Forgiveness is vital to the pursuit of happiness. It is the only sensible way to relate to a painful past. The importance of the ability to “let go” of a traumatic past is universally recognized. “Letting go” of the past is the key to recovering from it. There is no other way to deliberately “let go” of the past but to forgive it.
A Buddhist story tells of two monks who were walking the countryside. They arrived at a river and saw and old man sitting on its bank. The old man asked the monks if they would help him get to the other side, which they happily agreed to do. One of the monks helped the old man climb on his friend’s shoulders and then they started walking across the river. As soon as the monk stepped into the water, it turned out that the old man was hysterical and quite nasty. He started yelling and screaming at the monk, calling him names and accusing him of carelessness. And it quickly got worse, as his anxiety rose he started kicking the monk with his heels, scratching his scalp and pulling his ears. The monk didn’t respond and just kept walking across the river. The three of them eventually got to the other side, where the monk let the old man down, wished him a nice day, and walked away with his friend. After about an hour of walking the second monk, who was clearly bothered by the sight of the scratches and bruises his friend sustained, couldn’t stay silent and asked his friend: “Are you really not going to say anything about that nasty old man?” to which the second monk responded “The old man? I put him down an hour ago. It seems as if you are still carrying him”. Therein lies the power of forgiveness. It makes it possible to put the old man down and move on, free of his excess weight and hurtful name-calling, clawing and kicking.
Traumatic experiences can cause chronic mental pain, continuous or sporadic. If the recall of the trauma is persistent, that is, it keeps playing in consciousness, the pain associated with the experience will be continuous. Sporadic recall can be even worse. Traumatic memories that are pushed out of consciousness — temporarily forgotten, have the potential to “pop” back into it unexpectedly. Such reemergence into consciousness can be triggered by reminders related to the original trauma as well as by neutral reminders, such as a seemingly innocent images, sounds, or smells. When a traumatic memory “pops” into consciousness it will trigger acute pain. Making matters worse, it may cause “temporal disorientation”. Temporal disorientation is a blurring of the distinction between past and present. (You can think of it as a “spillage” of the past into the present, or as stretching of the beginning of the present backwards, resulting in the inclusion of data that belongs to the past into what is perceived as the present). Temporal disorientation is, at best, unpleasant. It is potentially more serious, as it can lead to functional impairment. In other words temporal disorientation can interfere with the pursuit of happiness. The all too common clinical presentation of this is the psychiatric disorder known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Forgiveness is the only cure.
Forgiveness is the way to disarm, or neutralize the harmful potential of past traumatic experience. Given that trauma is an inextricable element of the human condition (As per Buddhism’s First Noble Truth), the importance of developing mastery of forgiveness can not be overemphasized.
(This chapter is complementary to the Cultivating Forgiveness chapter in the Practice section, which would be reasonable to read next, You can skip to it by clicking http://wp.me/P7aKBB-73 .)