It’s those we love who hurt us the most. Creatures of constant contradiction, they speak and act in the name of love, all the while not knowing how to be in love.
They don’t see us; they don’t hear us; they don’t accept us for who we are, right now. And, as we all know, non-acceptance is a form of prejudice.
Still, the only way forward is through forgiveness, compassionate forgiveness. This is what Eckhart Tolle explores with penetrating insight into the essence of human condition in his altogether sublime Stillness Speaks.
Eckhart Tolle writes:
How quick we are to form an opinion of a person, to come to a conclusion about them. It is satisfying to the egoic mind to label another human being, to give them a conceptual identity, to pronounce righteous judgment upon them.
Every human being has been conditioned to think and behave in a certain way – conditioned genetically as well as by their childhood experiences and their cultural environment.
That is not who they are, but that is who they appear to be. When you pronounce judgment upon someone, you confuse those conditioned mind patterns with who they are. To do that is in itself a deeply conditioned and unconscious pattern. You give them a conceptual identity, and that false identity becomes a prison not only for the other person but also for yourself.
To let go of judgment does not mean that you don’t see what they do. It means that you recognize their behavior as a form of conditioning, and you see it and accept it as that. You don’t construct an identity out of it for that person.
That liberates you as well as the other person from identification with conditioning, with form, with mind.
Then he adds:
If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace.
If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace.
If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion, peace.
This, of course, implies that you also must forgive yourself. Eckhart Tolle concludes:
The ego doesn’t like to hear this, because if it cannot be reactive and righteous anymore, it will lose strength.
Complement this powerful mantra and meditation from Stillness Speaks with Buddhist nun Pema Chodron’s on-the-spot compassion practice “Just Like Me.”
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