Volume 3, Issue 31
Writing this on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in the Jewish religion. The day to atone for one’s shortfalls, forgive oneself for them, forgive everyone for whom one is still carrying a grudge.
A perfect Jew, which I am not, would probably not be writing on this day. My friend Stan Silverman calls us HinJews. Even that does not quite encapsulate it — I am faithful to the common core of all religions, not as religions, but as scientific truth. My hypothesis and conviction is that there is only One of us.
This of course makes it easier to forgive. If there is only One spark of being populating all of us, then a person who has offended us has done so because his or her experiences have led that originally perfect tabula rasa into a condition in which giving offense is possible and perhaps inevitable. At-One-ment makes atonement easier.
If my friend, whose mother belittled him because of her own childhood conditioning, has become carping, surely on this day I can understand and forgive that. I myself am him, living a different life with different experiences that have made me less carping than him but perhaps imperfect in lots of other ways. I can forgive everyone including myself for all the influences that drive us all to become what we perhaps only temporarily are. Knowing this may free us from having to continue to be exactly the same today as we have always been.
Pragmatism again. There is utility to oneself to stop blaming others. Blame is an investment of mental/emotional energy that pays no return. That same energy can be redeployed to deliver a positive return. Solutions are better investment instruments than blame.
As Mind Magic says on page 229:
Do not be critical of that which has happened; do decide what should have happened and seek to bring it about in similar situations in the future.
What has already happened could not have been otherwise; all events are merely the resultant of their causes, which are themselves events dependent on the constellation of prior causes.
You can make yourself a more potent cause of future events by deciding how to act differently the next time the same kind of situation arises; you can do nothing about the past.
Do not be critical of what any individual, including yourself, has done: all actions are merely the resultant of their causes.
Again, seek only to set new policies for similar future situations.
Honesty and gentleness are essential tools in this endeavor.
Guiding others to adopt more useful new policies requires special gentleness; often it is best to simply ask the right questions to have the desired effect.
Best to all,
Bill
Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.