True Forgiveness.
I’m declaring here and now that I forgive the terrorists, the murderers, the rapists, the thieves, the police officers, the right wingers, the left wingers, the centrists, the bigots, the haters, the clerks at DMV, big pharma, Blackwater, Monsanto——basically everyone and everything in the world.
But what is true forgiveness?
This is complicated, because it’s NOT what we have been brought up to believe, i.e. “I forgive you, but you’re still a sinner, I’m just choosing to take the high road.” That’s still a condemnation, and all condemnation implies separation. And it is separation that is truly the root of all that we label as evil.
True forgiveness recognizes that there is no separation. That there is only one thing going on—always—with many many different points of view. True forgiveness looks on sin and desperation and recognizes it as only part of the picture, recognizes that from our limited perspective we can’t hope to know the whole truth of WHAT IS, and admits that what we have seen/are seeing, is a lie.
All prophets and saviors and spiritual teachers have said this one way or another, and it has been, time and time again, twisted for the purpose of separation. Thus, I won’t quote any prophets or teachers or religions in this piece. But I will attempt to prove that there is no separation, that there is only WHAT IS, and that WHAT IS is always neutral. In other words (Shakespeare’s from Hamlet) “…there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Consider this. You are reading this right now and believing it comes from somewhere outside of you. Especially if you disagree. Then you’re shouting, “No Dave, there is separation, because I would never spew this kind of crap. Evil does exist. Other people do exist. The world of ten thousand things is real!” But whether you are reading it, or listening to someone else read it aloud, or reading a braille version of it, there is no way other than through your own awareness that you can come to know about it. In fact, try now to think about something that is absolute, that you know, that doesn’t first come through your own awareness of it. Is there anything you know that isn’t colored by your perception of it? Anything that doesn’t come through your “I?”
If you hadn’t read or heard this post, you wouldn’t know about it. Your world would be without it—until you came to know about it. If there was a fire in your basement, you wouldn’t know about it until it became real in your experience. And then you might succumb to it, and your separate experience might come to an end——and then your world would seem to disappear. But you might also become aware of the fire and escape it. Or you might put it out. Or it might burn down your house. But whatever would happen, would only happen to you. For others whom you believe to live in your house, the experience would be similar, but still unique. They might suffer, but your experience of their suffering would be your own reaction to it, it wouldn’t/couldn’t be their suffering. We all experience only our own world.
I’m sitting at my dining room table as I write this. I can see snow on the ground outside the window. There are men working on my neighbor’s roof—I heard them before I saw them. My two dogs are by my feet, my lover is still in bed, one of my daughters is in her room, the other is sleeping at a friend’s house. But I have no proof that anything is happening around me until I experience the knowledge of it, and that knowledge is always through my perception of it. “I know nothing!” as Schultz used to say on Hogan’s Heroes, other than what I perceive. And what I perceive is always skewed by my sense of separation, by my “separate self.” So how can I believe what I perceive?
We say the terrorists are performing evil acts, yet they believe they are doing God’s will. I recently watched a film everyone is raving about called Boyhood, yet I found it tedious and pedestrian. I love the taste of Black Truffles, yet my mother finds it disgusting. When Igor Stravinsky premiered his ballet The Rite Of Spring in 1913, half of the Paris Opera house walked out while the other half hailed it as a masterpiece. What then was the truth? What is the truth about anything?
There is only one thing we can all agree on: I AM. But we all (most of us) add a third word, “SEPARATE,” which is nothing more than a belief. We have no proof of separation. In fact, we only have proof of Oneness. There is only ever one experience that we can know of the world: our own. And yet we somehow believe that the world and all that happens in it is somehow happening to us, rather than through us. The fact that we are all alone in our perception shouldn’t be a cause for despair but reason to rejoice. It is the ultimate proof that we are all, literally, the world. There is always only one thing going on, the ongoing moment of creation, the NOW, and many seemingly separate perspectives on it. Like five blind men touching an elephant for the first time and believing that what they feel—the small part of the whole that they know—defines the truth about the animal.
True forgiveness comes from and points to this one truth. True forgiveness looks on any act, anyone, and any thing, and reminds us that what we see is false.
And so when something awful happens I can condemn the “crime” as being based on the error of separation while still forgiving the “criminal” (because the criminal and I are one). And the more I practice this true forgiveness, the more I recognize that everything I seem to be experiencing is just the manifestation of one thing: consciousness waking itself up. And the more I “see” that, the easier it is to forgive.
And so when something awful happens I can condemn the “crime” as being based on the error of separation while still forgiving the “criminal” (because the criminal and I are one). And the more I practice this true forgiveness, the more I recognize that everything I seem to be experiencing is just the manifestation of one thing: consciousness waking itself up. And the more I “see” that, the easier it is to forgive.
