Forgiving Others, Forgiving Ourselves 1 in This Issue
Eknath Easwaran’s Blue Mountain Journal Meditation & Spiritual Living Summer 2016 Forgiving Others, Forgiving Ourselves www.easwaran.org 1 In This Issue Eknath Easwaran called this the age of anger, and anger the biggest problem of our times. For him the word included all sorts of subtler feelings simmering below the surface of consciousness, ready to burst out at the slightest provocation: ill will, hostility, resentment, enmity, bitterness at how other people or even life itself is treating us. This takes its toll on those around us, but the frst casualty is to ourselves. Anger, Easwaran said, invades the mind like a virus. If unchecked, it can utterly destroy peace of mind. But we have invincible defenses: “When the internal viruses of resentment and hostility attack our consciousness, the mind’s immune system will be able to vanquish them through patience and forgiveness.” We think of forgiveness as a response to Summer 2016 wrongs, but the forgiveness the mystics Volume 27, No. 2 plead for is universal: a state of mind that © 2016 by Easwaran said absorbs ill will as trees absorb The Blue Mountain carbon dioxide in the air and transform it Center of Meditation, into life-giving oxygen. This lifts the burden P. O. Box 256, of anger from the heart, but if we are striving Tomales, CA 94971 707. 878. 2369 for Self-realization it is much more. “On the info @ easwaran.org spiritual path,” Easwaran enjoins us, “the www.easwaran.org very frst attribute we are asked to cultivate is The Blue Mountain forgiveness” – because the Lord, the one same Journal is a Self, is present in each of us without exception, publication of so that insofar as we are divided against others, The Blue Mountain we are divided within ourselves.
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