Q: How can I love and forgive someone who is being mean or dangerous to me?
A: First of all, don’t be in denial.
Even though I have said everything we perceive on earth is an illusion, you still have to respond to your reality as you perceive
it, handling first your physical and psychological beliefs, then working on your spirituality.
If you are in an abusive relationship, if you
are in danger, if you are in an environment that is physically and/or morally untenable, don’t be a wimp, get the hell
out of there.
With that said, if you are asking the question
so that you may understand it from a spiritual perspective, then I suggest there are different ways we can look at our relationships
with people and the judgments we make.
If we only consider the way other people act and
the effect they have on us, the best we can hope to have is a psychological understanding. Psychologically, we act and react
based on environmental influences, studies and interpretations. That can be different for different people, hence, the
chaos of the world.
If we are honest, we will realize that when we
are responding to how we are affected, we are coming from an egocentric standpoint. If we choose to practice
compassion, we could consider that no one truly wants to be unhappy or offend other people, thereby alienating themselves.
There has to be a reasonable answer to their behavior.
Perhaps they were abused as children. Perhaps they are in an unhappy relationship. Perhaps they are facing bankruptcy.
Compassionate understanding is a kinder reaction and will often alleviate our reaction of offense to another’s actions;
however, we are only analyzing their behavior.
We still have not truly gotten to the source of
whom we are contemplating. No matter who we observe, we are looking into the face of God’s perfect children.
When we have seen the perfection we have seen
the truth. The misbehavior we thought we saw was just their misperceptions acted out and your misinterpretation.
With all the gentleness at your disposal, observe
God’s humanity and know that they, like you and me, are merely faced with lessons to learn. The lesson is always
of their and our own making, our own perceptions, fears, feelings of guilt, insecurity and insufficiency.
People are confused and long to be in the arms
of their Creator. These people are just making mistakes based on choices made from the standpoint of wrong thinking.
They are not unpardonable sins, and they can correct and change their mind and choices like all of us. No one can affect
you unless you choose to be affected.
GOD DOES NOT JUDGE US. WE JUDGE OURSELVES.
DO NOT JUDGE YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS.
Everyone makes mistakes. We are all in a
process of change. Compassion for our fellow human beings can
come first. However, as we come closer to understanding the truth of oneness in God, then we learn that physical reality,
which appears to be endless variations of separateness, is just an illusion.
At that point we may comprehend the physical illusion
as our projection and recognize that whomever we gaze upon is our mirror. When we judge another person, we are merely
looking at that which we do not want to see in ourselves.
