About grudges

About grudges


I share something I went through recently. Somebody who started to say things behind my back and do a number of things that upset me about 10 years ago ..he was still around in town but we never met..recently died quite suddenly . My first reaction was " that is good!"

A few days ago a read about how Ibn Arabi did a zikr 75,000 times to ask forgiveness for a man who had just died. The man's bad deed was cursing Ibn Arabi 10 times per day ..I don t know for what duration of time...

When I read that, I realised I also had to ask forgiveness for this person whom I feel wronged me...perhaps he felt I wronged him, who knows...but it made me feel so much better as if a load is off my back.

I am not saying we should condone any negativity or abuse directed towards us. Indeed it needs assertiveness to ask people to stop it and to take action to prevent people from doing harm and assertiveness is necessary .

It is when we have made the right actions and we now find we have to deal with the emotion causing a pain in our somatic body.

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From Pir Vilayat Khan

Now comes the crucial test: Remember Pir o Murshid said: There must be no grudge against anybody, and no complaining of anyone having done him harm, for all these things which belong to this world, if man took them along, would become a burden on the spiritual path. The journey is difficult enough, and it becomes more difficult if there is a burden to be carried. If a person is lifting a burden of displeasure, dissatisfaction, discomfort, it is difficult to bear it on that path. It is a path to freedom, and to start on this path to freedom man must free himself

When I advocate forgiveness, I sometimes have the response: "Pir, I already feel so bad because of what that person did to me and now I feel worse because I feel criticized for not being able to forgive!" I know it is difficult, but if one wishes for illumination very strongly, then one needs to meet what it takes. Pir o Murshid gives
the clue: It is the need for freedom to progress on the path that will help one overcome resentment because one's grudge weighs upon one holding one back; one's will cannot do this.

If the transit from the past into the future is not triggered off by one's incentive in singling out a resolve or resolutions, one will slip back by dint of the law of entropy. Life is a battle against deterioration, neglect, letting go, defilement, decadence, decay, slovenliness, You will find that if you do not yourself take the initiative to bring about a change, either entropy, psychological sclerosis, will set in or a crisis will start brewing and force you to take a decision.

The cosmos has a perfunctory way of righting itself, often awkwardly, inadequately, incongruously, unfairly, that baffles our need to make sense of life, and shatters our concepts of a wise, merciful and just God. The storm let loose clears the present from the past with a thrash, ruthlessly, savagely, indiscriminately, often victimizing
innocent martyrs while sweeping tyrants into power. It is the same primitive force of nature bursting forth in galactic explosions, in the territorial combats of animals ensuring order by the pandemonium of war, or the racial vendettas still raging in our supposedly civilized world, and at the personal scale personal resentment. The
evolutionary thrust takes time to refine, and transmute this savage force into unconditional love. You find it amongst the few - the saints. This is spirituality.

When the cosmos shrieks in flashes of light and sound, lightning and thunder, it tells us of its wounds, for example, in the cries of agony of victims of torture in concentration camps, in the the agony of the whole cosmos the ordeal of the disaster wreaked by the abuse of the Universe's (God's) gift of free-will to those fractions of the cosmos which now become auto-destructive, threatening to not only disrupt
others but destroy the very totality which endowed it with free will.

Fortunately alternatively you have another option: validation of the gift of life, zest, verve. You may pick up on the screen of your mind a mountain scene at dawn, the sky radiant with many-splendor ed colored clouds while His Majesty, the Sun takes his place in this array of glory. Or you may pick up the atmosphere of sacredness of a religious celebration. Or, moving back into the 1st century you could still recall the ovations of the masses greeting Christ as he traveled on a donkey from the Mount of Olives to Gethsemene.

The psychological energy generated by pain and suffering wreaked upon the psyche by abuse, injustice, failure and for whatever reason, being frustrated if it finds no outlet in revenge, vendettas, will simmer furiously in resentment. But by calling forth the transpersonal dimensions of one's being, one transmutes personal rage in cosmic outrage, one awakens latent qualities lying in wait in the seed bed of one's psyche which will trigger off creative thoughts fashioned into creative forms having a healing and enlightening effect upon the social environment.

Some mountains are scars incurred by our Planet by explosions spewing asteroids across space that bombarded us aeons ago. Here is one more illustration of the way that violent turbulence can trigger off beauty and majesty. Likewise with our psychological tribulations: the breakdown may aver itself to be a breakthrough. Pir o Murshid says: a defeat can aver itself to be a victory.