I had a fascinating - and frustrating - conversation with Xena yesterday; I feel as though I’m simultaneously closer to an answer and significantly farther away from one. I jokingly told her that every time she opened her mouth, my thinking became more complicated and messy.
I love that about her.
Anyway, I was trying to articulate this idea I have been wrestling with about forgiveness and compassion. This topic has dominated my thinking for a while now, and I keep feeling as though I’m one revelation away from understanding. I figured Xena was a good place to go looking for revelations.
Is there a place, I asked her, for anger and hatred and retribution?
I tried to describe my own uncertainty around how I believe things work: do we make agreements (Xena and I called them “contracts” for clarity) with others before we come to this life? Do we agree to behave certain ways for/to others so that they/we can learn something from those experiences? Do we agree to be present for certain things - to allow things to happen to us - so that we can gain insight and come another notch closer to enlightenment? I think we do, I said, but if that’s the case, then how can I justify anger or hatred or resentment in any form? If we agree to these things ahead of time, I mused, how can the fulfillment of a contract warrant a negative response? In my paradigm, everything happens for a reason and exactly as it should. There can be no victims in my system.
Xena, who is an intelligent and thoughtful soul, pointed out that I wasn’t taking free will into account. What happens, she asked, when someone breaches that contract? Let’s say, for example, that the boy who killed his gay classmate wasn’t supposed to do that - that this incident wasn’t something those two souls agreed to? What if, just for the sake of argument, their “contract” was supposed to play out in an entirely different manner? What if it wasn’t even the boys’ fault? What if someone, somewhere along the line, failed to uphold his or her part of the larger contract - a classmate who knew of the killer’s intentions and chose not to speak up, for example, or a parent who failed to instill a particular lesson at a particular time? What if someone dropped the ball - intentionally or otherwise - and that changed the whole outcome of the contract?
DING! A light bulb went off. It’s possible for both ideas to agree simultaneously: we can have contracts and we can have breach of contract, too. This paradigm allows for victims, but also complicates the idea of wrath and vengeance and forgiveness.
Xena also brought up the concept of the positive power of anger. It may be, she posits, that an incident that happens between two or more people may have nothing whatsoever to do with those particular people on a spiritual level. If we are all truly interconnected, it could well be that the lesson that can be taken from any situation could be received endless permutations away. Lawrence King may have died, she said, to galvanize the anti-hate movement. He may have died so that his classmates could learn something. He could even have died, she said, to spark my thinking about all of this; his death may not have had anything at all to do with him spiritually.
It just keeps getting messier.
I too have spent much time wrestling with these concepts for some kind of answer that fits.
I think that things make more sense when you start with the premise that we are immortal souls with infinite chances to overcome our weaknesses.
Each event precipitated by random free will is a chance to prove ourselves, and measure our progress.
I’m not so sure that ‘positive anger’ is sustainable. look at elections for example, they use positive anger to focus people on certain issues then it invariably fades.
I think the anti-hate movement is best waged on an individual basis, for example when someone makes a joke or comment that has elements of hate that is your chance to nip it in the bud.
Thank you so much for bringing this discussion to us all. I am still processing, but just as my brain began to hurt, I had a moment of clarity.
It’s the combination of “pre-destination” and “free will” that makes it all make sense. It leaves us all with the opportunity to make the right choice in the here and now, and feel like the choice belongs to us at this moment.
I don’t know that I believe the whole consciously making contracts thing. I think of it more as a system that we work through, like getting through a maze but in a video game so, if you make it through one maze, or hit particular buttons then you move on to a new maze the next time around. If you don’t within your time limit then back you go to this one or the one before depending on how poorly you’ve done.
I’m one of those people that thinks things do happen for a reason. Sometimes the reasons are not at all clear or immediately understood, but ultimately the do become more clear. Early on in your post, I started thinking that maybe things happen because of the greater good it can bring to “the collective.” Maybe it has nothing to do with the individuals involved.
I think that the mere fact that you are struggling with this and debating the implications of Lawrence King’s death is proof that it had much greater implications than can be attributed to any individual.
If all things happen for “a reason,” that means things are pre-destined. It can be redefined or reframed any way that any one wants, BUT, if something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck… well, then it’s a duck.
Contracts have to be agreed upon ahead of time and accepted by all parties. One cannot breech agreement one never agreed to or never knew about in the first place.
I will not subscribe to pre-destiny. To do so relieves people of responsibility for their actions. “It’s not his fault. He was meant to kill 6 million people so the rest of us could learn about man’s inhumanity to man.” Ooops. If it was pre-destined, how can in be inhuman? It was meant to be.
No. Things happen because they happen. Sometimes we influence what happens to us. Other times we are just recipients of luck; good or bad. We decide how we will live and treat others. We reap what we sow.
The true measure of us as individuals is how we handle what comes our way. Can we help to make something good out of a bad situation? Do we take good fortune gracefully, or do we flaunt it to show our own perceived superiority?
My not so humble 2 cents
Daz, that idea of immortal souls is one I was trying to get to when I posted, last week, my “What would you do if you knew you could not fail” print. I really don’t think that “failure” as we understand it is an option.
Sooza, my soul went “CLICK!” when Xena pointed out to me that I wasn’t taking free will into account. They CAN both exist simultaneously, and I’m still trying to figure out how I couldn’t get to that on my own.
Kizz, I’m not comfortable with the idea that EVERYTHING is random; is that what you’re getting at? Who sets up the video game? I like the idea of some sort of cosmic lesson plan..
Mike, do you believe that everything happens for a reason, or that everything is pre-mapped?
Dudley, I don’t believe that everything is pre-destined, either; that’s part of why I’ve been struggling with these questions. You’re right - that DOES absolve people of responsibility for their actions and really doesn’t set up an ideal learning environment. I appreciate your input here, but I want to know this: can’t it be possible for our SOULS to agree to something, whether or not our physical brains are conscious of it? Haven’t you ever gotten the feeling that you’ve KNOWN someone before or that you’re driven to do or say something without really being conscious of WHY you feel that way? Sometimes I think that’s my higher self telling my mind/body that this is something I should do or someone I should meet. Sometimes, things just click, and I choose to believe that the clicking is an indication that some little piece of my personal lesson plan is falling into place.
An interesting thought on our souls, however, I don’t believe that pur souls come into existence until WE come into physical existence. When our physical forms die, our souls continue on.
As for the cosmic lesson plan, I think of more as on the job training. We get thrown in to see how we perform. It’s all up to us.
Two thoughts:
1) Let’s say there is a God, and God has a plan for humankind. God sets up time, space, and our individual and collective reality to allow us free choice in decision making within the framework of something we call life, but we all also come with genetics that set up certain predispositions, eye color, and all that stuff that makes you, you and me, me. This is a world in which choices are the only constant. Do or don’t do – it is all a decision, it is all a choice. Outcome? Do we not become the sum of our choices, including the choice of wanting to love or of wanting to hate?
2) Louise Hay, author of “You Can Heal Your Life,” believes “We are each responsible for all our experiences.” When she says “all,” she means all – our parents, our accidents, our illnesses, our death – all. She grew up horribly abused, and she believes that she “picked” her parents – that she chose –on some kind of subconscious/cosmic level — to go through the hell of her life to find the strength she has now and to be the person she is now. If that is true, doesn’t it still come down to being the sum of our choices?
I’m pretty sure things happen for a reason. We may never understand the reason, but I think there’s a purpose to everything.
I’m sort of in line with Dudley (#5 but not after that) but then again, not so much.
I’m of the mind that there is no “god” to refute. It’s not atheism, there is just nothing there. No God, no “not God”, but something else, maybe there is no other option. Perhaps one of you kind readers might be wiling to offer a word about what I’m thinking?
God as a religious and/or political tool exists only to keep people in line, a political medium.
If you understand evolution, we are all just one step in the process. Your genetic line lives on or it dies out, for good reason.
We are each in charge of our own lives. There is no presubstantiation, there is no after life. There is no promise of something else. This is it.
Our only contract in this life is with ourselves and then with the people we each call “our family”. We fail when we fail to honor that single contract. The one, with self, with others that we love.
Sometimes we fail, sometimes we don’t
I don’t think things happen for a “reason,” I don’t think things are pre-mapped/ordained. I don’t even know what the word “ordained” means.
Life is what it is, perhaps I should say “Life is what it turns out to be; life was what it turns out to have been.”
This is all kind of too esoteric for me.
I’m with twoblueday on this being a bit esoteric.
But I do have a story. Whether it applies or not, who knows?
I was healing and wondering about the afterlife and such things.
I was told this story:
“It was the day of the state fair. My lover and I had plans to meet at the fair grounds.
When I arrived I didn’t see his car and decided to go in.
One of the first things I saw was the palm reader and I went inside.
I was amazed when she knew I was gay and had a lover. I asked her how she knew. She told me my lover was behind me, in the crowd and there was a rainbow arch connecting us. She said the rainbow aura trailed from my head to his head. She also pointed him out in the crowd.
She went on to tell me he and I had been lovers in a previous life. That we had found each other again in this life.”
I’m not sure if this story has any purpose in this dicussion but it sure seems to support the right to ask such questions.