Finding Forgiveness

Say what you will about His Giggliness the Dalai Lama, but the lessons he has taught the world about the power of forgiveness are pretty significant.

I count myself in the camp, ugly as it may be, who draw a degree of strength from the art of the grudge. Somehow, I find both creativity and motivation from the self-righteous sense that someone has done me wrong, even as I understand that the energizing feelings it engenders are probably more-than-counterbalanced by the negativity of focus, and know that such enmity is hardly the thing I wish to be propagating in the world.

So, I work on forgiveness. The process is, perhaps, all-the-more interesting because it does not come easily to me. For that matter, it may not come that easily to anyone, even the Lamaisto Giganto himself. Forgiveness is a concept we throw around pretty easily. It is not difficult to utter the words of forgiveness; it is altogether a different proposition to work through the resentment and excise the satisfyingly ingenious, mouse-trap acts of revenge the mind cooks-up, to arrive at an attitude of true indifference to the slight.

My more spiritually-oriented friends would describe the correct mindset as incorporating an element of love in the mix; but then, these folks always want to gild the lily. There is an element of compassion that comes into play, but it is mostly in exonerating the offender and sparing them from the pain that one’s no-doubt-perfectly-exacted revenge might cause them. Kindness is part of the process, I think, and perhaps a byproduct of the outcome. But, for me, any stronger feelings of affection are not salient features of this mental shift from hostility to forgiveness – and I call “bullshit” on those who claim they are, even His Robedness. One treats well those they forgive not because one has come to love them, but because they are people, and that status alone earns them a degree of kindness.

These reflections on forgiveness come after many hours of hard work toward forgiveness over the last two days, while writhing around in post-surgical discomfort, following my emergency appendectomy.

We are encamped at the Delhi outpost of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram; and it was from here that I decided I’d better get my ass to a hospital, post-haste. Since I was alone at the time, it was a struggle to get myself dressed, packed, down two flights of stairs, and over one building to the reception area at the entrance to the main ashram compound. Still, this was the easy part. I had more than 100 meters of ground yet to cross before I would reach the street and attempt to flag-down an auto-rickshaw to serve as my ambulance.

So I stopped in at the reception desk to ask if someone would help me to get to the hospital. I was doubled over in pain, and had already stumbled to the ground twice, once when entering the reception area itself. I don’t know if I actually looked like I was dying, but I think it would have made a pretty decent theatrical portrayal. Without recounting the entire dialogue, which would be cruelly unflattering to the woman who greeted me from behind the reception desk, suffice it to say that she was too indifferent to my predicament to offer me any assistance. So she watched me crawl out of her office and make the seemingly interminable journey to the roadway, and on to the hospital, on my own. So much for the quaint notion that, in India, “the guest is god.”

For two and half days in the hospital, even more-so since my return to the ashram, this woman’s unwillingness to help me – or even to dispatch someone else to the task, something at which people in India are unusually adroit – outraged me. It is no exaggeration to say that her lack of sympathy or concern caused me more than an hour of blinding, needless pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Damn the bitch!

Last night it occurred to me, though, I ought to be working toward an attitude of forgiveness. For several hours as I lay still on my bed, I thought-and-thought about the situation; and by the time sleep found me, I felt I had made good progress. When I emerged from my room this afternoon, after days of being an invalid shut-in, I happened to spot both my tormentor and her superior; and it became instantly clear to me how little change there had been in my feelings of injustice. So this afternoon I went back to work. And guess what? I made it.

I saw her again this afternoon as I took tea at tiffen-time, and not a single feeling of ill-will remained.

The key, in this case, was to reach an understanding that, on the afternoon of my illness, this woman owed me nothing. To put the proposition starkly: it was neither her duty to look after me, nor her concern whether I lived or died. I would have greatly preferred, of course, that she spare me a little compassion; but that was entirely within her control, not mine for the taking. All too often we assume we are entitled to certain treatment because good manners, keen wits, or the exercise of basic human decency would seem to suggest it. But if we take the point of view that the world owes us nothing, not only do petty resentments fade away (or fail to materialize in the first place), but the gratitude we feel when we are beneficiaries of true compassion becomes even more immediate and genuine. Both are nice outcomes.

There is another aspect to this. I pride myself on my self-reliance and, indeed, managed this mini-crisis pretty admirably on my own, if I do say so myself. The notion that the ashram receptionist was somehow responsible for extracting me from my predicament flies in the face of this most cherished self-conception. I realized this afternoon that I could not hold my self-satisfied viewpoint and my lingering resentment simultaneously in good-faith. I chose smugness.

Nothing about my shift in attitude makes me think the ashram receptionist is smart, competent, or even nice. But these are her problems now, not mine. When I see her, I feel the same indifference I felt before this awful incident, and in this, I think I have found the roots of forgiveness.

I do not reject the idea that better folks than I are capable of achieving forgiveness on some kind of morally more desirable level; but I am equally convinced that most who speak about forgiveness and love in the same breath haven’t the faintest idea what they are talking about. They are the spiritual poseurs of whom I tire so easily. They are good students of the game, who recognize a brilliant line when they read one, and have the skill to parrot it back with sufficient humility in their bearing and conviction in their voice to, just perhaps, look to others as having reached “higher consciousness,” whatever-the-fuck that means.

As for the remaining few who speak of love and forgiveness – probably HHTGXIVDL, perhaps even you – I think they do so from an honest miscalculation about the nature of the exercise. They already hold the world in such a state of adoration that the practice of working from resentment toward forgiveness is actually surplus to requirements.

Caveat: Just because I reached a pretty good result with my feelings toward the ashram receptionist, don’t go thinking you can piss me off and get away with it. I don’t always have this much time on my hands to do the difficult mental work that forgiveness requires; and I might just scorch your ass!

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