47 - On Resentment

I am aware that by challenging people to find room in their heart for those who have offended them, I am arousing in many an obstacle to their wholehearted enlisting of the teaching because many feel that I am asking something which they feel they cannot do.  This fosters in many an even worse sense of inadequacy than was already there; so that, instead of helping them, it is placing them in a bind. Confirming that this is the message of Christ still does not do it.

A similar situation arises when one is told by religious authorities that one is a sinner, blowing up one's sense of guilt beyond the tolerable level. One's self image is already bad enough - nothing is gained by making it worse. This may indeed aver itself to be the hitch in spiritual prescriptions: "shoulding" people and thus making them feel uncomfortable. While the intention is good, it does not generate realistic help.

In contrast the psychotherapists propose self acceptance - which would mean that, while one has difficulty with forgiving someone who has done one serious harm, in particular by wounding one's psyche, or one is struggling with resentment against a person with whom one is continually brushing shoulders and who brings out the worst in one, one feels that one needs to be open to work with it because one's resentment makes one feel most uncomfortable and festers like a lingering wound, continually bugging one and undermining one. Paradoxically, resentment is often surreptitiously linked with guilt: guilt for having allowed oneself to be slighted or abused. Add the guilt of failing to forgive to this, and it becomes intolerable. Most often this guilt feeling is unjustified and can be dismissed by the conscious mind, however, the unconscious brooks of no argumentation.

Resentment avers itself here to be written right into the programing of the psyche because it deters one from being the enabler that gives license to a person to do one harm, or for that matter harm somebody else. Therefore with the exception of those cases where the violence or threats of the aggressor have put one in a bind, it is more healthy to recognize and admit failure to having given vent to one's anger, thus unmasking and disarming the culprit, rather than covering up one's resentment even from one's own view because one does not like being cantankerous. Notwithstanding, the crunch is that, bereft of one's defence system, one is not only vulnerable, but is facilitating malevolence.

Now to deal with both one's resentment and the guilt is difficult to substantiate because on one hand, one may be indicting oneself unjustifiably, and on the other the mind provides every argument to acquit one. Subliminal feelings need to be unearthed gradually and with enlightened supervision to avoid overstressing by disorienting our already precarious self-image. In short, one's resentment or anger or rage need to be released cautiously from the unconscious, that means identified, recognized, then skillfully processed by converting rage into outrage - first healing, then regenerating. If not, it may erupt dramatically, leaving the psyche devastated and stymied. 

How does one heal a physical wound? Starting with first aid, one needs to protect it from further irritants , which includes infection. Likewise one needs to be sheltered in a protective and supportive psychological environment, feeling cared for. In these circumstances, the regenerative process gets on its way, gradually rebuilding damaged tissues. Similarly, damaged elements of the psyche need to be rebuilt skillfully and painstakingly and of course it will take its appointed time.

However, sheltering is only half the battle, the regenerative forces of the body expend energy and may require an extra boost; even so with the psyche. Ultimately it is ecstasy that avers itself to be the energy of the psyche. While it might be more conservative to spell enthusiasm, ecstasy is the superlative, enthusiasm quickening itself ad infinitum. There can be no doubt that it is by admiring something beautiful, or contemplating or accomplishing a valuable deed that one's bewonderment ardor is aroused, or glorifying the splendor manifesting as the universe, whether or not personified as God, that one sparks one's spirit to ecstasy. How does one bring oneself to be high when circumstance are disenchanting, at best low key? This is where spirituality affirms itself to be a tonic for the injured psyche rather than a sedative, because the act of glorification unveils the divine status of one's own being - the sense of sacredness that triggers off self-validation which in turn permits personal creativity. Since the self-image is an albeit totally inadequate image of the psyche, a notion and therefore is of the nature of imagination, one can work with it creatively.

What is more: the infirmities of the psyche can be diagnosed in their traces in the self image. Pain is the alarm signal that there is some lesion which manifests as a distortion of one's real being. Yet, curiously enough our true being can be retrieved out of this distortion unscathed, exactly as the voice of Caruso, so badly distorted by the recording technology of his time can be retrieved from the old records. The difference with the psyche is that while the record registers the past, the psyche need not just reinstate its pristine state, but can improve on it. While the template is impervious to any defilement, the psyche is ever recurrent.

The hitch is that one often obstructs this regenerative process by failing to believe that nature has the property not only of restoring itself, but of mutating, and likewise the psyche. And it takes a trauma to set the evolutionary process into brainstorming new ways of being. According to physicist Ilyia Prigogyne, the evolution from more rudimentary to more sophisticated structures in nature requires a breakdown of the stability achieved in states of equilibrium. He calls the structures thus arrived at, thanks to the disruption of the status-quo, dissipative structures. It is the vision of how things could be that saves the structure from irreversible disintegration.

Therefore one needs to not only lend oneself to the regenerative process, but also welcome the strong, sometimes dramatic pummeling of the forces of the cosmic drama upon one. Eventually not only bygones get more and more into bygones even though they may still linger in the twilight of the lighted up area of consciousness (at least one develops the ability to live with the scars), but also one learns to put pain to good use. This is the great art. Many of the handicapped learn to adapt themselves to their disabilities, and some even compensate for their inability with enhanced acuity, as for example a blind piano tuner - or enhanced zeal like Dr. Stephen Hawking - or capitalize on pain using it as a catalyst to enhance inspiration like Brahms.

What can meditation propose at this stage? In the first place, if indeed emotion calls for a conceptualization of the problem and the conceptualization escalates the emotion into overacting, one can gauge the wisdom of the Rishis about questioning one's assessments, thus avoiding that the emotional charge slips off the handle. The danger is that under the emotional overstress, the thinking gets awry and the psyche runs amok into unrealistic fantasies. 

But the crunch of the matter is that by putting conceptualizations on hold, one releases a whole different dimension of thinking: the intuitive mode. One substitutes feed-forward to feed-back. One scans the events from the vantage point of the programming rather than try to infer the programming from an analysis of the events.

We are talking of a non-commonplace mode of understanding called transcendent cognizance, not based upon the feed-back of experience, but upon the properties of our own thinking which functions on the same principles as that of the thinking of the universe, except infinitely less adequately.

Some psycho-therapists disentangle their patients from their conceptualizations by asking them to say how they feel rather than what they think about their problem. The added advantage here is that the focus is now in the heart. Of course it is true that ultimately one is tested in one's love. It is one's love that has been wounded, violated, desecrated. There has been a betrayal of the pure love of the early days. The innocence has been sullied. Love has soured into a paradoxical love-hate syndrome. Here lies the acid test. Can one love a person whose actions or behavior has devastated one, or that one condemns, or abhors? Does one have the strength to scan one's mind to provide excuses for them, mitigating circumstances to ease one's wrath? Such as: they were badly brought up, they are spoilt brats, they are struggling for self esteem, and I am the scape-goat. . . their genetic package was flawed.

Combining these would require a difficult coordination of left brain/right brain activity. The danger is that, trying to do this, intellectually, the left brain takes over right brain functions, so that one does not really love, but tries to believe one does because one is enjoined to. The answer would therefore be for the right brain to take over, so that there is no point in trying to provide an alibi for a person. This is the unconditional love. One's love for one's child will overcome any criticism or admonishing in one's mind. Such is the power of love - it triumphs over the mind. Where the right brain prevails, one does not have to provide mitigating arguments, one zooms on the good points of a person. People who manage this become very charismatic and have the makings to be successful in life by mastering the art of dealing with people, rather than dismissing them from one's heart. And what is more, by dint of some ironical divine wit: here lies the secret of being high!

Furthermore, it is helpful to grasp clearly the distinction between struggling to control things or not trying to control but letting a sense of orderliness and sovereignty operate, where one's higher self takes over. For example, it is realizing that Planet Earth feels and thinks through one or rather in one, that Leonardo da Vinci's inventiveness or Bach's attunement, or Einstein's insight are features of the thinking and feeling not just of that being that is Planet Earth, but also that being that is the Universe and which some call God. Precisely the same is true of our thinking and feeling and willing except that it gets limited, sometimes distorted by being funnelled down.

This is why people find it difficult to forgive. No matter how much one wills, one cannot overcome one's resentment and heal the pain by one's own personal effort. In fact the will can put one in a bind by hating oneself for hating another and not being able to avoid it.

Resentment degenerates into hatred and gets transmuted by heroism. One cannot "should" oneself or, for that matter, another person to be a hero.  One volunteers one's heroism when the call for service is sounded, or one does not. Giving vent to the latent hero in one is ultimate fulfillment. It elicits one's need to see and fulfill a purpose in one's life. What is more, in releasing this need, one is honoring a dimension of one's being that one treasures as representing a higher value. This is where meditation will ultimately help one overcome resentment, after processing it.

But it is giving vent to actuating one's role in life in dedication to service that triggers off the discovery of the more transcendental dimensions of one's being, heretofore unknown and latent. This is discovering by doing. The confidence gained by the discovery of these strata of one's being upgrades one's performance. Often, dedicating oneself to service will prove to be therapeutic in overcoming the side effects of resentment.

There can be no doubt that the key to safeguarding one's self-image from further inroads lies in considering it holistically, that is including the more cosmic and especially transcendental dimensions of one's being, where one's self-image is crowned in something of the nature of the splendor that is behind all creativity which is trying to manifest and actuate itself in the universe; then reconciling this aspect which is latently present in the depths of one's being with the inadequacy born of one's having the support system of one's personality made of the fabric of the evolutionary process occurring on Planet Earth. This confirms Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan's aphorism regarding reconciling "the aristocracy of the soul with the democracy of the ego". 

Thus, honoring the divine status of one's being proves to be the ultimate safety-buoy, keeping one afloat through the crisis in one's self esteem facing resentment, triggered off by self-pity, thus rescuing one from sinking into the bitterness of hatred with its epidemic of violence and the resultant cruelty wreaked upon one's fellow beings.
