“All forgiveness is self-forgiveness. Your [experience of] the world is the result of your combined state of thought and feeling – [your arena] of consciousness. [Since your experience of the] world is a result of your state of consciousness, then if you hate anyone, you are disliking a part of yourself.” -Raymond Charles Barker
Noel Frederick McInnis
Being Who I Am by Forgiving Who I Am Not
The key to beginning the allowance of forgiveness, both of myself and of others, may be found in a statement by Rudolf Steiner:
“If it depends on something other than myself whether I should get angry or not, I am not master of myself . . . I have not yet found the ruler within myself. I must develop the faculty of letting the impressions of the outer world approach me only in the way in which I myself determine.”
For the first two-thirds of my life I did not know that such a “faculty” existed. I was so tardy in taking self-dominion of my own being that not until my 43rd year did I experience my first fully mindful engagement of “the ruler within myself.” This encounter initiated my genuine commitment to self-emancipation, after more than a decade of flirting with the prospect of taking such command.
In those days my wife and I meditated each morning before I went to work. During each daily meditation a pick-up truck stopped in front of the house next door as its driver honked the horn to alert our neighbor that his ride to work had arrived.
I became increasingly irritated with the driver of the truck for disturbing my meditation. One morning I angrily exclaimed, “If I had powers, I’d give that guy four flat tires!” To which my wife gently replied, “That’s why you don’t have powers.”
Illuminated by the profundity of her response, I instantly saw her point. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, I am not capable of reliably wielding my inner “powers” – which do exist! – until I am sufficiently centered to effectively command them. I replied, “You’re right. If I actually did have powers, all I’d really do is bust his horn.” Again ever so gently, she said, “That’s a bit better.” And again, I saw her point: I was still in forceful reaction to my awareness of the horn.
Following our meditation on a subsequent day I announced, having mellowed considerably, “If I had powers, I’d see that his horn didn’t work in this neighborhood.” Yet again my wife quietly observed, “That’s a bit better.”
Though I had clearly seen my wife’s point from the beginning, I obviously wasn’t “getting” it. I thought that selectively silencing the horn was the ultimate solution. So now what?
I eventually recognized the real issue, as my wife had from the start: I was looking for the forceful resolution of my distress “out there,” as if the honking horn were my problem rather than my choice of relationship to it.
With this alteration of perspective, I also recognized that changing the time of our meditation to an hour when the neighborhood would be even noisier (during the day) or when we would be tired (after our evening ministerial classes) would also be a reactionary solution. Such capitulation is no less reactionary than the flattening of tires, even when it is I who am the target of my reaction rather than someone else. The only satisfactory resolution of my inner turbulence was a non-forceful response to the honking.
In due course, such resolution was forthcoming. “If I had powers,” I announced to my wife one morning, “I wouldn’t be distracted by that horn.”
“Yes,” she smiled.
I had finally recognized that my upset and distraction did not come from the horn. If they did, then everyone would be comparably upset and distracted whenever and wherever the horn was being blown. No, my serenity of whole being is forsaken in the same place that it is otherwise realized, within myself rather than in my outer world. The honking horn itself was neither upset nor distracted. All upset and distraction originates and sustains its existence in me, not in any stimulus that may evoke it.
None of the incidents in my life is causal of my response to it. My reactions and responses are caused by me, albeit often unconsciously according to established patterns of habit, rather than by the effects to which I attribute them. This is indeed fortunate, for if the state of my own being were dependent on the state of the world around me . . . well, as they say, “There goes the neighborhood.”
Having Powers
“Intention organizes its own fulfillment.” -Deepak Chopra
The “powers” that I long for will continue to elude me so long as I mistake effects for cause. I sometimes illustrate how commonly this mistake is made by asking participants in my workshops to watch my hand as I wave it back and forth above my head. After waving it I ask, “What caused you to watch my hand?” Some say that the waving hand itself caused them to watch. Others say that my invitation was the cause. Yet if either of these were the case, wouldn’t everyone caused to watch my waving hand? What about the few who do not watch it, because neither my invitation nor my waving hand itself succeeded in distracted them?
The waving of my hand is watched only by those who, in response to my invitation to do so, make an intention to watch when it is waved. Intentionality governs choice. My intentions are what cause me to make corresponding choices.
It is sometimes suggested that those who do not watch my waving hand were not caused to do so because they were not paying attention when I gave the invitation. This suggestion rests my case. Having formed no intention – no matter what the reason – these inattentive people can have no corresponding result, because there is no corresponding choice to be made. Furthermore, people who were unaware of my invitation would still tend to watch my waving hand, because of their subconscious autonomic nervous system’s intention to take notice of unusual movements in their visual field. I finally rest my case, however, on the admission of one whom I questioned: she chose not to watch my waving hand because she thought that, like a magician, I was going to pull some trick on them while everyone’s intention was diverted.
Intentionality governs my choices, by selecting for choices that are fulfilling of my intentions. Accordingly, therefore, once I made the intention to be distracted by the honking horn no longer, it soon ceased to do so. When I accepted it as a natural component of the soundscape of my morning meditations, it was no more disruptive of my meditation than are passing overhead clouds disruptive of my experience of daylight.
And so it is with forgiveness. My intention to be forgiving is the cause of my forgiving behavior, so long as I am committed to the intention. Commitment is distinguished by non-divertibility. Non-divertibility of intention does not mean that I am never off the course that my intention has set, only that I correct my diversions from my intended course as I become aware of them. Where there is no persistent inclination to course correction, there is no committed intention, and without committed intention I am incapable of forgiving those persons, situations and circumstances that I otherwise feel powerless to forgive. Persistent course correction is the lifeblood of all commitment.
I am off course in my intention to be a forgiving person whenever I entertain violent or otherwise outwardly forceful feelings and thoughts. Even when I do not act upon such forceful impulses, my inner powers are nevertheless forsaken. Only as I release the distracting body/mind states that preclude my exercise of inner powers do I become mighty to manage the outer world’s impingements from the very centeredness of whole being that my meditations are intended to empower.
Having powers is a matter of translating capacity into ability. I can’t “have” (i.e., exercise) my powers until I actualize my latent, innate capacity for their exercise into actual ability to employ them. Furthermore, the exercise of my inner powers requires that I cease my forceful engagement of outer ones. Only thus may I empower the faculty of allowing external impingements on my sensibility to approach me in the way that I myself determine.
The desire to have powers over one’s circumstances and other people seems to be universal to the human experience. Yet having power over some person, thing or circumstance means – as the term suggests – that I must overpower him, her or it. And overpowerment requires the use of force.
The desire to have power over one’s externalities accounts for much of the unforgiveness that likewise seems to be universal in extent. Unforgiveness represents a self-deceiving use of outer force in reaction against some person, thing or circumstance that I feel myself to be lacking power over. Yet unforgiveness is a mere simulation of having power over that which is unforgiven, a simulation that I must perpetuate lest my feelings of powerlessness return.
The alternative to having forceful power over my external impingements is to be inwardly powerful with them. “Having powers” consists of mindfully determining the influence that external impingements are allowed to have upon me, rather than concerning myself with the influence that I have on them. When having (i.e., exercising) powers is my objective, my unforgiveness is clearly seen to be a liability, because my unforgiveness has far less influence on others than it allows those unforgiven others to have on me. Those to whom I relate in unforgiveness are thereby allowed, whether deliberately or merely by virtue of their existence, to have enormous manipulative influence on my feelings, thoughts and behavior. As Della Reese has remarked:
“If I don’t forgive you, and I hold some kind of resentment or grudge inside of me, it’s not going to bother you. You’ll go right on with your life, but I’ll be suffering. I’ll have backaches, nervous tension, or disease from the festering sore of this unforgiveness of you in me. My attitude about that is that it’s not worth [it]. I won’t give a person free rent in my mind when I don’t even like that person.”
My unforgiveness not only gives others a lease on my mind, it provides them with a corresponding leash on my well being. Forgiveness cancels such negative occupancy of my mind by all concerned, myself included. How I know that I have forgiven someone is that he or she has harmless residence in my mind, which means that my thoughts and feelings about him/her are without any negative association or charge. And only as I myself enjoy harmless residence in my own mind are others likewise safe therein.
As I came to recognize what “powers” are about in the aftermath of my honking horn conniption, I commenced the ongrowing realization of my ability to relinquish self-distracting, reactionary states of body/mind. My flirtation with self-emancipation had ended, and my serious courtship thereof had begun. I had discovered the foundation of all forgiveness.
©2001 by Noel Frederick McInnis