Najois

Christianity preaches forgiveness as the highest of goods.
And all the while many Western countries have a growing number of atheists, this exact value of forgiveness still permeates our collective thoughts and behaviors.

But there is such a gap between a prized value and the reality that drive our actions. And in that gap, there is a festering pool of poison, deceit and lies.

And let me start by telling you that, my dear friends, I am not a good person.

Resentment was my shadow. Covering my shoulders with a heavy weight that I wasn’t aware of carrying.
Because I didn’t know about its’ existence.
I didn’t know that, I, the martyr, was a brooding and resentful, grudges holding individual.

Many of you observe my many wanders in questioning myself, my actions and motivations, and perhaps do not understand why I need to go deep.
The reason is simply that I want to live.

But back to the resentfulness.
When I say that I didn’t know, I truly mean that I was totally unaware of me being unable to forgive.

Because just like so many of us, I was totally conditioned by the value of forgiveness, never really digging into how and why.

Forgiveness is so often preached by people that do not truly understand its’ true meaning. Explaining forgiveness like some kind of absolving you wave over someone’s head, and poof, grudges gone.
But it simply doesn’t work like that.
It doesn’t.

How many lovers, friends and family members have wronged me and I kept acting ‘as if’, because the all mighty ‘absolving’ Me was above that lower energy of resentment.
How naive. Yet, I however truly believed that.

And then sudden outbursts of anger came. And the repetitive dreams where I would punch said people in the face. Plowing their heads in a bucket of water to make them ‘wake up’ to the wrongs they have done me.

I was so shocked to observes these feelings in me, that I couldn’t put my head in the sand any longer.

Of course the awareness of these processes were not isolated, and were the result of many years of deep introspection that mindfully started when I was about 24.

This was coupled with the release of many other emotions. The guilt, my all mighty old friend.
It passed fast and all the anger I had entered came out. No longer do I feel shame at expressing my anger. Because yes, anger is a part of the human experience. And as I say so often, I am not applying for the open position of the next Mahatma Gandhi.
So I do not repress. I do not care about the judgment of others when I have to defend myself of mistreatment. And this helped me to overcome my resentfulness. I have released and expressed, it’s gone. And it gives me the space to defend those that are not as ferocious as me.

I have many more observations regarding the nature of forgiveness and its’ hidden mechanisms, but I believe that the acknowledgement of ones human nature is the start of cleaning up that nasty pool of illusions and deceit that we have created as a humanity.

At the end of the day, I am a product of nature. Just an ephemeral part of the eternal.

And that is just as ambitious as I need to be.