Forgiveness & Your Life's Unfinished Business

My family calls me Pancho and I'd like you to know that I love you all...

All Wednesdays are unique and very special. Last week was the last Wednesday for our beloved siblings Pavi and Viral who will be in some part of the Planet (Gandhi's, Vinoba's and Vimala Takar's homeland) sharing their light and inspiration with other communities. Until their back, Wednesdays at 7PM Santa Clara Time will be a way to connect in that other dimension. These are the 3 point I shared last Wednesday:

1. The Forgiveness of Mother Nature.
2. Humans learning from Mother Nature.
3. The Best Revenge.

1. The Forgiveness of Mother Nature.
The first thoughts and feelings that came thorough me after reading the passage, were a couple of incredible stories about the resilience of Mother Nature and how she "forgive us" when we hold the space for healing, even when we have been abusing of her generosity for centuries. The first story is called Hope in a Changing Climate (a 22 minute video I watched on a recent DailyGood). Once the cradle of civilization, parts of the Loess Plateau in China faced environmental ruin just 15 years ago as hundreds of years of over-farming took its toll on the ecosystem, making this once lush terrain a degraded landscape. This video documents the uplifting story of how ecosystem restoration helps stabilize climate, reduce poverty, and support sustainable agriculture. Proven to work in China, these visionary people didn't stop there and left to Rwanda and Ethiopia, to facilitate the restoration there too.

Another extraordinary example of how Mother Nature does her work if we leave her, is the willingness of a man who helped to restore an entire rainforest... that's right, an entire Rain Forest! This titan found a way to facilitate the re-grow clearcut rainforest in Borneo, saving local orangutans- and creating a thrilling blueprint for restoring fragile ecosystems. The 20 minute thrilling TED talk can be seen here.

In our own little way in San Francisco, we started an urbiculture project and in just a couple of weeks, we have facilitated the "forgiveness" of Mother Nature and from an abandoned empty lot full of needles, syringes and plastic, now I witnessed the first green sprouts coming up from the soil in just 4 days! We are calling it the Free Farm.

Profound. Each line of this passage can be experienced. "As long as there are two, there is unfinished business." I think this extends also to one, for one is also a distinction we make in our mind. To get beyond one's and two's, we have to get to zero. I have often wondered at the brilliance of whoever came up with the symbol for zero - no beginning, no end - a circle, the idea of a whole. This notion breaks all the distinctions in our mind, and takes us toward the "no mind," where there is nothing to forgive, no one to be angry with, no one who will be angry. Indeed, that is because there is no "one" anymore.

Reflecting back on moments that can be termed "the dark night of the soul," I find that intense guilt arises out of a great misunderstanding, a great confusion, a strong self-deception. Experienced constructively, guilt is a stepping stone, which takes us from a bigger confusion to a smaller one, provided we step out of it, and realize it is not a useful emotion. Its big trap is to make us believe the stories we spin about how terrible our actions have been, or worse, how terrible we are. Before we saw multiplicity, and didn't feel the pain of others. Now, we have connected at an awkward level, where the guilt and the associated pain comes like a gushing tsunami. But stare at it some more - and the tsunami becomes a mere wave, and soon crashes innocuously under its own weight, for it is not being fed anymore. Then, the zone of the zero begins - who is to ask for forgiveness and from whom? The futility of the multiplicity was long obvious. The trap of the one becomes clearer, as the one quickly leads back to the two.

There are times (in fact, many times), when we are hopelessly mired in the two, and that is when the author's suggestion of using forgiveness as a tool becomes invaluable. With practice, forgiveness becomes the stepping stone toward the zero. Forgiveness is what makes us human for we can only forgive when we realize there is no need to hold on to a past memory. The word "forgive" comes from "for+gifan", where gifan means to "give." I can only give when I have - which means, forgiveness is a quality that springs from abundance, not from scarcity. Therefore, one has to be truly poor and suffering when one is unable to forgive.

This week, a situation came up from the past, where my forgiveness was tested. A colleague in a professional venture had broken up with our team on a very sour note. After a year, there was an opportunity where our team was asked if we wanted to give what we had created together some years past. While all of us loved the idea, this colleague vetoed our plan. Immediately, negative memories came up, and I could see a dark cloud passing over me. It was a little while before I loosened up and smiled at myself - how silly that all of the thoughts that were in the past, that I had officially "moved on" from, had to come rushing back. I hadn't truly forgiven and loved. Or perhaps, if I had, I must have forgotten. Better late than never - I blessed this colleague, and felt immediately transformed.

I find the Wednesday pieces so practical and scientific that it is beyond belief. The trap in these lovely well-written pieces is to think that they are philosophical and leave them aside from our daily lives. Very grateful for the opportunity to reflect. Very grateful for the opportunity to forgive and to ask for forgiveness.