Forgiveness: The F Word (Streaming Audio)

Forgiveness is fundamental to our well-being and our spiritual growth, and is central to the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, and other spiritual figures. So why do we so often forget (or refuse) to put it into practice?

At this time of year we hear a lot of Hallmark card rhetoric about peace on Earth and goodwill towards men. But that very peace and goodwill begins in your own heart, and it expands outward from there. Forgive those who have trespassed against you, just as you would wish to be forgiven for your trespasses. Forgiveness and compassion are the prerequisites to peace on earth. Start where you are. Who can you forgive right now, in this very moment? And how would that change your experience of the world? Holy child, what in the hell are you waiting for? Be the change you want to see in the world.

Join Dennis Hunter for a free 37-minute satsang (dharma talk) exploring the stickiness of resentments, the freedom of letting go, and the vital role of forgiveness in spiritual awakening. Adapted from material presented in Chapter 13 of You Are Buddha: A Guide to Becoming What You Are.

Recorded on Christmas Eve, 2014.

Boyhood

There is a moment in Richard Linklater's new film Boyhood when the film's main character, Mason — caught deep in the throes of the most awkward transitional years of high school — realizes that growing up is not necessarily the guaranteed outcome of getting older. In a pensive, philosophical conversation between Mason and his girlfriend — the kind of intelligent, emotionally engaged dialogue that has become like Linklater's filmic signature — Mason reflects on the fact that his mother, who has worked hard to be as grown up and responsible as she can be, still seems as lost and confused about the direction of her life as he is about his own.

Boyhood is unlike anything else I've ever seen in cinema, just as Linklater is unlike any other director working today. Over the course of the film we watch Mason grow from a shy, introverted six-year-old into a shy, introverted young man going off to college. But rather than using multiple actors or special effects to depict Mason and his family aging across the years, Linklater filmed the same group of actors repeatedly over the course of 12 years. As Mason's character ages, so does the actor playing him, along with his family members. The effect is that, although Boyhood is a fictional story, it illustrates the joys and pain of childhood and growing up in a way that is profoundly authentic and true-to-life.



But what does it even mean to grow up? Who the hell really knows? It seems to have a lot to do with taking responsibility for ourselves, getting with the program, and becoming successful in life — at least that's the message that the adults in Mason's world keep preaching at him. Do your homework, complete your chores, get ahead in school, find something you're good at and excel in life. But for all their good intentions and rhetoric, those very same adults keep struggling to find their own way in the world, and repeating mistake after embarrassing mistake. Mason's mother keeps marrying the wrong guys, and his father seems stuck in a perpetually rebellious childhood phase of his own.

Practicing Dharma Without Becoming a Doormat

Recently someone wrote to me with the following question:

How does one who is on the path practice love, tolerance, compassion, forgiveness, etc. without becoming a doormat? Our culture is so plagued with fear greed, ignorance and anger that I find it difficult to rise above it all and work from a higher spiritual plane. When people violate me, I want to fight back instead of sort of "stepping off the playing field."

Over the years, I've found that this is a frequently asked question -- especially among people who are new to the path of meditation and Dharma practice. That is not to say that it's a naive question. It's a fundamental one, for it goes right to the heart of the matter. And there is no easy answer for it. The path of Dharma does not provide us with easy, prefabricated answers to living questions; we must find our answers in each moment, and then find them again in the next.

But I've observed that this is one of those questions that ceases to plague people as they continue going deeper into their practice and spiritual path. It's not that it ever really goes away; but we begin to understand that the question hinges on a perceived separation between life and spiritual practice that doesn't truly exist.

Practicing love, tolerance, compassion, forgiveness and so on does not, of course, mean that we should make ourselves into a doormat for other people's abuse. For starters, we should extend the same friendliness and compassion to ourselves that we aspire to extend to others. The Buddha said that we could search the entire universe and we would not find anyone more worthy of our love than we ourselves are. So putting ourselves in a position of being repeatedly violated by another is not practicing compassion or love towards ourselves.

The Buddhist path is often misunderstood (and mis-applied) as a practice of passivity -- dis-engaging from the world and retreating into oneself. Certainly, retreat (in the literal sense) has its purpose and value for a practitioner, in terms of deepening and stabilizing one's own experience of truth. But real Dharma practice is not navel-gazing, or fiddling while Rome burns -- it's being fully engaged in one's life and world and relationships, with no separation and no prefabricated rules.

In the Sadhana of Mahamudra, Chogyam Trungpa described -- in poetic language -- the wisdom of a fully realized being:

He is dark red in color, symbolizing the oneness of everything within compassion. He is inseparable from peacefulness and yet he acts whenever action is required. He subdues what needs to be subdued, he destroys what needs to be destroyed and he cares for whatever needs his care.

If being inseparable from peacefulness and yet acting whenever action is required seems paradoxical, that's good -- because it is. As Zen master Suzuki Roshi said, if something isn't paradoxical, it isn't true.

As we grow on our path, we begin to see that we can act whenever action is required, but that action can come from a different motivation. It's no longer "fighting back" in the usual sense, which comes from aggression and fear, a sense of closing down and tightening. Rather, our action can come from a place of compassion and staying open to other people's basic goodness (even when they're behaving atrociously).

Sometimes that means retreating from the situation and giving it space. Sometimes it means sitting down and having a frank conversation, and sharing your perspective. Sometimes it means protesting. Sometimes it means walking away entirely, and never looking back. Sometimes it means giving someone a gift to show that you care. Sometimes it means calling the police and pressing charges. You get the idea.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution, no predetermined course of action. We meet each situation that arises with fresh awareness and open heart, and we respond in whatever way is most beneficial. Making ourselves into a doormat is rarely the appropriate response.

East Mind / West Mind

Today was a rare double-post day. My weekly 21st-Century Buddhism feature at the ID Project went up this morning with "The F-Word: Forgiveness." Check it out to learn why I think forgiveness is one of the most essential, and often overlooked, qualities on the spiritual path. In this article, I look at the 12-step model of spiritual practice, which places a strong emphasis on recognizing our crippling (and sometimes hidden) resentments and cultivating forgiveness. Have you had an experience of forgiveness that changed you? Post a comment to the article and share your insights.

Also, "East Mind/West Mind" appeared today at Buddhist Geeks. In this article, I look at the cognitive and psychological differences between "Asians" and "Westerners," and how these differences might shape our experience of Buddhism and spirituality.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

The very labels “Western” and “Asian” are fuzzy, finger-painting language—maddeningly imprecise in what and who they refer to—and they fall apart on closer inspection. How similar, really, are all the distinct cultural and linguistic groups that get lumped under those two umbrellas? Are we to assume that Swedes and Americans and Brazilians and Croatians all think the same way because they live in the same “Western” hemisphere? What about people from China, India, and Indonesia? Labels such as “Western” and “Asian” are generalities, and when speaking in generalities it’s probably inevitable that someone will feel excluded or misrepresented. So the conservative approach would be to avoid discussing these things at all.

Still, in spite of that, here we are, with what we all acknowledge is the more or less “Asian” spiritual tradition of Buddhism being transplanted into a more or less “Western” cultural matrix. While those labels raise a number of questions, they seem to retain some usefulness for describing the situation we are in today.

In the past decade a number of studies have demonstrated significant differences in how East Asians and Westerners perceive, cognize and think. One such study conducted by Richard Nisbett and colleagues at the University of Michigan used computerized eye-tracking technology to measure the ways European-American and Chinese subjects related to simple pictures of animals or other focal objects set against a complex background — such as a picture of a fish in an aquarium. Almost invariably, the Americans’ eyes zeroed in on the fish first, perceiving it as the most important object, and only then did their eyes take in the rest of the aquarium as the context in which the fish appears. The Chinese participants, on the other hand, generally perceived the context — the aquarium — first, and only then did they zero in on the fish and locate it within that context. Similar studies have suggested that such differences translate into unique ways of processing and committing information to memory, as well as different ways of making sense of what is perceived.

...

If something as seemingly innocuous as the way East Asians and Westerners receive and prioritize visual information in a picture is measurably different in the laboratory, could there be other significant differences in our ways of perceiving and knowing? If, as Nisbett suggests, East Asians have a more “holistic” way of looking at phenomena and interpreting their experience, and Westerners have a more linear, object-oriented, “analytic” mind, could this help to explain other more commonly observed cultural differences? Why, for example, has Western medicine excelled at treating specific, isolated problems with very direct remedies, whereas Chinese and Tibetan medicine take a more holistic view of mind and body and focus on treating imbalances within an interdependent network of systems?

And how do such different cognitive styles — which go largely unnoticed much of the time because they are so deeply embedded in our individual and collective psychology — impact the way we relate to something like spirituality or religion?

In looking at these differences, I reference not only Nisbett's studies in cognitive psychology but also some very interesting recent work in linguistics. Check out the full article at Buddhist Geeks and share your thoughts.