HPR1150: Hacking Karma And Reincarnation With The Forgiveness Discipline

Summary: I recently ran an educational event for a society concerned with Mysticism and as such, gave the first speech. I recorded it "on the fly," so there are problems with the recording, and I had to cut a few comments that were too soft to be picked up at all by my head-mounted microphone. What follows is the script I wrote for the first three-quarters of the presentation. ================================================================== The first thing to understand is that we are not really discussing the traditional idea of forgiveness. We are talking about a whole new ballgame. This really is not your parents idea of forgiveness. Let's have an example of old-school forgiveness. "Well, you really did it. This is a real, and a really bad, situation, and it happens to be your fault. But I'm going to forgive you for what you did. You don't deserve this, but I'm just so much more perfect than you, I'm going to do this anyway. Because I have Jesus. By the way, you don't. And you will always be screwing up. You could stop screwing up, but you wont. Because your not as great a person as I am. You could begin to agree with me about everything, but you won't. You could even believe every last thing I believe. But you won't. So, unlike me, there is no hope of you going to heaven. I will, but you wont. And I might not look sad about this, but I really do feel sorry for you." I had a little bit of fun writing this. What's wrong with this? Well, just about everything. But the worst part of all of this is that it treats both the world, and things people do in it, as real. Now, as a society of mystics, there are problems with what has been called the "objectiveness" of reality. That is to say, we actually have no guarantee that what we experience is actually real. I'm sure you've heard phrases like "the world is Maya" which roughly translates into illusion. It's appeared in popular culture, like in films like "the Matrix," where all of the world is a computer simulation. There are also several philosophical thought experiments, like what if we were a brain kept in a vat by a mad scientist that was doing some experiment where he was feeding it data. When you get right down to it, just about the only thing you can tell is that some mental data is coming in, and something we identify as our mind is experiencing that data. Such talk is of course, "heavy metaphysics." Let's simplify it in a couple of analogies. Now, me and a few friends deeply enjoy going into the movies. You know, you go into a big auditorium and the lights go down and there are very real looking images on a screen that move and a lot of involving dialogue. Now if we were viewing a movie for a second time, we might know that a certain characters decision would lead, in the course of the movie, to a certain bad outcome. If we were to stand on the stage and try to engage the character to warn him, though, that would be foolish. Certainly you can see that the movie would continue through to the inevitable conflict, which wouldn't change. Now, if we could get into the projectionist's cabinet and mess with the projector and the film, then we might be able to change the course the of movie! What I'm trying to lead you to, is that there is a spiritual discipline aimed at leading to actually changing the film. This is because if you just try to interact with what is happening in the film, you are never going to change anything. But we don't have to look at it like a film. Another analogy serves well, that of a dreaming child. If you were a mother, and you were watching you're sleeping child, you may be able to see that it would be dreaming. You know, you would see the child in the bed asleep, but it might be saying something to someone in the dream. It might physically twitch in a way that you would say "oh, the dream is about running." Something li