The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
- Shakespeare ( Portia's Speech - Merchant of Venice)
Prologue
Most of us are unconscious victims of the tremendous traffic of thoughts which parades through the human mind minute-by-minute and hour-by-hour. The average life is, unfortunately, quite wasted in the effort to follow one's thoughts. Many incarnations are spent completely, in a frenzy of urgent desire, without any moment of "awakening" into enquiry. How many of us even begin to wonder about the suspicious origins of these urgent "mandates" and "directions" emitting from the Mind.
The single greatest threat to human peace of mind is -- not hatred, anger, or guilt -- but rather doubt. You have the intelligence and the self-discipline to make a practice of becoming aware of the presence of doubt and negative expectations. If habitual, fear-driven thoughts of failure, ignominy, and zero-option despair are caught and identified at the mental level, then they can be dealt with quickly. They might not be able to be completely extinguished because they are the result of past-life karma. They will have to be understood and accepted before they can be eradicated.
The conscious human has less control over the flow of events, and more control over how one reacts to those events. Hence, if one is able to capture and consciously work on to cancel the negative thought process at the level of direct mental perception, one can be spared much unhappiness. If the negative thoughts are not recognized at the mental level, then the information will be passed on to the next gross particulate level of the astral plane, where it will try to gain one’s attention
The astral plane contains a huge "ocean of emotion". On the astral plane, the negative thoughts will manifest in a roller-coaster of emotion that surges from wild fantasies of total redemptive love to blackest despair of abandonment and total rejection unto death. The astral plane is not governed by time, so one might experience violent fluctuations of feelings - from bright to black and pure merging love to total isolated death - in a matter of minutes.
Holding onto the negative mental process of resentment, guilt, anger, & sorrow from the past, is a psychic disaster. It takes a huge amount of creative energy to manage our detailed inventory of past hurts & grievances. The more deeply one invests in the commitment to hold the perpetrator until they are properly punished, the less energy one has to do anything creative at all.
Shani
Shani's job is to inculcate personal responsibility (without guilt) and neutral acceptance of the karmic process. Shani's mission is to convert ignorant error into calm wisdom. Shani will do "whatever it takes" to command the native's attention. Shani will recall the native over and over to a central difficulty, a repeating failure, or an insurmountable obstacle.
Shani's job is to bring forward the people we have inadvertently harmed in past lives, give them the opportunity to enter into a negative relationship with us, harm us in return, and thereby allow us (in the best case) to consciously realize that we attracted those people into our lives in order to learn a lesson about compassion. This is a painful and frustrating process but it is really the only way to balance the karmic ledger. Spiritually, there is no advantage to having Shani-evoked troubles magically evaporate. To the spiritually aware, there will be deep gratitude for having been offered the chance to suffer consciously, and consciously forgive. This is the single greatest achievement of the human soul.
Shani's impact on life experience is painful and frustrating but, in the end, extremely beneficial. The pain can be reduced dramatically through neutral awareness and acceptance of the role one plays in creating one's own destiny. Once one has established a pattern of calm and non-judgmental reaction to the flow of events, Shani's job is done - and the pain stops! (The events continue but they just roll past...)
The faster one can achieve neutral awareness of one's own negative expectations, the faster one can eliminate the pain. Unfortunately for the slow learner, Shani will give all the "time" necessary to repeat the lesson. For those of us who live a bit behind the curve of total wisdom, it is valuable to be aware of the most acute effects of Shani. With forewarning, one can address these "scheduled" negativities, as they arise, with consciousness. One can meet each well-timed disappointment with a deeper commitment to acknowledgement, forgiveness and release.
Ego & Marriage Conflict
In each life, certain intimate partners are permitted access to the soft, childlike, sensitive ego core - or very close to the core. Often the marriage partner has permission to press our buttons, criticize our practices, question our validity, and rattle our cage. These are the partners with whom (against whom) we negotiate our core identity.
These intimate partners are pre-assigned. They enter our current life by invitation. These intimates are souls with whom we have built a shared inventory of both trust and grief over many lifetimes. They know us well. We all can handle a professional attack pretty well, but an attack from a loved one hurts horribly, coming from a person with whom we have entered into a loving promise to love and protect.
The ego identity testing ground is marriage which in turn is the true testing ground for forgiveness. Unless the two parties are enlightened beings, the negotiation for valid ego identity in marriage can get pretty intense. The more fragile the two egos, the more desperately anxious the negotiation.
Essentially, "edits" of the marriage script require the power to "forgive" the other spouse for their supposed transgressions against what we believe to be good and true about ourselves - i.e., offences against our ego structure. Hundreds of these offences occur during each day of married life. Tragically, they are the primary cause of "irreconcilable differences" leading to divorce. In any relationship - but especially the queen of all relationships "marriage" - resolution of conflict requires dissolution of false ego.
The pain of ego-damage and the terrible anxiety caused by threat of ego-collapse is very stressful. Letting go of the ego is easier said than done. Once the crutch of Ego is gone, what happens to the mind when it has nothing to do? No values transactions (your way; my way or the highway; compromise) No negotiation. No discussions, agreements, or balance to strike, No conflicts to mediate, when there is no self to represent “Me” at the arbitration table?
The Ego does not go quietly. It goes berserk. It likes its dominant position in your consciousness. It likes its control. It goes on a rampage. It wants its job back. It goes on protest mode, insisting on its self-evident, constitutionally guaranteed "right to work
The threat of ego-collapse is enough, for some people, to force consideration of forgiveness as a survival strategy in marriage. Marriage often forces the reluctant ego to at least “try” the possibility of forgiveness. The pain of ego invalidation, coming from the person closest to us in this life - the spouse - is often unmanageable. Some souls are driven to the final extreme - forgiveness - in an effort to free themselves from a huge accumulation of toxic anger, humiliation, and grief acquired during failed identity negotiations with this most significant Other.
Forgiveness
It is not normal & natural to forgive. It is normal & natural and rigorously socially enforced, to store up offences and wait to get redress. It requires considerable consciousness to forgive our spouse for being a unique soul who is different than us, for exposing our faults, and for forcing us into levels of awareness that our sleep-walking egos did not want to achieve.
Forgiveness does not mean condoning or justifying the harmful acts done by others. The laws of karma ensure that those who do harm will themselves be harmed, when their time comes. Forgiveness does not erase the memory of the transgression. Rather, forgiveness "gives back" the unsuitable (ego-assaulting) energy to the original sender, which gives the spouse permission to be a separate person, have their own tastes and values, and make their own judgments. The trick is that their values and judgments are divinely theirs, not ours - and thus, we are completely freed from conflict and criticism in the marriage
The decision to forgive, especially for really grievous emotional wounding, is a desperate act parallel to radical cancer surgery. No one in their "right mind" would start taking apart their ego, which is the instinctive core of our social survival.
Forgiveness is not noble. We only do this in complete desperation, when all negotiation with the partner has failed. When we are incapable of discussing the matter; exhausted in our attempts; have no new ideas; have reached a total Waterloo; and furthermore are in deep psycho-emotional pain. Only then is forgiveness the way out of suffering.
The only useful motive for forgiveness is utter desperation.
If this is happening to you, you may be blessed to look back upon your troubled marriage and your hurtful partner as the best problem you ever had in your life. Because, skillfully handled, the anger (ego-threat), pain, anxiety, and sorrow caused by marital conflict can force the spirit who is ready, into a much broader campaign of forgiveness which encompasses not only the spouse but all the "usual suspects" who have harmed us in this life.
