BUILDING A NEW WORLD
There is a lot of darkness, disharmony and suffering in our world today, a lot of injustice, violence, greed and indifference. The rich grow richer and the poor poorer, and instead of respecting our environment and using our money to feed our Have Not’s, we seem to prefer spending billions to create increasingly more ingenious weapons to destroy ourselves with. And what we must realise is that we – that is, you and I – are the reason behind all this. Indeed, the state of much of our outer world is created by the fact that many of us live very split and disconbobulated inner lives; many of us are stuck in very unhealthy conflicts , fixated in great sadness, despair and anger, all of which is continually seeping out of us and contaminating the society around us.

I therefore believe that if we wish to move forward and take steps to create a better world - a more enlightened culture which the Bulgarian Master Peter Deunov described as being full of love and justice - that a lot of healing of our past is needed. In the words of Lao Tsu: ‘Going on is going back’. Put simply, we cannot advance our human evolution by abandoning what has gone before. Rather, we need to find ways and means of recycling it, which means we need to ‘return’ to address those aspects of our past, which, for whatever reason, prove resistant to moving to the ‘next level’. And we need to do this in the understanding that until such a time as we learn to ferret out and exorcise the many different kinds of ghosts that are still haunting us, that obstacles will always stand in our way. In Jung’s famous words: ‘We don’t become enlightened by going into the light but by embracing our shadow’. Indeed, much of what I call the ‘evolutionary rocket fuel’ that will propel us into higher states of awareness and thus inspire us to lay the foundation stones of a new and better world, can only emerge as we increasingly learn to open up to those areas of our past where we are still blocked and wounded..

And here, a very integral part of this process, lies in our ability to forgive. Indeed, we must never underestimate just how many conflicts and how much suffering still persists, because so many of us are so rigid and un-yielding and not only have very little idea about how to forgive but also wholly fail to recognise the importance of it.

So what I want to look at are some of the characteristics of forgiveness. I want to explore why I believe forgiveness is so important, why it is often so difficult to put into practice, and what I believe is required if it is to be implemented .

THE CHALLENGE OF FORGIVENESS
Evidence of the importance of forgiveness lies in the fact that all spiritual traditions give it a central place. In Christianity, for example, in the Lord’s prayer, the words ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us,’ inform us that we are challenged not only to forgive other people but also to ask to be forgiven ourselves.

And I use the word challenge, because forgiveness is generally quite a challenge and in most instances, does not emerge easily, especially if we feel we have been badly hurt or damaged. One of the main reasons why it is not easy to forgive in such circumstances, is because deep wounding can bind us in a perverse way to the source of our pain , resulting in our remaining very fixated in and therefore attached to, our suffering. And essentially, what forgiveness asks of us, is that we learn to let go.

Let us imagine that something terrible will have happened to us, say, that we will have been betrayed, abused or tortured in some way, or that those we love – our family, members of our tribe or clan – are stolen from us, ethnically cleansed, victimised, or put to death. What we will tend to feel is great outrage, the sense that something very precious and sacred to us and that gives our lives meaning, will have been ‘stolen’ from us. And here the outrage, together with all the suffering accompanying it, can become the ‘new meaning’ to fill our void! We therefore become reluctant to want to relinquish it , for we feel it is all we have left to remind us of what we have lost! To surrender it ( so necessary if we are to forgive) can seem to be a dishonouring of our old memories!

In fact, our sorrow, brought about by being hurt, can actually contract and twist our humanity. In many instances, we may actually ‘take on’ the de-humanising presence of those whom we perceive to have wounded us. Thus our desire to exact revenge - to have ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ - can then become a governing force in our lives. Forgetting that we turn into what we hate, the sense of having been ‘wronged’ can create in us the illusion of our own purity. In our minds, we become ‘all good’, and those whom we feel will have hurt or betrayed us, ‘all bad’. Thus we may feel justified in giving vent to our destructive tendencies ; we are now ‘allowed’, in return, to rape , pillage, torture, abuse and try to destroy those we perceive as our destroyers. To forgive them would deny us this ‘luxury’!

Such scenarios can be further exacerbated by the fact that many of us can carry deep wounds that seem unconnected with anything that would appear to have happened to us personally. Many report carrying deep cellular memories of ancestral, racial or religious violence relating to incidents they have no personal knowledge of. Very often I have found similar scenarios surfacing in my deep memory work with clients in therapy. Many have reported experiences of slowly dying on battle fields, filled with deep despair and a huge hatred towards their enemy who have robbed them of their lives…..

Indeed, if we look back at just the last 2000 years of our history, we realise firstly, just how much of it has been characterised by extreme violence. Millions have been abused, raped, ethnically cleansed, tortured, murdered, enslaved and victimised. And secondly, we see just how little of this violence has ever been effectively resolved or worked through, that is, how little we, as a species, have ever learned to forgive those who have mistreated us. And, as we well know, what is unhealed or unresolved, persists. Indeed, I believe much of the violence we are seeing in the world today ( Christians vs Muslims, Palestinians vs Israelis, Sunnis vs Shiites, etc) is often a re-enactment of old, unhealed enmities reaching way back into our past.

And many of these old enmities are surfacing powerfully at this moment because we are living at a very special time I believe a new ‘culture of love’ is currently ‘wanting to emerge’ and is doing its very best to break through into our awareness. Put another way, we are all living at a time of great spiritual awakening, where much spiritual light is now emerging on our planet. And one of the effects of spiritual light is to expose or illumine for us, the dark and cobwebby areas that obscure it, not only inside each of us personally, but also within humanity collectively and within our world globally.

FORGIVENESS AND HEART
So, given these many challenges, how then, do we forgive?

Here, the first thing to bear in mind is that situations requiring forgiveness always involve conflict and that conflict can never be solved at the level that it exists at. It can only be solved at a higher level of consciousness, at a level where oppositions begin to converge as opposed to fight. To forgive, then, whether it be ourselves, another person , another race or a nation, or whatever, what is essential is that we be in a place of being able to raise our awareness to a level higher than that in which the original perceived wounding occurred. So long as we still remain caught in our old dramas, no resolution is possible. ‘There is a dark unscrutable workmanship’ existing inside us, the poet Wordsworth pointed out, ‘That reconciles discordant elements’. But this workmanship is only operational, he went on to say - and this is the key point - when we are in a place of feeling ‘worthy of ourselves!’

So, if we are to begin to forgive, it is of prime importance that we discover our place of self worth , which, we remind ourselves, can never be found so long as we still remain fixated in our egoic identities, for the very nature of ego is essentially to keep us feeling cut off and separate from life, i.e., experiencing ourselves to be less than who we are! In a word, the bigger our egos, the harder it is to forgive and the less we will be motivated to want to do so!

I maintain, then, that in order to forgive, we have to be able to open our hearts, for it is essentially only with our hearts that we can experience our true self worth. I believe that the more open our hearts are, the more we are able to access the kind of wisdom that enables us to understand what lies behind why certain painful things will have taken place. From this place it becomes possible for us humbly to experience that no matter whether we be Muslims, Christians or Jews, rich or poor, Protestants or Catholics etc , that we all come from and we all share, the same ground of human beingness, and where, despite our differences, we are all united in our Creator’s Heart - all part of one big human family. If we are able to experience our shared unity with those whom we believe will have hurt us, then half the battle is over!

It is not with the intelligence of our minds, then, that we are able to forgive, but with that of our hearts . It is only inside our hearts that we discover the wherewithal to let bygones be bygones, the humility to give up our self righteousness, the compassion and the generosity of spirit to love those who have hurt us, together with the spiritual intelligence to understand how forgiveness brings freedom. When our hearts begin to open, we only want justice and truth; everyone, as I said, increasingly becomes our brother and sister and less and less is there the space to have enemies, for we are no longer interested in exacting revenge. Indeed, from this new place, we come to realise that to forgive, far from being a sacrifice , is an enormous release and that carrying poisonous thoughts about others, and wanting them to ‘go through what we did, in revenge’, is equally toxic to our own well being.

The great Catholic theologian, Teilhard de Chardin recognised the huge transformational capabilities of the heart, and, speaking in the 1940’s, he suggested that there was more power inside an awake heart than inside the atom bomb! And that power gives us courage. And courage is very necessary for forgiveness. ‘The weak’, Gandhi said, ‘Can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.’ The more open our hearts are, therefore, the stronger we are and therefore, the greater are our possibilities for forgiveness. Indeed, inside our inner hearts exists a veritable alchemical laboratory whose fire not only allows us to transmute and burn up our grief , but also empowers us recognise the deeper purpose behind why certain things happen as they do , even if those things are painful and terrible. I believe all these perspectives are necessary if genuine forgiveness is to take place.

WOUNDING AND AWAKENING
One might say at this stage: ‘ It is all very well saying all this. but how can our hearts open in such circumstances? Surely, the effect of our wounding is to keep them crushed and closed. Surely, to experience courage and strength and self esteem in such instances, is not possible!’

While it may seem as if this is so, and while I agree that this can sometimes be the case, it is not always so with everyone. Indeed, there are many examples of people whose hearts have grown bigger and stronger as a result of their tribulations. A case in point was a very extraordinary and very brave woman whom I had been privileged to have met, and whose dearly beloved husband had been killed by a terrorist. She not only met and befriended this terrorist but also campaigned to have him released from prison. In talking with her, she told me that forgiveness was the only thing she could do to liberate herself from her pain, and that in coming to understand what lay behind why the terrorist did what he did, and in being able gradually to forgive him, her whole life changed.

‘I am now a very different person to who I was then,’ she told me. ‘The gift of this whole process is that now I have found my humanity. Before that incident, I was narrow and bigoted. Most of the world lay outside my heart. Today, most of the world lies inside it. Though I still carry sadness, there is also a lot of joy inside me. I feel much more a part of the beauty and mystery of life.’ This accords with what many Holocaust survivors, who have also learned to forgive, have reported.

GROWING OUR HEART LIFE
If we wish to forgive, then, I maintain that we need to prepare ourselves for it by focussing on ‘growing’ the mechanism for it to be possible, namely, our heart life. Indeed, from that place, like the brave lady I mentioned, it becomes possible actually to send our so-called enemy or enemies ( those that hurt us) the very love that they lacked ( which was one of the reasons behind why they hurt us in the first place.) Forgiveness, we learn, not only challenges us to let go something, but also to give something.

In a situation in my own life, where I needed to forgive a certain person whom I felt had deeply betrayed me, I realised two very interesting things . I realised not only that the possibility for doing to them what they had done to me, lay in me, that is, I was ‘no better’, as it were, than them, but also that by doing what they did to me, had actually done me a great favour and was actually helping speed up my spiritual evolution.

I saw that before my betrayal, I had been rather self satisfied. I had erroneously believed I was ‘quite spiritual’! What happened subsequently allowed me to see how ego-identified I still was and how shallow was my so-called ‘spirituality’. What was happening to me was that this betrayal was serving as a very necessary ‘grist in the mill’ to help me take much more responsibility for ‘growing’ my heart life and thus for deepening as a human being. (The two, I saw, went hand in hand. What we call ‘depths’ is all about the intelligence of the heart.)For the first time, I understood what Jung meant when he said that ‘Conflict exists to increase consciousness!’ I also came to see that the forgiveness space was actually an aspect of our true nature. As my heart began opening, its natural inclination was to be open and tender and to forgive.

My heart also illumined for me how much I also needed to forgive myself for not being perfect, and what a hard time I had always given myself for this. (Another reason we don’t forgive is because we secretly believe we are ‘bad’ and ‘deserve what we get’, an attitude that can actually ‘attract’ painful scenarios towards us!) I also saw how attached I was to hanging on to old resentments towards other people as well, such as my parents, old girl-friends, business partners, etc – and how much psychic space this all took up! I realised that if I truly wished to be free, I needed to forgive them all – let them all off my hook, which meant to take them all into my heart.

PLAYING A ‘HIGHER GAME’
Essentially what led me to attempt to embrace a forgiveness path was a deep desire to ‘play the game of my life’ at a ‘higher level’, in a more truthful or authentic way. I wanted to feel more worthy of myself more of the time, not least because it felt so bad and was so exhausting not doing so! I was fed up to the teeth with hanging on to every small slight. I wanted to be more fluid, to allow life to touch me and to flow more easily through me; I wished to be rid of all my old egoic dramas and soap operas that I had been so good at manufacturing and which, I realised, also opened me up to being hurt! In a nutshell, I deeply wanted to have more energy to feel more fully awake and alive. As I worked on awakening my heart, I saw that many of my old fears began to melt. This let me see that I really did not need to suffer in many of the ways I had set myself up to suffer. With more heart, it was possible to surrender up the old game of self punishment!

CONCLUSION
Sometimes what needs forgiving exists inside us; sometimes it is outside of us – some situation out in the world. Yet because each part is connected to the larger whole, it follows that the more forgiveness-light we bring into our personal lives, the more the whole benefits. And, of course, the same holds true vice versa. Mother Theresa offered us much good advice. She told us not to ‘Curse the darkness but always to light a light.’ And Meister Eckhart suggested that we should ‘Walk our lament on a sea of ecstasy’. Beautiful advice. But again, this can only have relevance for us if our hearts are beginning to open. Hence putting effort into their expansion and developing the self-discipline to maintain it, is nine-tenths of the work. And it is pretty challenging work, not least because our ego identities don’t want to die to being the king pin, and will never cease from whispering to us that all this heart work is pretty dubious stuff and rather a waste of time and that we don’t really need to bother to forgive!

Nelson Mandela, however, stands as a wonderful example of ‘heart man’, of someone who made that effort and whose life achievements reflected it. Indeed, in the act of forgiving those who had held him prisoner for so many years, his heart grew so big and compassionate and powerful, that when he became President of South Africa, it was able to contain the whole nation inside it. The result was that his people were able to complete their rite of passage into a new culture without a single drop of blood being shed.

Our challenge, then, is always to try to open our hearts more and more, not only to the pain and conflict inside ourselves, but also to that out in the world. And if we listen to our souls speaking through our hearts, we will always be guided to know where our conflicts lie , and to understand how we can most effectively work with them. We remember that in the act of forgiving those who may have hurt us, we not only help re-humanize them, but we also do the same for ourselves. To forgive, then, is an important part of our own transformational process. It is also a significant form of service. And one powerful way of helping activate this space is to make a daily practice of seeking to behave in a loving and generous-spirited way towards everyone we encounter. I have met people who were so practiced at this, that one could say of them that their very presence radiated the spirit of forgiveness. However, please remember that the cultivation of such presence cannot and does not, happen overnight and we must be patient and learn to live gradually into our forgiveness. While we will begin our journey calling out to it, searching for it, we may end it by the spirit of forgiveness drawing us ever closer into its own heart.

©Serge Beddington-Behrens