Forgiveness is the penultimate step in the first stage of awakening because when we relinquish anger, guilt, and blame we have finally unraveled the knots of personality and character in a way that is destined to free us from the chains of our conditioning.
Sculpting the Wind
I have described these chains as the ego-processes. I use this term ego-processes because the ego is a sheer phantom, known only by its effects. As the Zen master has shown, you cannot take the ego out of you and place it before you on the table. You cannot stand up and say categorically I am the ego, this is what it is, me! Ego is ungraspable, unmanipulatable, unhandleable; it operates on slyness and concealment through guile and secrecy. It can be described but it has no center. It is not an entity merely an activity. This is why we can say self-importance arrogant, boastful, domineering, willful, subjugating, coercive, punishing, angry, controlling, selfish, competitive, narcissistic, and so on. But what do these words actually describe? Are they not colors and tones, hues and textures applied to something formless, like painting on thin air? Or plucking a string with no instrument and pretending to make music? Or sculpting the wind? No form no entity no being as such…
No Substance to Ego
On examination then we see surely that while epithets abound, there is no fundamental reality or substance to ego. In this insight lies the secret to all our wonderings and imaginings about forgiveness. Forgiveness is not truly understood because it is a bridge too far. Before we can understand forgiveness, we must understand ourselves. When our supposed center is void, a pretense, an illusion, either we ourselves are nothing at all or we are something other than ego. But who coming to see us in the therapy room is something other than ego. I suggest that by definition, by which I mean through the simple act of seeking healing and counseling, the client whether ourselves or another is grappling with the ego-processes. They are experiencing dilemma of some kind. The kind of dilemma – the content, the details, the dynamics, and the results of the dilemmas on their life circumstances as they perceive them may be of importance and we will certainly treat them most seriously, but deeper than any of it is the cause of arising dilemma itself.
The Root of the Ego-Dilemma
Everyone who comes to therapy has a dilemma. The dilemma is based on the presumption of ego. Once we have processed the content, the details, the dynamics, and the effects we are left with the deeper enquiry: What does the dilemma in any form serve? This is because as we tend to notice many seek therapy in order to heal their present dilemma. Once this is done sufficiently to erase the unhappy effects, they leave therapy and return to their life with a sense of accomplishment. But what was accomplished?
We will not stand in judgment of those who ask for immediate relief. Not everyone has the same capacity or potential for growth and awareness. But it may remind us of the fable of the monkey and the rabbit in which the monkey positions himself over the entrance to the rabbit hole and as the rabbit appears he throws it behind him and another and another until the monkey is convinced he has a veritable haul of rabbits piled up behind him but it is merely the same rabbit having fun running in and out of its hole.
Sadly the client who has not penetrated deeply enough to the root cause of his suffering has in a sense done nothing at all. The vagaries of life led through the veil of ego-processes is remarkably repetitive. This is why the friend we haven’t seen for eight years, and the last time we saw then they were suffering in their primary love relationship, is suffering the same travail in a fresh relationship the next time we see them, and the next time and the next. My Aunt Susan used to rail at the injustices of the service industries – her purchases were always substandard, the dry cleaner left stains on the clothes, the delivery man placed valuable merchandise on the front doorstep. Her litany of ills and complaints was extensive so much so that even at the end of her life she could console herself with some new offences. It is hard to imagine who she might have been if she wasn’t the long suffering one who was doomed to be ill-served by others, and it extended into her personal life. I was by no means her favorite nephew because I wasn’t attentive enough to her misery, but the depths of her spite were reserved for those even closer to her, the husband who left her, the son who despised her. Tragically, throughout her entire life she held on to the offenses that consumed her, a toxic field of judgment, blame, and vengeance. She was unable and unwilling to forgive.
Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].
