William Martin - The Tao of Forgiveness: The Healing Power of Forgiving Others and Yourself

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Table of Contents

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
New York

For Nancy, as always. She sees me with her Tao Mind and points me to my own.

Preface

My love affair with the classic wisdom poetry contained in Lao-tzus Tao Te Ching is entering its fifth decade. My understanding of his words has shifted and settled into new niches in my mind with each change in circumstance and life situation. It guided me in my twenties to remain entranced with the Mystery of the Tao when my conditioning wanted everything, including spirituality, to be certain and clear. It comforted me in my thirties and early forties as the joys and trials of parenting put an end to many dearly held illusions. It danced and romped with me as my forties and fifties brought me more love and joy than I could have dreamed possible. It beckoned me to take the hesitant step over the hump of fifty-five and into the world of AARP, senior discounts, and mortality. Ive tried to give some account of these stages in my life through my earlier books: The Parents Tao Te Ching, The Couples Tao Te Ching, and The Sages Tao Te Ching.

Some experts on the craft of writing advise, Write what you know. I have spent my career writing about all the things I dont know. I wrote a book on parenting when the only thing I knew was every possible mistake a parent can make. I wrote about love between two peoplea mystery that no one could possibly really know anything about. And I wrote about growing old with grace and courage. Ill let you know how that turns out.

I am grateful to the wisdom of Lao-tzu, whose classic line in chapter 56 of the Tao Te Ching is often translated: Those who know, dont speak. Those who speak, dont know. Those words seem to be an admonition to keep ones mouth shut and not prattle on with a faade of wisdom. Then again, perhaps they are a mere caution that, whenever someone speaks or writes, they have taken the risk of speaking the unutterable and writing the unfathomable, and their words are to be taken with caution.

Now, in my early sixties, I have been given the opportunity to look at Lao-tzu once again, this time from the perspective of Forgiveness. So I pick up again the burden of one who does not know, but who speaks anyway, because I am beginning to experience a glimpse that forgiveness is the very stuff that holds the whole cosmos together. That it is not just a nice, moral, good-person thing to do, but is part of the very nature of the Tao Itself. I am discovering that forgiveness, like the Tao, is the very water in which we human fish swim and live and breathe. Its been a wondrous and freeing discovery.

BILL MARTIN
Chico, California
January 2009

Introduction

The Practice of Forgiveness

Every expectation that is not met, every disappointment, every shameful memory, every regret for things done or undonegreat or smallforms the content for the processes of clinging or aversion, grasping or pushing away. Over the years this process narrows and restricts our experience of life, making it seem far less than the wondrous adventure it truly can be.

The Tao of Forgiveness is a practice of laying down that process, letting go of all that has happened, keeping only the openhearted wisdom that has bloomed from the soil of our triumphs, our disappointments, and our mistakes. It is a path of freedom and spacious acceptance. It is the grace-filled life for which we all long, and which we have forgotten has been ours all along.

The Tao

If you are not familiar with Lao-tzus wonderful wisdom, may I invite you to obtain a copy of his Tao Te Ching and use it as a companion to this book on the journey of forgiveness. It is available in dozens of translations, including my own (A Path and a Practice, Da Capo Press). It is a small book, only eighty-one short verses of wisdom poetry, written more than 2,500 years ago. Yet it remains one of the most translated and venerated books of both Eastern and Western cultures. It sets out the basic themes of the Tao that I will be using as a foundation for this book on the practice of forgiveness.

In The Tao of Forgiveness, the important word is Tao. Directly seeking forgiveness itself will leave us stuck in a maze of impossible contradictions. If we find the Tao in any situation, however, we will find forgiveness to be a natural consequence. So this book presents a practice that will help us discover the Tao waiting within our own minds and hearts. Finding that, we will find the forgiveness we seek.

Tao (pronounced Dao) can be translated in many ways, from a simple path up to the front door, to the sublime The Way the Cosmos Unfolds Itself. It is the Mystery behind all mysteries, the God behind all gods, the Unnameable behind all names. We can speak about it, but as Lao-tzu taught, the words we use are mere imperfect pointers and are not the Tao Itself.

Like the Tao, forgiveness cannot be presented in a linear fashion. It cannot be discovered through a series of premises presented in a logical progression, culminating in the Aha, now I have got it! experience we Western people so enjoy. I wish it were different. It would be more gratifying, and probably more popular, to write a book on forgiveness that promised a grasp of and control over the subjectTen Tidy Tips to Total Forgiveness.

That is not possible. I am constrained by the nature of the Tao Itself to offer stories, parables, poetry, and meditative exercises. There is no way to predict what you will experience as you read the stories and work with the suggestions. If you are like me, it will depend on the mood you are in when you read. Sometimes, when I read a book, there will be a spacious gap in my mind that allows something entirely new, spurred by the words I read but not contained by them, to arise in my experience. At other times, my reading is merely a search for pre-packaged ideas that fit my familiar forms of thought, comforting me in my conditioned notions of what life is and who I am. It has been my experience that the combination of story, poetry, and suggestion can be effective in searching out those mind-gaps that help open us to the Tao. It is my hope that my words will provide that for youa doorway into an experience of your own Tao Nature.

Two Minds

Forgiveness is not confined by any particular religious belief system. It is, at its heart, a direct experience of the spacious unconditional acceptance found in the Tao and made available to us through what I call our Tao Mind. This Tao Mind is active whenever we are immersed in the non-interpretive, wide-open wonder and awe of just what is in the present moment. It is the Tao Mind that watches a flock of Canada geese play hide-and-seek with scudding clouds without adding layers of labels and interpretations such as Canada geese, windy day, getting to be winter, got to get the firewood chopped, wonder where theyre going to spend the winter. The Tao Mind just experiences the wonder of cloud-cold-wind-geese with an Ahhh. It is the same with forgiveness. There is a moment when thoughts and concepts such as letting go, making restitution, she shouldnt have said that, why did I do that? give way to the Ahhh of freedom.

This direct experience is juxtaposed with a more conditioned experience of thought and concept. Our brains, especially the left hemispheres, are designed to take the vast amount of input impinging on our senses in every moment and sort, categorize, remember, and form conceptual frameworksconnections of categoriesfrom that input. By the time we are three or four years old the brain has formed, in addition to all the other conceptual frameworks, a concept called Me.

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