I was thinking a little further on my comments in a recent post on faith healers and the strange way some folk will keep believing, even once they’ve been exposed to the truth.
While I was thinking, a memory rose up and attracted my attention. On further thought, I realised that this phenomenon isn’t just found on the positive side of things. I started thinking about the way it can be much more blatantly negative.
I was remembering someone I knew a few years ago, he’d been mistreated during his school years and it transpired that he was nursing his grievance and dreaming of revenge. A dream of going back and burning the place to the ground along with everyone who’d made his life a misery. One day I pointed out the futility of this dream, only to be met with anger. I’d thought I was helping, but obviously not.
At the time, I said nothing. But looking back, it’s a little clearer now why this happened. In a couple of my previous posts, I’ve shared my opinion that many people frame their life experiences in terms of their faith, and/or their surrounding society. But some people must frame their experiences in terms of the bad things, especially during their formative years. Thus they will always be (for example) the person who was bullied, and as much of who they are is framed in those negative terms, they cannot easily escape it for the reasons of investment I explained previously. Even though it’s a negative mental landscape, it’s just that, their mental landscape. To change it is to threaten part of their identity.
My advice from then still stands now though. Our desires for revenge, especially over the long term, are based on the mental picture of the people / organisations that wronged us. The longer the term, the more it’s a mental image than a concrete reality. Why? Read on….
A major point of Buddhism is impermanence, constant change. This means that very quickly we are faced with the point that the target of our revenge no longer exists. In the case of a school, the pupil and staff rosters change, the buildings, fittings and fixtures alter slowly over time. So even a small number of years later, the target of the urge for revenge no longer exists! But rather than this being something that leaves us tortured it gives us complete freedom, as exactly the same principle applies to ourselves. Thus the person who suffered those wrongs no longer exists either, and so we are truly free.
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