Why Forgive? - Quareness Series (22nd "Lecture").
The short answer is because we cannot fully pursue an inner energy connection with the Divine until we free ourselves of our past. We can't go forward and continue to expand our energy, because blame always throws us back into the old control drama (seeking sympathy or energy from others).
Only forgiveness can fully liberate our potential to go past such oft repeated scripts that waste our time. It does so by reinforcing what higher witness awareness we have acquired and the key to forgiving is simply acknowledging that everyone was doing the best he or she could at the time.
Where attention goes, energy flows e.g. when two people turn their attention to one another, they literally merge energy fields (pooling their energy). And more often than not the issue between them quickly becomes one of who is going to control this accumulated energy. The one who proceeds to dominate (capture both energies) feels an immediate rush of power, security and self-worth, while the other feels off-centre, anxious and drained of energy. And the natural tendency of the latter then is to try to win energy back from the dominator.
This process of psychological domination and its countering impulse, these games people play, can be observed everywhere and may well be the underlying source of all irrational conflict among humans in our energy-competitive societies. Each person is an energy field consisting of a unique set of beliefs and assumptions that radiate outward and influence the world. This includes beliefs about what an individual thinks other people are like, and a style of interaction about how to win in conversation (control dramas).
According to the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, as we look out on the world our inner urges are not just to avoid pain and maximise hedonistic pleasure (as Freud thought) but to move toward psychological wholeness and self-actualisation of our inner potential. And in this journey we are aided by already established pathways in the brain (archetypes). As we grow psychologically we can realise or activate these archetypes and in so doing progress toward self-actualisation.
The first stage of our growth is one of differentiation, during which we become aware of ourselves in the cultural milieu into which we are born and begin to individuate. We have to find a niche for ourselves in the world we learned in childhood, a process that includes becoming educated, assessing the economy and finding a way to make a living. As we do so, we sharpen our ego-power and our will, replacing our learned set of automatic reactions with a logical way of interpreting events that becomes our own way of standing out i.e. extending our self in the world as a unique person with unique views. This first stage early on is somewhat narcissistic (selfish) and inflated (egotistical) but eventually fully activates the Hero archetype when we're ready to find something important to do in the culture, feeling proud and determined about accomplishing it.
As we continue to grow we progress beyond the Hero phase and activate the Self archetype - the development step during which we move past a self-concept based on mastering our milieu and enter a more inwardly directed consciousness where intuition and logic become partners and our goals become more in line with our inner images and dreams of what we really want to do. This is the self-actualisation phase where the perception of meaningful coincidences becomes most instructive. At this stage the events of our lives begin to respond to our readiness for growth and the synchronicity begins to occur more frequently.
Jung maintained that synchronicity (the perception of meaningful coincidence) is an acausal principle in the universe, a law that operates to move human beings toward greater growth in consciousness. And maybe the personal challenge for each of us is to overcome the cultural conditioning that leads us to reduce life to the ordinary, commonplace and non-mysterious. Mostly we have learned to pursue life with our egos alone, waking up in the morning and thinking we must take complete control of our day. Yet the mystery is always there, dancing around the fringes of our lives, giving us fleeting glimpses of possibility. However, it's solely up to us to decide to slow down and shift our focus, and to begin to act on the opportunities coming our way.
It's undoubtedly part of wisdom to look at any assertion about the nature of reality with a critical eye, but it's also wise to stay open-minded enough to consider the phenomenon in question. Admittedly, maintaining a balance between skepticism and openness is especially difficult when the phenomenon involves our inner psychology or spirituality, but it's important to keep our conversation friendly and to push toward areas of agreement. The process of opening up to the mystical side of life happens mainly through personal interaction e.g. we may see another taking seriously the idea of spiritual experience and we may decide to investigate the matter for ourselves. It's for this reason that we must take every conversation seriously. Our frank disclosures just might be the testimony that breaks someone's entrenched position, or indeed the skeptic we're speaking to might be correct on a given issue. For spiritual growth, we need to be committed to a two-way process of consensus building. In order to learn, we all have to listen. It is open dialogue that ensures a widely debated viewpoint and keeps our perspective broad.
Humans have a tendency to create particular lifestyle beliefs and behaviours (scripts) that they inflexibly hold onto as their way of pushing anxiety out of consciousness. Ranging from uncontrollable fetishes and neurotic habits to more normalised fixed religious ideas and philosophical beliefs, these scripts all have in common their intractable nature and their resistance to rational debate or discussion. Human society also tends to be characterised by irrational power struggles designed solely to keep these scripts intact. One aspect of this is what's called the double-bind effect, during which someone discounts every idea offered by others in order to dominate the interaction. Per the Scottish psychiatrist R.D.Laing, the effects when this habit is perpetrated by parents on their children, are often tragic. When every possible action a child offers is criticised, the child retreats into extreme defensiveness and develops excessive reaction patterns created in order to fight back. When these children grow up, their defensiveness and need to control every situation lead them to unconsciously use double-bind techniques themselves, especially toward their own children. And in this way the condition perpetuates itself across many generations and continuously spawns a culture with a tendency for many (maybe most) of its participants to defensively try to control or dominate everyone else. In these conditions, self-actualisation and higher creativity are limited because most people spend their time struggling to dominate others and reinforce their scripts, instead of opening up to the greater possibilities available in experience and in relationships among people.
Building on Darwin's work, the French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin maintained that evolution is not arbitrary but is moving in a purposeful direction, that human beings are not accidents of nature, and that our social evolution (including our journey into the higher realms of spiritual experience) is an outcome for which all of evolution has been aiming. Supporting de Chardin's thesis, the English scientist Rupert Sheldrake has proposed that biological forms originate and are sustained through morphogenic fields which are nonlocal in nature and create an invisible structure which molecules and cells and organs follow as they differentiate and specialise to give rise to a particular life-form. Each generation of a species is not only structured by such an underlying field, but actually amends this field as it overcomes challenges in the environment i.e. the fields themselves are evolving. And this introduces the possibility that the members of a given species can create a morphogenic field that produces not just additional traits but a jump into a different life-form altogether.
Sheldrake also suggested that this type of progress could account for social evolution in humans as well. Throughout history, humans have pushed the outer envelope of our knowledge, always striving to evolve toward a fuller understanding of our environment and the actualisation of our own inner potential. At any one time, the level of human ability and awareness can be viewed as defined by the shared morphogenic field. As individuals actualise particular abilities (e.g. running faster, receiving intuitions) the morphogenic field is shifted forward, not just for them but for all other humans. And this may explain why, for example, inventions and discoveries are quite often put forward at the same time in history by individuals who have no contact with each other. We seem to be intimately connected with the universe and with each other, and our influence on our world through our thoughts appears to be very powerful.
It seems that for most synchronicities we start with a background sense of the truth that we are here to tell, a truth that is becoming ever more clear and manifests first in the form of our prime question, and then in the question most urgent in our current life situation. Afterwards comes an intuition, a mental image of something happening, of ourselves taking some sort of action in order to pursue the answer to this question. And if we pay attention, an actual opportunity approximating our intuition will occur, bringing answers and feeling perfectly synchronistic. Such answers of course will always lead us forward into a new life situation and more questions. And so the process continues - question - intuition - synchronistic answer - new question.
Perhaps then it's not so far-fetched to suggest that the universe must respond to our intentions, that our thoughts and beliefs go out into the world and the environment tries to give us what we seem to want. If, in our own control drama, we expect everyone we meet to be intimidating or foolish or neglectful, this is what we will find. In fact those other persons will usually behave thus, feeling that they have been cast in that role in our conversations. However, from a higher energy state (brought about by our own focussing on love and lightness and connection with our environment) we can look with fresh eyes at the persons with whom we've been talking - in fact sending spiritual energy to their higher selves that allows them to ease the rigid assumptions defined by their control dramas. The key is to keep our energy high and to use the power of our intentions in a positive way.
To do this in practical terms, we must focus on the wholeness of the other with an attitude of openness. As the other person talks, if we look closely, we can begin to see the higher self of that person, the particular expression that reflects the individual's greater awareness and knowledge. And if we begin to speak to this higher self (actually projecting love) the person will begin to move into that awareness while we are interacting. We have known for millennia that it is important to love one another and that transformative outcomes can be the result. Now we seem to have found ourselves in a position to learn and integrate the spiritual details of how to send the love through using this process of uplifting others as a higher ethical stance toward them. And as we send this love energy to others, we become the channel for an energy that originates with the Divine source and moves through us - maybe the best way of regaining our own inner Divine connection when we feel separated is to uplift someone else (= the all embracing power of "dem positive vibes" again)?
On the working assumption that there is only one Divine force in the universe, and that force is positive, it becomes evident that the problem of evil is all about human ego and fear, which alienate us from this creative force. When we are connected with this Divinity, our security comes from within. When we are alienated from it, we look for security outside ourselves in some form of ego gratification and energy-stealing control dramas. All evil is then essentially a way to repress the fear of being lost, if only for a moment. In truth evil and hell are internal states.
A typical way of coping with our daily fears is with some kind of fetish or obsession that can be repeated enough to create a sense of control. However, the problem with constructing delusional devices to ward off anxiety is that they regularly break down - they relieve the symptom (anxiety) rather than the true illness of fear and insecurity. Whatever the crutch or obsessive behaviour (e.g. by anyone whose use of drugs, working, shopping, eating, watching sports or pursuing sex gets out of control), it never addresses the root cause and is doomed to break down. The angst creeps back in and we are driven onward in our never-ending flight from disconnection. This is the nature of hell. Deluded souls need to wake up from the illusions they have devised and open up to the Divine inside (heaven), which is the only real cure for any obsessive activity. Jung (again) suggested that the stories of the Scriptural fall from grace and banishment to hell, are merely metaphors for the pitfalls inherent in human evolution. In its evolutionary journey toward spirituality, humanity has had to emerge from unconsciousness by developing ego strength and becoming self-aware. Yet, to progress further, our egos must take a back seat to the higher self and stop resisting letting go to the transcendent experience. It's important (for the positive future of mankind) to realise that all such delusional behaviour is but a defense mechanism against the great fear that results from spiritual disconnection.
We are told that Jesus was seen to appear and disappear at will, to walk on water and so forth, but after Newton formalised the vision of a clockwork universe, such abilities were seen as magical or metaphoric, the stuff of myth or hoax, but certainly not as examples of real human ability. Official Christianity tended to explain these abilities as the mark of a deity, nothing that humans could possibly emulate. However, it seems there have been many examples of transcendent ability in both Western and Eastern history, and the awakening happening today appears to include a revision of what is possible for all of us.
Perhaps the new world emerging will be one of greater creativity and personal fulfilment where each conversation can be special and carry a message. As technology advances and automates more amd more of our material needs, the information age could emerge more completely as our collective focus shifts from accumulating material security to engaging in the higher inspiration of synchronistic growth (shades of Maslow?). And as the synchronicity continues and the inspiration soars, our bodies could reach ever higher levels of energy (switching on more of our DNA) until we become spiritual beings of light?
Could it be that the next quantum leap for our world is an unfolding merging of dimensions? As integral aspects of the Divine consciousness, have we come here to slowly manifest the spiritual consciousness of the afterlife in this dimension? From the "big bang" to the complex organic atoms and molecules, from one-celled plants and animals to human beings, we have moved forward. We may have slowly worked to live an awareness that we knew, but had to remember while in human form. And our overriding purpose may always have been to raise our energy level to the point where we can walk into the afterlife dimension, essentially merging the before and after, heaven and earth, into one?
I am wounded, vulnerable,
And daily dying into wonder beyond wonders.
Let it happen, let it be,
It's what happens on the day we're born
And whenever we allow ourselves
To rise from the dead.
In the meantime my solid body walks unresolved,
Trapped in its solidity,
This kind of everything envelope
Waiting to be nothing
Which can be transformed
Only if it accepts to be nothing,
And to become a garden
Where love walks and meditates on all
That may yet be part of itself.
The only thing between us and resurrection
Is ourselves.
And the reticent God
Determined to hold onto nothing,
The creator who gives everything away
With constant evacuation of the heart
And striving towards emptiness,
Is ensouled in our person
Impregnated whenever we allow entry
To the self effacing Spirit,
This Christ who is nothingness in person
The universe turned into one Word
The one who lost his soul to save us.
For the Spirit
Never born,
Never died,
Will never leave
Until all are saved.
Rising from the dead
We simply release what is holding us back
And standing outside
Surrender to ecstacy,
Urging upwards towards the spiral
And falling down into the marvellous,
Like an artist watching reality
And disturbing its surface
With the asceticism of achieved spontaneity,
Ensuring that our nature no longer determines
The limits of our personhood.
Doing for ourselves
What God has done for himself,
Viewing the world and all its parts
As works of art,
Turning water into wine
And life into eternal life.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
September, 2012.