This week, and in fact for almost two months, my attention has been on taking out the trash. As you’ve seen from previous posts, I’ve been helping my nephew-in-law deconstruct his past as he painstakingly went through the belongings of his parents, and decided what goes to the dump, Good Will, or family. And now we are done, but like landfills taking out the trash has many levels, and we usually just scratch around on the surface.
We moderns are so so full of trash that we can hardly live, and if fact, a truthful observer would say we aren’t living at all. We are just suffering: living, breathing, walking around suffering, with maybe just a few breaths of fresh peace once in a while just to keep us from committing suicide. This is a blunt statement but it is true. Just look at our so-called relationships with family, friends, and strangers. All we do for the most part is exchange our trash. We like meeting new people because they look like empty landfills we can dump out trash into. We’ve probably filled up our friends and family.
Gossip, now there’s a big trash exchange. But lets define trash before we get lost in the words. Negativity is trash. And positives are trash if they leads to negativity. And what is negativity? Judgment. So here it is folks: all judgments are negative trash and they will bury you if you don’t throw them out.
The truth we don’t realize about judgments—which is another word for grievances—is that they are like plaque in the arteries. They are sticky! They cling to the mind in groups gathering strength in numbers. Then when the pressure builds up, they burst into the mind like a black oil gusher, and pity the person standing in this foul rain without an umbrella. The next thing they know is that they are having a mud fight, everyone screaming at each other over some buried grievance that needed venting. Even if the combatants kiss and makeup (makeups are always enjoyable because they give license for the eruption to happen again), the trash just keeps on coming in. Grievances like company.
So taking out the trash—and I mean really taking out the trash—can only happen when forgiveness is brought in to do the work. Forgiveness works like this: it holds each piece of emotional trash as it comes up, feeling the weight, touching its texture and sharp edges, but it makes no judgment about the worth of the trash. The trash has no reference point outside itself. It is just trash. A feeling is just a feeling until we hook it to a grievance and give it meaning. Once that happens it’s too late: we are actually thrown into the dump truck and become the garbage.
Forgiveness is a practice. You can’t just by will or thought become a forgiving person, because that has a reference point outside itself. You want to be a forgiving person so you can be a better person, and you want to be a better person so you can get love, money, success, whatever. Forgiveness can’t be bought or prostituted. Forgiveness is forgiveness. You either do it or you don’t. But you can practice forgiveness, and it’s best to practice with little pieces of trash instead of waiting for a refrigerator to land on you.
Taking out the trash begins and ends in meditation. Meditation is forgiveness. You practice forgiving yourself.
Posted under The Tao is
This post was written by ed on February 18, 2009
