Forgiveness as an Avenue of Consciousness

by Gregory Allen Butler

Forgiveness is a necessary component of our mental makeup if we are going to experience a life of joy and peace. And the inability to forgive is a major factor in not being able to live in the present moment, where Presence is experienced, where we connect to our higher selves. I know it’s a real challenge to be able to move on despite the pain and suffering caused by others. In my own life, I have learned that if I buy into the mean-spirited words hurled at me, I suffer. But I also learned that if I don't, I don't suffer. It's like visiting someone in a mental hospital and hearing the patients call you crazy. You just don't buy it because you know what their state of mind is.

It takes wisdom to see that people sometimes act in unconscious ways. But the truth of the matter is that the person who caused your pain was just in a state of unconsciousness. It is not the nature of consciousness to cause pain—that is the nature of unconsciousness.

Lets look at a hypothetical example to clarify this a little more.

Let’s say you can’t forgive your sister because she forgot to send you a birthday card. You are upset and hurt. “Just wait until her birthday, I won’t send her a card either.” Then you get a phone call from your father telling you that your sister was in an automobile accident last week and has been in a coma ever since. Now it is easy to forgive your sister because you realize she is unconscious.

Similarly, if you can see the mental state of anyone who causes harm to anyone else as a state of unconsciousness, then you can forgive. When you look at all the ways our minds are conditioned in this culture, with all the messages in our entertainment of violence and all the advertisements that repeatedly tell us that we are not going to be happy until we have their car, or clothes, or vodka, or cigarette, then it is easy to understand how someone could be disconnected from their state of being, how someone could become deluded and unconscious, and cut off from their highest intentions.

If you have this understanding, perhaps then, the response activated in you would not be one of pain, but one of compassion. Instead of fragmentation, you feel oneness. The pain never had a chance to lodge in your consciousness due to your understanding.

It takes deep insight to see that we gain nothing by holding on to the past. On the contrary, we attract more of the pain into our life. That is the premise of the universal law of attraction. We attract what we think about. Resentments take us away from gratitude, and hate takes us away from love. And without gratitude and love, life is empty. When we lose our inner life, all we have left is a life situation of darkness and despair. That to me is living life in a soul prison, with the soul hidden away, not allowed to express itself nor to experience the oneness of existence.

But it is not just others that we need to forgive. Sometimes the person we need to forgive is our self. Often we are our own worst enemy. Self-loathing is a big obstacle to living consciously. The negative energy is self-sabotage which creates even more dislike. It’s a vicious circle and hard to get out of.

Related to this is when you recognize unconsciously a part of you that you don’t like in the words or actions of another. Instead of facing the issue in yourself, though, you see it only in the other person. This can bring on intense disdain. The intensity of the projection is directly connected to the resistance in dealing with this within yourself. To forgive the other person would require you to face the truth in yourself and forgive yourself. In many cases the seemingly easiest option is to continue to project the disdain onto the other person and thus avoid taking any responsibility for self-growth.

If this is the case, take a look at yourself. Recognize that projected and rejected part of you inside yourself. Don’t judge it. Just focus your attention on it. Don’t deny it; don’t resist it. Sit with it. Embrace it. With focused attention on it, with consciousness, it cannot exist for long. The presence of your consciousness transmutes it. What was once darkness becomes light. It ceases to exist as a fragmented aspect of you. And when that new conscious assimilation occurs, the darkness isn’t there to be projected onto others. Instead of judgment, you experience oneness and healing. Then you are ready to forgive.

In the movie, What the Bleep Do We Know, the main character in the drama, Amanda, looks in the mirror and says, “I hate you.” I felt for her because I saw that she didn't see the big picture. You can see, from watching the film, how destructive this type of negative energy is. As she looks at herself with hateful rage in the bathroom mirror, she hears a drop of water leak from the faucet. That prompts her memory of an exhibit she saw the previous day of Dr. Masaru Emoto, “The Message from Water,” showing the effects of thoughts on water, and a man saying to her, “If thoughts can do that to water, imagine what our thoughts can do to us.” This gives her pause and prompts her to begin drawing all over her body hearts of love with branches connecting to other hearts. She heals herself of her contempt with consciousness and love.

How can you ever have peace of mind if you can’t forgive? To keep playing over and over the past hurt means to keep experiencing it. To focus on it extensively leads to identifying with it. It even effects the consciousness of your cells. The ego attaches itself onto the pain.

In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle refers to this as the pain body. And the pain body can take over your consciousness at any time when you are reminded of it, or when something resonates with it, or when something of a similar energy vibration comes into your awareness. You have no freedom. You have no control over it. You might become angry with someone for no reason other than the fact that he or she reminded you somehow of a past infliction of pain or sorrow that you haven’t let go of. You might not even be aware of why you are angry. But what has happened is that the pain body has been activated.

Perhaps now you can see how non-forgiveness makes it impossible to live a life of wholeness. It’s like telling a guest he is invited to dinner as long as he doesn’t talk about a certain part of your life. There can’t be any spontaneity there. It’s like living in a society where the press is censored. If you write on an off-limit subject, your career is over.

I was in a marriage once where I felt like I was walking on eggshells. That’s how relationships are with people who have a dense pain body. You have to tread very gingerly. Perhaps walking through a minefield is a better metaphor, never knowing what is going to trigger an explosion. It was her past, and her inability to come to terms with it, that created this fragile state of affairs. It affected her health, I’m sure. She was creative and brilliant, but she died from cancer—at way too young of age.

With this perspective, you can see how it is impossible to have a peaceful, joyful and serene life without forgiveness. Without forgiveness, it is impossible to live in the present moment. And that is where life unfolds. That’s where creativity takes place. That is where we are able to experience infinity. If the purpose of life is to discover the infinity of our true reality, then we cannot continue to identify our self with a painful incident of the past.

Forgiveness isn’t an issue if you can prevent the wound in the first place. If someone speaks to you with words of malice, it is your choice to let them lodge in your consciousness or not.

The Buddha told a story of when he was meditating under a tree, a group of young men started throwing insults at him, mocking him, and trying to humiliate him. After they finished their barrage of insults, The Buddha asked them a question. “When you give someone a present and he doesn’t accept it, what happens to the present?”

They answered him saying that they take the present back. The Buddha then said, “In a similar way, I do not accept your presents and so they are all returned to you.”

This universe was created for the purpose of experiencing love and oneness. It’s a shame that so many of us deny ourselves the possibility of ever having that experience. If you have young children, teach it to them. It’s not taught in the schools. It will save them a lot of pain in life and it will enable them to go much faster in the attainment of their highest aspirations.

But there is one catch. You have to live the example for them. They will listen to you when they see it manifested in you. It other words, you have to walk the talk. Be the change you want to create in others.