Forgiving others’ trespasses for fun and profit

Admittedly, I am one of those people who would rather be defined by the people who hurt me than my relationship with God.

I try to seek Him in everything, to feel Him even when I am experiencing His absence, knowing that He is there, but I myself am a captive to pride and thus, to the demiurgic impulse. I can talk all day about Sophia and the energies of God activating within us the capability of knowing Him and being made in His likeness, but I have my own λογίσμοι to battle. I’m seeing, though, a way to turn the tides of war looking back at the mind being a thoroughfare.

The epistemology of Buddhism and Daoism must be applied in relation to Christianity’s spiritual warfare, because the former modalities point to a truth: the more we know of appearances, the more distinction there is between I and You, the less reality I am aware of; the more discursive and rational my thinking, the less insight and Wisdom I am able to perceive. 

I think this hints at why Christianity is such a difficult religion to practice, why it is so much easier to simply declare that truth is subjective and from that state of consciousness one does whatever they need to do to survive. And survival is about all they can do, because in this state we are trapped in a feedback loop of our design, manufactured by unconscious influences, habitual substance abuse, lingering traumas, normalized thought-patterns, and emotional triggers. Living under these conditions does not make a life, but rather one is simply living in a perpetual groundhog’s day of their own making. 

It’s the same life I lived when I was a short order cook, paying for alcohol at the bar I worked at with the wages I made working… Over and over again. Waking up hungover, unsure as to why I feel so depressed, eating Waffle House to stave off suicidal ideation with hashbrowns and jalapenos, feeling like my head is a microwave heating a potato all morning, lungs tar-tied and half-hanging on. Going back to work to afford the jagerbombs which have become my only solace apart from an hourly Marlboro which is substituting intimacy and true connection, chain-gang-linked to lighter, booze, and coffee unaware of any reality outside the smoky walls of the bar that raised me. It was a sickness, really. Operating from presuppositions and reacting toward everything from internalized pain manifesting as rage and a need to drown in a licorice oblivion. This mode of being founded totally on pride and a product of pride—the nefarious, insidious—resentment.

When we live with resentment, we are actively impeding our own liberation from the master-slave feedback loop of the demiurgic impulse. Resentment, being a form of pride, is an obstacle between the self and Truth; it is a chronic condition where the νοῦς is constantly under assault by the λογίσμοι and, as Fr. Maximos said it is in this chronic condition that is like giving the key to our hearts to Satan. The remedy for this chronic illness and weakness of mind is found in relation to the epistemological pursuit of shedding profane knowledge, cleansing the νοῦς and paving way for the emergence of Hagia Sophia. 

The cure is letting go.

The cure is found in Wayne Dyer’s experience in an alcoholic recovery group where, posted on the wall, were the words, “In this group, there are no justified resentments.” 

When we blame others we affirm our own subjective reality, we are implying that the way see things is how things are: 

“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye” (Matthew 7:1-5).  

No justified resentments. No justified resentments. No justified resentments. 

Resentment is walking with attachments; resentment is walking chained to the perceived hurts that we have encountered in life. These sorts of resentments lead us to making the same choices, same mistakes, and becoming stagnant. We enter a void state vacuously consuming everything, everyone, and every experience as a slave living under the demiurgic master. Every thought, emotion, and perception is charged by our resentment, by our pride. 

It is not only the demiurge that is our master, but eventually those who we blame, despise, or feel have wronged us in some way also become our masters—our consciousness forms in the shadow of this hurt. The people that have wronged us infect us where our subjective truth starts corresponding to relational resentment narrowing the eye of the soul. 

Resentment confuses and darkens the soul. The thoroughfare that is the mind traps every possible thought that races through, holding onto every perceived slight, the pain we carry begetting more pain whether a reality or glitter. The practice of Christianity requires us to take responsibility for this charge, to cleanse the νοῦς, and while it may not be scholastically sound to say but knowledge is acquired through the shedding of these resentments, because they work as intellectual biases that presupposes epistemological pursuits.

True knowledge—pure reason—in relation to Buddhism’s epistemology is a practice of forgiveness in Christianity.     

Forgiveness is the means in which we forget ourselves and let go of a state of reactivity. Forgiveness is a practice of perpetual crucifixion of the mind; it is the practice of manifesting eternity in the temporal world. Forgiveness is how we invoke divinity and we become like Christ, Who is Truth… So, it’s not about knowing Absolute Truth, it is about being Absolute Truth. It is like with life, how can we explain life and the human condition to an entity that has not experienced existence? 

Absolute Truth comes to us through renunciation which is found in the practice of forgiveness. The key to our heart is given to God, rather than Satan, through forgiveness, because we are inoculating ourselves to the λογίσμοι which seeks to inflame us in passion.

Christianity is a model that helps us to understand how we keep ourselves captive and in darkness, hidden from Truth, living with sin. It’s akin to the pursuit of enlightenment in Eastern philosophy: it is right here, if only we could just see, and cleansing the eye of the soul is like seeing with new eyes. 

“From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we no longer know him in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us” (2 Corinthians 5:16-19).

Wisdom emerges in Christ and as we have been given the ministry of reconciliation so we must practice this divine duty: it is the Christian dharma to forgive others’ trespasses as God Himself has forgiven us our trespasses. I think we can see this in a different way using the Biblical Lord’s Prayer: 

“Our Father in heaven,

    may your name be revered as holy.

     May your kingdom come.

    May your will be done

        on earth as it is in heaven.

     Give us today our daily bread.

     And forgive us our debts,

        as we also have forgiven our debtors.

     And do not bring us to the time of trial,

        but rescue us from the evil one” (Matthew 6:9-13).

Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 

Slavery, in scripture, refers to the practice of being in someone’s debt and paying it off through labor. It’s one of the oldest socio-economic structures and not in any way like its 19th century and contemporary counterpart. 

If we can see this in relation to the νοῦς, then it might offer us exactly how forgiveness is our practice of pursuing and embodying Truth. When someone is in our debt, it may cause us to unnecessarily dwell on them in our minds, to the point that if we saw them out somewhere we might confront them in an aggressive manner. And when we are in someone else’s debt we might feel ashamed or even hide away from their physical presence, unnecessarily dwelling on them in our mind, too. 

These debts are influencing our state of being. In regard to the physical, this kind of mentality may impact our body’s health, walking around with tension, anxiety, anger, and so on which leads to a weakened immune system. In the same manner, walking around in debt or holding debt over another leads to a weakened, darkened, and confused state of the soul leaving one open to the λογίσμοι that endeavor to pull us further into sin.

The divine duty of Christians: to forgive our debtors as God has forgiven our debts steals the key to our heart away from Satan. It is a yielding action, humble and meek; taking from the Aramaic of the Beatitudes, “Ripe are those who soften what is rigid inside and out; they shall be open to receive strength and power—their natural inheritance from God” (Matthew 5:5). 

Renunciation of the self is found in forgiveness, and by surrendering the self we are practicing a form of love in which we are foregoing the severed relationship of Man and God. We are uniting to Him by coming under His Will, willingly. “For only when we do not belong to ourselves do we become like Him who through love has reconciled us to Himself,” and from there we are open to receive our natural inheritance from God, which is Wisdom. “No one achieves this unless he persuades his soul not to be distracted by the false glitter of this life;” no one achieves this unless he persuades her soul not to be distracted by debts, resentment, pride, and the subjective reality that arises from these charges affecting our perception.

Absolute Truth is a knowledge, an understanding, a Wisdom that emerges from a kenotic love—self-surrender and being open to He Who is above truth and reason for He is Truth and Reason. If doctors make the worst patients than so, too, do we become spiritually unwell by assuming any certainty about our condition and the world around us.

The more we think we know, the more discursive and rational our knowledge the easier it is for us to think that our singular way of seeing things is the only way to see and from their resentment builds against anyone who does not see exactly the way we do.

The more we think we know, the easier it is to position ourselves as a demiurgic master in a master-slave feedback loop of our own design, becoming in relation to debts and chasing self-knowledge through temporal reflections of darkened eternity and fleeting desire.

The λογίσμοι take captive the self that is full of themselves, that has built up knowledge based on more, more, and more. The λογίσμοι imprison the soul that walks through the world of material seeing in transactional lenses, because the soul itself imprisons reality within its confused complexes of traumas, environmental factors, unconscious influences, and reactivity.

This is living with solipsistic subjective truth.

It is, in a word, unwell to live this way.

It is living in a conjured reality of one’s own self-ignorant craftsmanship.

Si comprehendis, non est Deus