IV. The Holy Spirit’s Plan of Forgiveness, P 7
7 The confusion of functions is so typical of the ego that you should be quite familiar with it by now. The ego believes that all functions belong to it, even though it has no idea what they are. This is more than mere confusion. It is a particularly dangerous combination of grandiosity and confusion that makes the ego likely to attack anyone and anything for no reason at all. This is exactly what the ego does. It is unpredictable in its responses, because it has no idea of what it perceives.
Journal
Oh my goodness! Do I ever know this is true! The ego thinks its job is to forgive and all it winds up doing is hiding hate behind “kind” words, and creating feelings of resentment at the sacrifice made. It is no kind of forgiveness, really, and what winds up happening is that the anger buried behind the so-called forgiveness rears its ugly head again and catches me by surprise. I wind up saying something I regret, and the process starts all over. I would laugh at the foolishness of ego forgiveness, but sometimes the result is not very funny.
I usually catch this kind of thing quickly because I have learned to recognize the signs of when I have allowed the ego to take on a function that belongs to the Holy Spirit. Sometimes though, I fall prey to the ego desire to take all functions for itself. I think that when this happens it is because I don’t really want to forgive.
Recently I talked about having an ongoing forgiveness lesson with someone at work. The reason it was ongoing is because I continued to allow the ego to be in charge of the process. This will always fail because the ego doesn’t know anything about forgiveness. Looking at the situation through the ego I saw the other person as the other person. ~smile~ I couldn’t see our unity because the ego doesn’t accept unity as a possibility.
Seeing him as separate from me, I saw our interests as separate. From that point of view it became a matter of whose interests would be served, so there had to be a winner and a loser, and I sure didn’t want to be the loser. The ego then focused on how to win and still look spiritual. See how confused and hopeless is the ego version of forgiveness? Every time I let the ego be in charge of forgiveness with this person, I wound up with another grievance.
The way it played out is that I would say something I immediately regretted, and then would sit there wondering where those words came from. Then I would have to justify my failure to forgive and so I would think of all the ways he provoked me. I would then find myself talking to my boss about how hard it is to work with this man, hoping to get her on my team to help support my weak case for him being the cause of my unhappiness.
Immediately, I would feel regretful because the sane part of my mind would recognize what I was doing. I don’t want to teach hate. I don’t want to teach unforgiveness. I would then sit in my office and ask for help. I would ask the Holy Spirit to heal my mind, and though I meant I wanted to be free of this conflict, I still didn’t want to let him off the hook. More evidence of ego arrogance and confusion. What kind of forgiveness is that?
I don’t know how many times I had to go back to my boss and try to undo the harm I had done. I would talk to her about my desire to let this go, and my desire to withdraw my projections and to accept responsibility for my own feelings. If I could not show her perfect forgiveness, at least I could share my process as I moved in that direction.
Having asked for healing once again, and having done my penance by admitting my culpability, I would think it was finally done. Then it would happen again and I would realize that while I was truly regretful for my ego driven behavior, my apology was from my spiritual ego, not from a place of true forgiveness.
I don’t know exactly when I finally gave the function of healing to the Holy Spirit, but I know I did because the animosity is gone. I feel nothing but good will and kindness toward this man. I can’t even really remember the feeling of being at odds with him. I remember the circumstances and the facts of the story, but I can’t go there anymore. This is how the Holy Spirit functions.
Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit removes all offending thoughts from the mind and with the thoughts gone, the feelings of anger and resentment are gone as well, as if they had never existed. True forgiveness leaves me wondering what it was I thought I had to forgive. This is something the ego will never accomplish for me, because the ego doesn’t know what true forgiveness is, or how to achieve it.
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