In the UNderworld

Maybe this is true. Maybe this is just a metaphor.  Maybe metaphors are truer than anything else.

Who knows?

Here is how it seems.

I see myself in earlier times. In some of those times, I’m a child frustrated by things I can’t control. In others, I’m a teenager, living through the agony of my teenaged years. In others, I’m struggling to keep my business afloat. In others, I’ve failed as a husband, a friend, or a father.

The details of those times are not important. What is common to all those times are the feelings that overwhelmed me. Existence became agony. I longed for it to end. Most of those times I did not want to kill myself, but I believe I would have been grateful if my wishes at the time had been granted, and I had painlessly ceased to be.

Maybe it’s a metaphor. Maybe it’s true. But here is how it seems.

When the pain became too great for some Past Self, that wish was granted. Its existence ended in a final spasm. Something that could not bear the pain died and something that could barely manage to bear it was born in its place.

That newly born self picked up the burden that was in front of it and moved forward.

It happened again and again. Pain. Death. Rebirth. And then pain.

Now, today, I am here, conscious, and joyful.

Deep in the UNconscious are earlier, suffering, agonized, failed versions of what has managed to become what I am today.

They’re long dead. Yet they live on.

Each is locked in its final spasm of bitterness, regret, and defeat.

Each remains frozen in the moment when each willed itself out of existence.

I can see it, and it’s a perfect description of hell.

It’s a place filled with souls in timeless and endless suffering.

But now--in my metaphor, and perhaps a kind of reality--I can descend to the UNderworld.

I can thank those who died that I might live.

I can sit with them so that they do not suffer alone.

I can let them know that time continues above and that they can rise above.

I can forgive those who could not and still can not forgive themselves.

I can tell them that there are other possibilities, that there is more to life than the dark UNexistence to which they have resigned themselves.

I can tell them they can share in the joy of being.

I  can tell them that they can live again.

Maybe this is true. Maybe this is just a metaphor.  Maybe metaphors are truer than anything else.

Who knows?

Frustration and forgiveness

Frustration!!!!

I spent the last two days intensely focused on writing a particular blog post. (Maybe I’ll link to it when I finish it.)

I spent the previous week or two trying to write it, but not so intent, not so focused.

I spent the two months before that intending to write that same blog post, but working much on it. I just kept musing and hoping it would appear.

Frustration!!!

I was writing in circles. I had started writing, was writing, and then rewriting, and then re-rewriting.

I was generating ideas, producing words, deleting words, rearranging thoughts, and making no forward progress.

I seemed no closer at the end of two days then I had been at the beginning.

I went to bed, frustrated. I complained to Bobbi. I resolved to start fresh the next morning. I decided I would debug my writing process.

Debugging day!

This morning I got up at 5:30. Took my usual cold shower. Did my meditation. Made coffee. And started.

I wrote some notes. Diagrammed some ideas. Captured some notions. I’d dealt with this before, I remembered.

So I did what I’ve been doing more and more, lately. I read what I have written.

I’m glad I read them.

I’m glad I wrote them so I could read them.

Knowledge lost, knowledge regained

I found more than 30 blog posts about “writing.” That’s about one out of every ten posts I’ve written. Not the first time that I’d tried to debug my writing process.

I looked for blog posts with the word “debug” or “debugging” in them. I found a few of them.

I landed on this one from December 6, 2016, called “Debugging and reconditioning myself.” When you finish a paragraph, it advised me. Celebrate! I hadn’t been doing that.

And I had forgotten about the “Six phase meditation” that I’d recorded in that post. That was a handy bit of knowledge, I told myself then.

I wrote a post about that the next day: Six phase meditation and reconditioning.

Then I found this one on the 23rd: “More debugging)” It’s about the fact that I’d forgotten this vital insight in just 16 days!

And now I’ve discovered that I’d forgotten again for another two years.

WTF!

The original post

This is the point of the original post, the one that I haven’t written yet.

Our programming is riddled with bugs, and if we don’t take care, even while we’re improving in one area, we’re deteriorating in others.

We humans are programmed to gain new programs: by imitation, variation, and selection. Most variations lead to deterioration. Only mindful self-monitoring (or the environment rewarding or punishing us) can keep us from deterioration.

Once upon a time, I’d imitated what I’d been shown in those talks.

Then I’d varied and selected toward deterioration.

So I went back to imitation. I just finished a couple of paragraphs. Yay for completing each!

I listened to the six-step meditation talk again and remembered one of his six phases: “Forgiveness!” I’d forgotten how important that was.

Suddenly it was even more critical.

Forgiveness

My life had an inflection point around the time I wrote Thank you Past Me. Thank you, random stranger. I had changed my attitude toward my past and future selves. Instead of resenting Past Me for what it hadn’t done, and dismissing Future Me (“Fuck you, Future Me, what have you ever done for me?”) I was grateful to Past Me for my life, and I wanted to pay forward some of what I’d been given to Future Me.

I’d practiced being grateful to Past Me. But I had not applied the lesson of forgiveness. I’d written about forgiveness in The paradoxes of gratitude and forgiveness and A meditation on assholery. But I hadn’t applied it to Past Me.

I’d been grateful to Past Me, but gratitude is not the same a forgiveness.

When I thought about forgiveness, it brought me to tears.

Past Me had worked hard. Writing was often a struggle, but Past Me had done it.

Past Me had left a record of what he’d learned in my blog. Past Me had captured bits of wisdom there.

For who?

Maybe other people will read that blog, and they will get some benefit. But for today, I’m the beneficiary of a series of undeserved gifts from my past self.

Thirty posts worth of recounting the pain of writing and the pain of not writing tells the story of Past Me’s struggle.

Today it paid off.

I recovered some valuable knowledge.

And I realize that gratitude is not enough. Past Me fucked up plenty and yet lives on (I’ll post on that, I promise) suffering, and unforgiven.

It’s time for forgiveness.

Now, if I can only remember not to forget!

Other posts in this series:

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The paradoxes of gratitude and forgiveness

Late in my life, I’ve discovered the paradoxical properties and the enormous power of gratitude and forgiveness.

Cost and benefit

When you tell someone that you are grateful for something they have done or have given you, you have gained nothing—nor have you lost anything—and they have gained some small benefit through your acknowledgment. When you perform some act out of gratitude, you have gained nothing and lost the time or resources that it took to do whatever you did. The recipient of your action has gained the benefit of whatever you did.

When you forgive someone for a harm that they’ve done you, you have gained nothing, and they have gained relief from whatever burden they were carrying for the wrong that they had done. It has cost you the time and trouble required to express your forgiveness and the risk of the dangerous consequences of reopening an old wound.

So gratitude and forgiveness seem to provide some benefit to the recipient and either a cost or for little benefit to the donor.

That’s the paradox.

Giving gratitude and forgiveness makes you richer, not poorer—providing you have plenty to give.

Utilitarian giving

“It is better to give than receive,” goes the saying. It comes from one attributed to Jesus in Acts 20:35. JC said: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Better? Blessed? Whoever said it and whatever was said, it’s true whenever you have an abundance of whatever you are giving.

Jesus didn’t make the utilitarian argument, as far as we know. But I’ll make it for him. If you have a million dollars, the value of a dollar received is about zero. But the benefit to you of the dollar you give to someone else can be substantial if you believe that your dollar has now made the world better in some way. That’s providing that you care about making the world better. (If you don’t care about making the world better, then you’re a terrible person. I forgive you for being a terrible person. But please reconsider what you value.)

To make it better for me to give than to receive I don’t need gratitude, though gratitude is nice. I just need to believe that my dollar has made the world better. I don’t need to know that it has made the world better. The fact that is likely to have made the world better is enough. Every dollar has that potential. (And consciousness turns the potential into the actual) See: Sacrifice to realize potential

For someone who is impoverished, the value of a dollar received may be far greater than the value of a dollar given. So the rule is not invariant. But for anything for which I have an abundance—much more than I need—I can gain more by giving that thing than by receiving it. You can, too.

Abundance

I have more than enough love, so it is better for me to give love than to receive it. I have an abundance of knowledge—better to give (by writing, for example) than to receive (by reading.) I have an abundance of money—so better money than receive. (Although receiving money is nice because then I have more to give.) Deciding who to give to takes time (and practice), and I don’t have enough of either. But I’m working to become better at giving.

I have enough forgiveness. That is: I have done some things that are regrettable, disreputable, and shameful, and have been forgiven of them all. Not by Jesus or God, or even necessarily the person I have harmed, but by me. My imaginary God has forgiven me, too. So I’ve got forgiveness to spare. It’s yours.

Resentment, forgiveness, gratitude

“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die,” goes another saying attributed to Malachy McCourt. I’ve taken that poison with exactly that hope. The poison hasn’t killed them, and it’s made me sick. I’m not taking it anymore. And I’ve found that forgiveness is the antidote all that poison I’ve taken.

So I’ve made gratitude part of my daily practice. And whenever I have a chance to forgive someone—anyone—for anything, I take it.

Expressing gratitude does not reduce the gratitude I have available. Paradoxically, the more grateful I am, the more I can be grateful.

Expressing forgiveness does not reduce my ability to forgive. Paradoxically, the more I forgive others, the more I can forgive—including forgiving myself.

Judged by the average of humanity, I deem myself a pretty good person. Judged by the ideal of what a person could be, I’m deficient. Maybe horrible. I could be more courageous. I could work harder at what I care about. I could have more self-discipline. I could waste less time. If someone recorded every thought that went through my mind in a day, edited them down to the worst couple of minutes and posted them publicly you’d see: pride, envy, egotism, contempt, greed, pornography, irritation, flashes of anger, shame. They pop into my mind from time to time unbidden. They make me deficient.

I forgive myself.

Once upon a time, my mother did something that so offended me that I stopped talking to her. It went on for years. I was seething with justified anger. I cultivated the resentment that I had built growing up. I nurtured it. I could have done something about it, but I refused to. I hurt myself, my father, denied my kids the experience of their grandparents, trying to hurt my mother. I was taking poison and hoping she would die.

Finally, I came to my senses. I apologized. I did not ask for forgiveness. I just took responsibility for what I had done. Maybe she forgave me. Perhaps for her, there was nothing for her to forgive. But that wasn’t important. What was important was that I had faced a terrible version of myself, I had accepted responsibility, I had apologized, and I had forgiven myself. I decided this: If I can forgive myself for this, I can forgive anyone for anything. That was probably too grand. I am sure that there are people and acts that I would still find unforgivable. If someone did something horrible, I still might want to punish them or see them punished. But without resentment. There nothing that has happened that needs forgiveness and remains unforgiven. My aspiration remains: hold no resentment. Forgive what you can.

Gratitude and forgiveness: better to give than to receive.

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