living dharma

I’ve got a stack of books with me here in Ottawa. I’m thinking that one of the things I will do while I am here is transcribe all the passages that have spoken to me deeply the last few years – centralize them in my own little vault of wisdom. Also – they weigh a lot and airlines charge like a wounded bull these days.

I’ve sometimes thought that I should tattoo wise words on my forehead so that I would see them every day and be brought back to their power over and over again, so that at some point they would carve new and healthy neural pathways just behind the spot where they are etched; replacing the calcified ones that arrive and take up residence over a lifetime.

Here’s one such very long tattoo, from Grace and Grit (actually quoting the Course in Miracles):

“What could you want that forgiveness cannot give? Do you want peace? Forgiveness offers it. Do you want happiness, a quiet mind, a certainty of purpose, and a sense of worth and beauty that transcends the world? Do you want care and safety, and the warmth of sure protection always? Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset? All this forgiveness offers and more.”

Talking about this passage in the Course in Miracles, Ken Wilber (the author of Grace and Grit) goes on to say:

“….the primal emotion of the ego, according to this teaching, is fear followed by resentment. As the Upanishads put it, ‘wherever there is other, there is fear.’

In other words, whenever we split seamless awareness into a subject versus an object, into a self versus an other, then that self feels fear, simply because there are now so many ‘others’ out there that can harm it. Out of this fear grows resentment. If we are going to insist on identifying with just the little self in here, then others are going to bruise it, insult it, injure it. The ego, then, is kept in existence by a collection of emotional insults; it carries its personal bruises as the fabric of its very existence. It actively collects hurts and insults, even while resenting them, because without its bruises, it would be, literally, nothing.

The ego’s first maneuver in dealing with this resentment is to try to get others to confess their faults. ‘You hurt me; say you’re sorry.’ Sometimes this makes the ego temporarily feel better, but does nothing to uproot the original cause. And, as often as not, even if the person does apologize, the likely result is now hatred of them. ‘I knew you did that to me; you just admitted it!’ The fundamental mood of the ego: never forgive, never forget.

What the ego doesn’t try is forgiveness, because that would undermine its very existence. To forgive others for insults, real or imagined, is to weaken the boundary between self and other, to dissolve the sense of separation between subject and object. …”

P.S. The picture is of a beach in Massachussetts that my mum and I went to a little while ago. Wow. I remembered how much I love the ocean, no matter the weather.