Forgiveness

I guess that maybe I should start this post off by asking for forgiveness of this ramble that I am about to….well…. Ramble.I have a lot of thoughts going on in my head right now with all these books I have been reading lately and I thought it would help me if I wrote some of them down.------------------------------------------------------------------- Forgiveness. If there is anything this world desperately needs more of, it is forgiveness. If there was a practice that humanity desperately needs to take up, it is forgiveness. As I reflect upon myself and I see how I have treated forgiveness or the lack of it and see all my past thinking. I can’t help but to see the insanity in what I used to think sane. There is a saying I have heard my whole life to, but never really listened to. “Hate will consume you”And this saying has never been more clear to me than it is now. I’ve always understood it on an intellectual level, but it is now that it is crystal clear at a much deeper level. In this world of form that we live in. We live in a world of cause and effect. The world without is merely a reflection of the world within. Everything in the world of form starts with a thought (the cause). And as this thought manifests, it creates the world without. I think for most people though (including myself), we tend to look at the world without as the cause and the world within as the effect of that cause. But what does this have to do with forgiveness?As I think about all the people who I have felt has wronged me in the past. Family members, friends, etc. and the resentment I have held onto some of them. I have to ask myself, “What am I trying to accomplish by holding onto this anger or hate?”What am I protecting by projecting these thoughts whenever I think of a certain person? Am I protecting myself? From what? The past? The past isn’t here anymore. It is no longer real, because it is NOT now. So what am I protecting? I must be protecting something. I must be afraid of something to hold onto resentment and anger in the present moment for something that happened in the past and is no longer real. Am I really protecting myself? Am I being attacked NOW? What is it, that is causing me to hold onto thoughts to keep the past alive and bring it into the present moment? What is it that causes this fear that if I let go of my thoughts and resentment against another person that somehow I will weaken myself and give them strength? Is it really ME that I’m protecting. Is it really my SELF that I’m trying to keep safe from harm by attack or is it really the false identification of the mind (the ego) that is trying to protect itself? Funny how the ego loves to live in the past or the future, but never in the present.Either by reliving past wrongs or rights in something that is no longer real (the past) or by living it’s projected thoughts in either worry or salvation in what is not yet real (the future), but it always seems to condemn the present moment. And the most insane part of non forgiveness is that while we think that we are attacking another person by projecting our thoughts of anger or resentment onto them. We are actually attacking ourselves! How insane is that?! Everything starts with a thought. All our emotions ( which by the way, emotion literally means disturbance in Latin) start with a thought. So every thought of resentment or emotion of hatred that we think we are projecting onto another person. We must experience it first, because everything starts from within and then is projected without. Every feeling of animosity. Every feeling of resentment. Every feeling of holding onto that grudge. Every feeling of attack through thoughts that you wish onto another person. We MUST first experience them within ourselves first. These feelings of anger, resentment, animosity. We must experience these feelings mentally, physically and emotionally first, they must manifest within us, before we can "project" these thoughts onto others. We are essentially attacking ourselves, trying to attack another with our thoughts. How insane is it to think that we can create thoughts of anger and resentment against another person and then project them onto that person and think that somehow we will find salvation and peace within this attack and that we will be released from the very thoughts that we created and are within us? We can only be released of these thoughts through forgiveness. Anything else will just hold onto these thoughts and keep the turmoil alive within us. I know all of us want peace. We all want to be happy,quit smoking, but look at the insanity of the ego. It is insane! It is the ego that thinks we will find comfort and safety within ourselves by placing false barriers to love for protection against being hurt by it. It is the ego that thinks that we will find peace by replacing love and forgiveness with attack and resentment to build up these “false” walls against attack from others. Forgiveness is the road to peace. For forgiveness and peace are the same. Animosity,stop smoking now, resentment, anger, and non forgiveness will only create conflict and turmoil. Which will only create suffering. This is the road of the ego. The ego doesn’t want peace. The ego cannot have peace. For if peace were to come about. The ego would dissolve into the nothingness that it really is. It must have conflict to create the illusion that it is real. Practice forgiveness, because when you forgive others, you are also forgiving yourself. For you release yourself from all the anger, animosity and resentment that you created within yourself first to project those thoughts onto that other person. If we practice forgiveness no longer will hate consume us. It will be peace that consumes us.