What does it take for you to let go?

In a class that I recently taught we had the opportunity to explore forgiveness.  So often in our western culture forgiveness is looked upon as solely a Christian tradition.  Because of that it has become a shunned concept in less ‘religious’ western homes.  It isn’t talked about because it’s part of the church paradigm.  

For many people who don’t want to come off as proselytizing zealots, with little to no appreciation for the other major religions of the world, many words such as forgive, church, wedding and bible have become taboo words dropped from their daily language.   It’s as if, by association these words have become synonymous with such concepts as heathen, damned, guilt and other such strong words used to define a moral standard of more fundamental philosophies. 

It is always sad when in a knee jerk reaction life enhancing ideas are tossed out with life corrupting ideas.  Unfortunately this is exactly what happens when we engage in life unconsciously.  Our minds automatically make unconscious associations and groupings in order to classify experiences without actually thinking.

Recently I watched a movie, The Death of a President, in which the accused assassin’s wife kept asking “Wasn’t he thinking?” 

Unfortunately; most of the time most of us are on autopilot.  We aren’t consciously thinking of anything.  We act according to our predetermined values as though those same standards will fit every situation and when they don’t we tend to assume there must be something wrong with the other person. 

Our problems have nothing to do with other people.  They are uniquely ours.  Other people have their own problems that have nothing to do with us.  They have their issues which they are more than happy to project on us and we typically accept those issues with open arms because they give us the privilege of recreating our own issues.  Thus we reaffirm our lack issues through repetition while holding others at fault.  Nobody needs to change because it is always obviously somebody else who caused our problems. 

Fortunately for most of us eventually we wake up to the pattern.  We realize that not everyone is suffering by the same patterns that seem to cause us grief.  We notice how some of the people we projected our problems on happen to be very happy, comfortable and popular people; people who don’t fit our necessary image of them. 

We realize we have made mistakes.  And when we realize we have caused another pain by projecting our issues (even though, like us, they were willing participants in the unfolding drama) we most often hide from them.  We avoid them and we resent them because somehow it has become the others fault that we have been exposed; or some similar story.