HDTV Forgiveness

Ever feel like daily spiritual discipline is a whole lotta work with no immediate payoff here in the 3-D world?
All this effort to retrain my mind to see the world correctly, you think, yet I’m still reacting to the crap around me in the same old ways. That’s how it feels sometimes, at least for me.
I know all this forgiveness work is hugely powerful in terms of healing my ego mind – I can feel it happening more and more all the time – but somehow divine love never seems to be my first reaction to anything.
Well, until yesterday. That’s when I got the opportunity to see just how far I’ve really come.
My husband, like many guys, is a tech geek. I, like many women, am not. He’s been lobbying for high definition TV for about a year now. Me, I harbor no desire to see the pancake makeup actors wear to cover their pores. Especially when it’s going to cost me an extra $20 a month for the privilege.
Truth be told, I’m not so in love with TV at all, anymore. It just isn’t any fun, watching cataclysmic ego stories of good and evil. But Kurt likes it, and he really wanted that HDTV. So I relented.
And then it turned out it came with hidden fees that made the total more like $32 extra per month. Kurt took it as a personal crusade, spending hours on the phone with the DirecTV people. But they wouldn’t budge.
So he removed the DirecTV satellite dish and switched to Dish Network instead. Dish Network (compared to DirecTV) comes with a user interface straight out of the Stone Age. It’s clunky, nonsensical and needlessly complex, making even the simplest functions a difficult mess. So much so that it puts me off watching TV altogether. That’s how much I hate using that remote on that interface.
In earlier times, I would’ve been really bummed out about that. But what the hey, I’ve been looking for a reason to watch less TV. Now I’ve found it.
Yesterday as I juggled my own hectic workday, in the background I could hear Kurt on the phone with DirecTV for what seemed like hours. He emerged afterward looking flushed and upset; I thought he might burst into tears.
“It’s really terrible,” he said, flinching a little, and I realized he had something he was afraid to tell me; he was bracing himself for my reaction. “I had to sign a brand new 24 month contract when we ordered the HDTV,” he said, “and DirecTV refuses to let us out of that contract. We owe them almost $500 in cancellation fees.”
The old me, the me I’ve been all my life, would not have taken that news calmly. I’d have let him have it with both barrels for dragging me down this HDTV road in the first place, leaving me with a new TV watching experience I absolutely hate, and $500 poorer to boot.  I’d have made a major drama out of it, remaining secretly resentful for months afterward every time the TV was switched on.
But it wasn’t the old me. I listened peacefully to his unhappy tale, observed the fear and frustration on his face, and immediately thought: It’s just money. You are the perfect light of heaven, and I have no desire to punish you. Because you’re not guilty of anything.
It wasn’t a forgiveness exercise – that was my honest-to-God first reaction. I then broadened the forgiveness to include all of Dish Network (who would charge the same cancellation fees if we bailed on them) and all of DirecTV. They’re taking our money, but they’re really just calling for love. It’s all perfect, exactly as it is.

Astonishingly, the whole mess has never interrupted my peace for even a moment. And I’d pay a hell of a lot more than $500 for that kind of joyous serenity, any day.
So I guess the moral of the story is: Keep doing those forgiveness exercises, kids. Keep retraining your mind to see the truth of Oneness in everything, because you never know when it’ll actually start sinking in.

Connecting the dots: Making up stories to give the world meaning

Here’s a simple way to describe nonjudgment: You have one dot over here and another dot over there. So, through nonjudging eyes, what do you see? Two unrelated dots, nothing more.
But that’s not how we humans view things. Judgment is the automatic function of our ego minds. We see a dot over here and another one over there, and we automatically connect them. Most of the time we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We tell ourselves a story that seems to fill up the space between those dots, and that story becomes our truth.
But really, it’s a story and nothing more.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example of how this works: I see a dog on a street corner. He has no collar. He looks dirty. I automatically say to myself, There is a stray dog.
It’s a conclusion I’ve reached entirely on my own. And because I historically have an affinity for animals and underdogs, I go on to embellish the story further:
He must be hungry and tired, poor thing.

I wonder if he’s been abandoned on that street corner. I’ll bet he’s waiting for an owner who’s never coming back.

People are so cruel.

So I’ve taken the 3 dots of ‘dog on a street corner’ and ‘no collar’ and ‘looks dirty,’ and I’ve used it as an excuse to weave a present story that reinforces my own past forms of condemnation onto the world.
I do not forgive you for cruelty to animals.
And then the dog’s human emerges from the garage of that house on the corner with a tub and a garden hose – and I see that suddenly the story has changed completely.
It’s still nothing but a story, mind you, as the dog turns and trots after the person, and they both watch the tub fill with soap and water. Now my story involves a squeaky clean puppy whose collar will be returned as soon as he’s dry.
I’m flooded with relief. But I also feel sheepish and ashamed for my earlier wrong conclusion. I attacked that dog’s owner for no reason. Clearly, this dog is loved. He’s cared for. I made a bad mistake.
I’m still connecting dots, but this time I’m doing it to condemn myself for my own misguided prejudices.
Connecting dots may seem like a harmless pastime, but it isn’t. We connect dots constantly, and it’s those stories we fabricate that make up the world as we know it. But the world isn’t as we know it. Not by a long shot. Yet we can’t begin to know the world’s true nature until we stop telling ourselves made-up lies about it.
Our compulsive need to connect dots – to judge random unrelated things and make up stories of good/bad, and right/wrong about them – this is what blocks our memory of Heaven.
As long as we go on making judgments, telling ourselves fantasy stories about each other to give our world meaning, we miss this eternal truth: The world in and of itself has no meaning.
It’s just a whole lot of disconnected dots, signifying nothing.
But if we patiently work, retraining our minds to leave those dots disconnected – to refrain from filling the in-between spaces with our fantasy judgments – that’s when the light of Heaven (which is always loving and entirely without judgment of any kind) has room to filter into our awareness.
To practice nonjudgment is to see the dots, but to resist the temptation to assign them a meaning they really don’t possess.
Nonjudgment is hard for ego minds to get used to. It’s uncomfortable for us to leave the dots unconnected – we’re hardwired for storytelling.
I guess it all just boils down to this: Do you want to know the world as it really is, and see Heaven’s light reflected everywhere you look?  My own answer to that question is hell yeah.
And I definitely want it more than I want to hang onto my stories about the world. So for me, it’s time to start doing my best to leave the dots alone.
End of story.