There are many personal reasons that I can list as reasons to forgive, but your last comment indicates that you are seeking a more impersonal response, one which could be applied to anyone. Any reasonable example of forgiveness can be seen as a demonstration of an act which will benefit the forgiver in some way.

It is a heavy burden on the human heart, and others who bear witness, for resentments to play a starring role in our existence. Also, how can we know when we have put those grudges away? They often seem to have nine lives, just like cats, returning again and again. These resentments, no matter how important to us, can slow us down in many ways. Personal energy is required to experience and, if chosen, act on these resentments.

If a person is conscious enough, this burden can be examined. We ask, why carry this burden? At any juncture, the thought may arise, do I really need this?

Do I really want to carry this?

Angry thoughts may be put down, just exactly as if they were a heavy bag which has been slung over our shoulder during a long walk.

I think the human mind strives towards balance.
It is flexible on how to achieve it.
There is no reason to limit our options.
Forgiveness is one option.
It carries no weight.
It carries peace.

When we are ready to let go, we can choose forgiveness.

Who chose this war, we wonder; how did this happen?
Now it is our turn to choose.

If there is a time for war, there is also a time for peace.
This can be the time.
We say the word peace to ourselves.
It sounds good, better than it has in a long time.
We say it again.
Before we know it, there is peace.

[quote author=Berserk2 link=1203153713/0#2 date=1203203109]Mitsuo Fuchida grew up hating Americans for their harsh treatment of Asian immigrants.   He became Japan’s top fighter pilot and led the epic raid on Pearl Harbor that engulfed us in WW2.  In fact it was Fuchida who shouted the famous code words “Tora, Tora, Tora,” that signaled the raid’s success and became the title of a Hollywood classic. 

Jake DeShazer was a member of the famed Doolittle raid, the first retaliatory strike on Japan.  He was shot down and captured by the Japanese as a POW.   During his captivity, Jake became a Christian and softened his harsh attitude towards the Japanese.  After his liberation, he wrote a widely distributed essay, “I was a Prisoner of the Japanese,” detailing his experiences of capture, conversion, and forgiveness.  Fuchida’s heart melted when he read this essay.  At his meeting with DeShazer in 1950, Fuchida converted from Buddhism to Christianity.  He later became a Christian evangelist in Japan.  Forgiveness can be a powerful agent of spiritual transformation.

B-man is right about one thing.  We cannot forgive others for the wrongs inflicted on others; we can only release our resentment of the culprit.  Forgiveness can only be offered by the offended or injured party and God.  Refusing to forgive traps the victim in his victim act and its accompanying bitterness.  Do you really want to give the offender that much power over your psyche?

Don
*****************
In the afterlife, where I would presumably meet the perp after HE
died, it would be cool if I had the option of making him my personal
a$$-kicking toy for a few hundred million years (or at least, do my very utmost to make him so!) Why should I allow
him to be HAPPY, after he'd confiscated the BEST part of my eternal
existence (i.e., the physical one???)

B-man

Hi F.B.,


Hmmm, those initials also stand for 'Faustian Bargain'.
I'm sure that is a meaningless coincidence.

You can get exactly what you want.
All you have to do is apply sufficient energy to your chosen vision.
Just decide what you want:
To kick someone's a$$, or
To have your own life without someone kicking yours.

It all begins right now.


- u

FB, The shooter does not need your or any one elses forgivness. Only his own. Thats the only way he will heal himself of what effect he has had upon these other souls. I would think that the ones he killed have forgiven him already.  Where you and I hold some what of a similar ideas are about the church. I don't need Jesus to forgive anything that I have done that might be disagreeable to what is portrayed as his beliefs. I only need to forgive myself and to except the responsibility of what I have done, or do, upon others. I was more concerned about your need to express a desire to kill others who have done nothing to you or yours. Sound very twisted and immature to me. To me it sounds like you are in some kind of need to create an effect when you say thing like this. Perhaps more acknowleddment when you were younger, when you spoke or had ideas, could have helped. Such an angry young man.
Joe

[quote author=dave_a_mbs link=1203153713/0#8 date=1203369932]Hi B-Man-

I'm basically very self-serving. The process of carrying hatred means that I would have to adjust my internals so as to delete a general feeling of goodwill and a bearable lifestyle, and in its place UI'd have to put a contingency, that life is OK if and only if the world has kept some SOB away from me, or permanently deleted him.

For someone to make me alter my naturally comfortable state once is a nuisance. The severity of the nuisance depends on just what they did to me. That seems bad enough. However, once done, it's difficult to do more than basic damage control.

For someone then to make me periodically drag out that event and look at it in order to maintain a level of rage and resentment is an additional insult. However, I can get rid of the whole mess by "forgiveness".  In this sense, forgiving does not mean that it was OK, that they can do it again, nor that I in any way am interested in havinf them in my world. It means only that I have better things to do with my life than holding a brick and awaiting a chance to whack them.

Conversely, so long as I am busy resenting and hating, I am using up energy that would far better be employed in having fun. By that kind of attitude, I'm letting them spoil more of my life, both now and into the future. Carrying a load of negativity thus keeps the unplessant event in present time.

In this specific sense, forgiveness is a self serving thing, and is the only way to get the event out of present time and to allow it to go into the past.

And this is also true if the bad guy happens to have absorbed a couple 7.62x25 Mag-Safe - except that in that case it is myself that I must forgive. After all, sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you.  (I'm more inclined to be bothered if I miss.)

So forgiveness is a weapon against evil. It is counter-intuitive, but it works. I generally use forgiveness as a clinical tool by which to restore a woman's sexuality after she has had 20 years to brood over being raped by Daddy at 10 years of age, or the equivalent.

The next line to that lesson is to be practical - If a dog bites you, and if you can't have it put down or locked up, then there's no reason to put your hand back in its mouth.

dave
*****************
Of course, my specific example had me as having been MURDERED
and therefore dead (and presumably condemned to being a non-corporeal cloud of gas in the "spirit world" - still aware, but having had everything taken from me by the perp.
What "fun" would there be for me there? To float around and look at
things, reminiscing maybe...
But not be able to DO anything?
What would there be for me, but to await the arrival of my enemy...
And plot against his happiness, so at least I'd have the knowledge that he wasn't ENTIRELY my lord and master?

B-man

Sounds like we'd better talk again in 15 years.....

The only problem with creating a peaceful situation is that we are today in one that we have to deal with. It's the old problem of discovering that you have a tiger by the tail - Ooops!

Actually, there is excellent reason, from various kinds of reports and such, that once dead, if we have lived a life without harm to others, our next lives too will be without harm. When we look more deeply at the "peaceful Buddhists" who were mistreated by the Chinese when they invaded Tibet, we discover that they are receiving the same treatment that they gave to the Bon Lamaists when Buddhism rose to power.

In my personal case, I recall being blown up, and I have an association with poison gasses and artillery. My present life has amply given me the chance to discover these karmic connections. Try as I might, I am unable to guarantee that I will have a life of safety. So I take the posture of an armed truce with the potential bad guys.

I guess that the other two extremes would be people like Edgar Cayce, who never had more than financial worries, and a bit of health issues at times. And the antithesis, the terrorist suicide bombers who seem to feel that national pride, religious zeal, or some other superficial factor is more important than human life.

As for me, I doubt I'll be around in 15 years, Vajra, so you'll have to work this one out with Brendan.

However - I recall that a large number of unhappy souls that I've worked with, especially entities who have been terrified of letting go of their hosts,  have been uhappy because they've dragged the causes of their own deaths into the afterlife. and are clinging to them through rage and hatred, and can't figure out why things don't work so well.

It seems to me that everybody is essentially God. But some of them don't know it, and need to be "adjusted" for my own well being, That's somewhat reasonable. In my life, I've been slapped down for doing stupid things, and I suppose that I couold apply the same method, but that doesn't mean that I don't love the poor miscreants. I just believe in tough love. Just like I feel for mosquitos. (Swat!)

dave