-structure and one can go about one's earthly business unmolested.
Ironically this specific type of pain, pain of ego-conflict in marriage, can call attention to a historic spiritual problem which needs addressing anyway. One way or another, by hook or by crook, all spiritual paths lead toward the goal of ego-dissolution and union with the Divine.
If your path happens to be the Way of Marriage (or the Way of Divorce, since it doesn't really matter whether the legal marriage survives this process) then congratulations, you found your path!
But do wait to embark on this path, seriously, until you are truly ready to let go of the pain. If the ego is still cherishing the pain, counting and recounting all the wrongs done and reciting the rules which prove the adversary was definitely wrong... then wait.
Forgiveness is for a little bit later, when you are saturated with toxic anger, exhausted by chronic reactivity, and bored or frustrated with reciting a liturgy of self-justification.
When you're ready.
How to get started - slowly and carefully
and before releasing my attachment to a particular defining attribute of my ego-self, so that when my partner (especially but not only in marriage) claims that "I" am wrong,
As the various skeletal or scaffolding structures of the ego are released - as we let go of attachment to ideas about ourselves and who we "are" ( "I" am a collection of attributes), some supportive, guiding and structuring energy must come in to replace those ego-identity "bones" that are turning to psychic jello.
Otherwise we get a mental health emergency, or even long-term psycho-emotional illness. Not that it is really possible (the Divine protects us by making sudden enlightenment very rare) but if, theoretically, one were to instantaneously forgive everyone who had ever harmed us in one intense moment of massive forgiveness - we would probably go insane.
Why? Because the ego functions as our social self-definition. All those little grievances, self-justifications and entitlements
What is *not* wanted is sudden ego-collapse caused by pulling out all the scaffolding at once. This is why a normal, functioning person with a robust ego will need high levels of consciousness and very probably spiritual mentor support before engaging in "forgiveness" with any depth of commitment to the process.
While some elements of self-identification "ego" are necessary to survive, most of the conflict caused by self-justification and daily defensiveness in marriage, comes from "false ego".
False ego is essentially the belief-system scaffolding established by our parents & teachers that helps us locate and stabilize our place in the social world. We are taught to believe that our way of doing things - morally, aesthetically, financially - is the right way.
In the absence of reliable caste indicators, a modern western person must rely on a complex of individual beliefs as his central "identity" and thus "my way is the right way" is the mantra at the very center of Self.
When attributes of the spouse's identity complex conflict with attributes of my complex, I must defend my beliefs or lose my Self.
Or, so it seems. And definitely, so we have been trained.
There is a way out of this marriage-killing ego conflict which destroys happiness for so many. Not only the 50% who seek legal divorces but the countless millions living in sustained marital misery. Anyone can do it but it will help to see the ego-resistance patterns in yuvati bhava and navamsha in order to know where to target one's efforts.
Essentially, "edits" of the marriage script require the power to "forgive" the other spouse for their supposed transgressions against what we believe to be good and true about ourselves - i.e., offenses against our ego structure. Hundreds of these offenses occur during each day of married life. They are the primary cause of "irreconcilable differences" leading to divorce.
It requires considerable consciousness to forgive our spouse for being a unique soul who is different than us, for exposing our faults, and for forcing us into levels of awareness that our sleep-walking egos did not want to achieve.
Forgiveness should not be confused with suppression or denial. Forgiveness does not erase the memory of the transgression. Rather, forgiveness "gives back" the unsuitable (ego-assaulting) energy to the original sender, which gives the spouse permission to be a separate person, have their own tastes and values, and make their own judgments.
The trick is that their values and judgments are divinely theirs, not ours - and thus, we are completely freed from conflict and criticism in the marriage.
This is tricky business in a society that demands conformity and mutual ego validation in marriage. Conscious marriage is difficult and should not be undertaken without spiritual supervision.
On the other hand, unconscious marriage is relatively easy, although often extremely painful and oppressive,
Forgiveness is not noble.
If the motivation is to impress other people with one's nobility of spirit, forget it. It's a common mistake. The motive to do the "right" thing by forgiving one's adversary, turning the other cheek etc., following the rules of the holy book in order to prove oneself a good person - will always backfire, because unfortunately this approach will deepens the ego's attachment to being "morally correct".
The only useful motive for forgiveness is utter desperation.
The decision to forgive, especially for really grievous emotional wounding, is a desperate act parallel to radical cancer surgery. No one in their "right mind" would start taking apart their ego, which is the instinctive core of our social survival.
We only do this in complete desperation, when all negotiation with the partner has failed. When we are incapable of discussing the matter; exhausted in our attempts; have no new ideas; have reached a total Waterloo; and furthermore are in deep psycho-emotional pain.
Only then is forgiveness the Way Out of suffering.
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.
~~Portia's speech, Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them as much."
~~ Oscar Wilde
updated: 20 September 2008
Copyright © 1994-2015 by Barbara Pijan Lama - Contact - Sitemap - How to Request a Jyotisha Reading - www.barbarapijan.com
- Barbara Pijan Lama Jyotisha Jyotish Vedic Astrology Horoscope Readings Surya Sun Chandra Moon Mangala Mars Budha Mercury Guru Jupiter Shukra Venus Shani Saturn Rahu Ketu Graha Planets Dasha Timeline Nakshatra Navamsha Marriage Children Wealth Career Spiritual Wisdom Death
