TO JUDGE someone is to judge the dysfunction of the family system that helped shape them. Behind whatever crazy-making toxicity may lie in their immediate family, stand generations of ancestors and societies that passed on their unique bias and blind spots.
Finally, zooming all the way out, every so-called “guilty party” is a product of the archetypal prejudice and automation that he or she karmicly inherited as indicated by their astrological birth chart.
A question arises:
If there is no single guilty party, who or what are we actually judging? Does not “the bad guy” become existence, itself?
Indeed.
When we aim mental violence at one ego, we are condemning the inheritance of handicaps that pour through each and every one of us. By withholding our blessing from a single soul, we withhold our blessing from the entire incarnational stage set and diminish our faith in the stage set’s Creator.
Fortunately, this parched paradigm burns itself down. On the day of God’s choosing, the winds of fate get whipped up and the aversion we aimed solely at the most mentally deranged and and psychopathic give rise to spot fires. Soon, our entire perceptual world is ablaze. Who’s the arsonist now?
Forgiveness is a Fire
Now that we’ve named the existential fallout of personal judgement, what then does it mean to forgive?
Perhaps forgiveness is better understood as,
The capacity to meditatively survive the identity crisis that ensues when the stage props that ego uses to tell itself who it is go up in flames.
Forgivers see:
The dream of separation has foiled my ego-hardening ambitions, precisely as I asked it to. I am not a victim because I did not really want– and could never truly relax into– what was lose-able.
Still, this feeling of being victimized must be honestly felt, purged and released. There is no shame in being a hurtable human and the more I cradle these feelings of unfairness and self-pity with compassion, the holier my tears become.
What does all this have to do with the L.A. fires? Simple. No matter how much mind searches for a culprit, this relentless hail of sparks (and the innocent wind that drives them) refuse to yield a “guilty party.” The blame game exhausted, life beckons us to take refuge in the one truly secure place in the world: the Merciful Witness.
Burning Down the House
What if the Los Angeles fires– and every shocking twist and turn of Samsara– is a self-administered meditative prod– the manifestation of a secret prayer to go face-to-face with impermanence until, through our holy tears, we fully confess: my only safety and refuge is the One Being shining through every name and form?
Amidst all the chaos, confusion and name-calling, there is something visceral and real that we know:
The body/mind house is burning down to the eternal ground of an unborn, undying awareness.
Let’s visualize this burning house.
Forgiveness Fire Meditation
Picture the licking flames of time– the glowing tangerine serpents dancing wildly, in a amoral frenzy, in the upstairs window.
Hear the sudden violent pops, the subtle “poof” of an emaciated, white-hot dinner table leg no longer able to hold its shape, the eerie squeal of a two-by-four out-gassing, as if it were begging for mercy.
Now notice the the lungs of the house; the commanding, low-pitched roar, the grave, inhuman confidence of the house as it broadcasts calmly like a talk show host from Hell, as post and beam take turns crashing down in a hail of sparks onto the scorched black pavement.
Now ask yourself: What posture shall I assume as this body/mind house falls down around me? What messages shall I shout over the fence to my neighbor in that classic English Tudor, soon to be a pile of steaming rubble?
There now. We have located ourselves, accurately, as the Merciful Witness of “personhood in flames.” How interesting are the arsonists, the mayor, the governor, Southern California Edison or the Smart City planners now?
Hunter Reynolds, January 2025
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