Difficult to Forgive

 

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Difficult to Forgive

The ego exists on misery – the more misery the more nourishment for it. In blissful moments the ego totally disappears, and vice versa: if the ego disappears, bliss starts showering on us. If we want the ego, we cannot forgive, forget – particularly the hurts, the wounds, the insults, the humiliations, the nightmares. Not only that we cannot forget, we will go on exaggerating them, we will emphasize them. We will tend to forget all that has been beautiful in our life, we will not remember joyous moments; they serve no purpose as far as the ego is concerned. Joy is like poison to the ego, and misery is like vitamins.

We will have to understand the whole mechanism of the ego. If we try to forgive, that is not real forgiveness. With effort, we will only repress. We can forgive only when we understand the stupidity of the whole game that goes on within our mind. The total absurdity of it all has to be seen through and through, otherwise we will repress from one side and it will start coming from another side. We will repress in one form; it will assert in another form – sometimes so subtle that it is almost impossible to recognise it, that it is the same old structure, so renovated, refurnished, redecorated, that it looks almost new.

The ego lives on the negative, because the ego is basically a negative phenomenon; it exists on saying no. No is the soul of the ego. And how can we say no to bliss? We can say no to misery, we can say no to the agony of life. How can we say no to the flowers and the stars and the sunsets and all that is beautiful, divine? And existence is full of it – it is full of roses – but we go on picking the thorns; we have a great investment in those thorns. On the one hand we go on saying, “No, I don’t want this misery,” and on the other hand we go on clinging to it. And for centuries we have been told to forgive.

But the ego can live through forgiving, it can start having a new nourishment through the idea that, “I have forgiven. I have even forgiven my enemies. I am no ordinary person.” And, remember perfectly well, one of the fundamentals of life is that the ordinary person is one who thinks that he is not; the average person is one who thinks that he is not. The moment we accept our ordinariness, we become extraordinary. The moment we accept our ignorance, the first ray of light has entered into our being, the first flower has bloomed. The spring is not far away.

Jesus says, "Forgive your enemies, love your enemies". And he is right, because if we can forgive our enemies, we will be free of them, otherwise they will go on haunting us. Enmity is a kind of relationship; it goes deeper than our so-called love.