Printed in the Summer 2021 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor's Desk" Quest 108:3, pg 2
Spiritual struggle takes many forms: the Dark Night of the Soul, the confrontation with the Shadow, wrestling with angels and devils, the battle on the field of Kurukshetra, and so forth.
Most people on a spiritual path have faced such confrontations. Nevertheless, I believe, you can realize that in many of these cases, you are merely making problems for yourself. Indeed the more grandiose forms of struggle often consist of elaborate means of avoiding this truth.
Life often seems to constitute a string of problems. One is solved, only to be rapidly replaced by another. This list is never-ending and self-perpetuating. Many of the practical problems of life are unavoidable. But what about the ones we create for ourselves?
Grievances are perhaps the most common form of self-created problems. Holding grievances is useless and harmful—like drinking poison and expecting it to kill someone else, according to a Buddhist proverb. Yet it is frequently the hardest habit to break. Why?
Because of the unconscious belief that holding grievances is somehow of benefit. Usually this is an attempt at defense: some level of the mind believes that grievances are armor; without them we would be at the mercy of a cruel world.
Of course this is ridiculous. In fact our grievances are our greatest points of vulnerability. (Look at this history of this nation for the past five years if you have any doubts about this matter.) To overcome them, the first step, I would say, is insight: you have to recognize the damage that you are suffering from your grievances. You cannot merely pretend that you understand this fact or indulge in empty moralizing about forgiveness.
The second step is to see when you are holding grievances (in the moment, of course). This can be difficult. If you are quitting smoking, you can easily know when you have a cigarette in your hand and when you don’t. With internal matters, it is not so simple. It requires a rigorous inner attention and honesty.
Such honesty is, I would say, even more important than forgiveness. It is no good to tell yourself you have let go of a grievance when you have done nothing of the kind. Better to face the truth: you are still holding on to your grudge, even if you realize that it is doing you no good.
For many people, grievances against others are the easiest to release, especially if they have to do with the past or with people with whom you have no more contact. If the issue is a serious one—involving, say, abuse by family members—it may require psychotherapy to fully resolve.
It is somewhat harder to release grievances against oneself. Most of us tend somewhat toward self-punishment; moreover, at some level we mistakenly believe that holding these past failures over our heads will save us from future ones. There is a word for holding grievances against oneself: regret. But a Uighur proverb says that a man with regrets is not a real man. There is a huge gulf between learning from the mistakes of the past and punishing yourself for them.
The third type of grievance may be the most insidious one: holding grudges about the state of the world. G.I. Gurdjieff noted the tendency of modern humans “vainly-to-become-sincerely-indignant” (to use his idiosyncratic punctuation). Its cause? The absence of the “instinctive-sensing-of-reality-in-its-own right.”
There is a blurry line here. It is between genuine compassion for the suffering of others and the belief (yet again hidden from consciousness) that one has to feel indignation as a moral responsibility. Much of this belief is nothing more than the ego trying to convince itself that it is a good person.
How can you tell the difference between these two impulses? Genuine compassion manifests itself in some form, even if only as an ephemeral and unnoticed gesture of kindness. “Vainly-to-become-sincerely-indignant” is the stuff of Facebook posts and Twitter rants.
Releasing grievances can be a long and arduous process, requiring the “searching and fearless moral inventory” of the Twelve-step program, although it need not be. What will make the difference is the strength of the insight. If you truly realize that your grudges are pointless and harmful, many of them will vanish overnight. But if parts of your character hesitate and doubt this truth, the process will be longer and more painful.
I have said as much about this issue as I can on the single page of a magazine. I wrote about it in a short book, published several years ago, called The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness, which sets out a simple process for releasing grievances. I would urge you to read and work with this book if you feel this issue has had any hold on your life.
By the way, I did not dream up The Deal because I thought it would be nice to write a book about forgiveness. It was a process that I had to go through myself beforehand; only afterward did it occur to me to turn it into a book.
Of all of the spiritual work I have done and the struggles I have gone through, I would say that this process of releasing grievances has been among the most important and has by far given me the greatest benefits.
Richard Smoley