(Note: This is deep, a few
re-reads (for me : ) & a gentle healing after...when you're ready. Eternal Truths are just that way... Namaste'- Ndr)
We are addicted to pleasure, and we thirst for
it, while being in denial that we constantly feel dissatisfied with
what we get. We are addicted to anger as a means of removing obstacles
to our desires, and in following the dictates of our anger, we are driven to self-destruction.
We can now take responsibility for the enemies who torment us, since
hurting us is their involuntary reaction to their fear that we will harm
them or their subliminal memory of our having hurt them in the
evolutionary past.
So not only should we not be angry with
them, but we should feel remorse that we affected them so negatively in
the past and caused them to live in such pain.
Here we begin to enter the realm of patience as active forgiveness.
Joyfully, ecstatically, we celebrate our initial freedom from fear of
suffering by going beyond patience as tolerant endurance and patience as
insightful forbearance, to experience patience as nonretaliation and
forgiveness.
Such active forgiveness opens the golden door of
the exalting temple of universal compassion, which is the amazing realm
of realistic happiness and natural bliss.
So our enemies
provide us with irritation, injury, and harm, which are the occasions
for us to practice endurance, forbearance, and forgiveness.
The worse they treat us, the more we benefit.
Robert Thurman from Love Your Enemies
President of Tibet House US & the Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. http://bobthurman.com
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