mr green wrote:I am starting to realise now what it means to forgive someone who has hurt and used you.
Yup, apart from the mental, material and emotional damage any abuser or abusive relationship can do, which is not necessarily caused by "your karma at all", the "pain" is one feels in the kicking of one's own ass and the banging one's own head, at how stupid one was until it is writ inside not to do the same again. (A resolve or sanskar in BK language). I do not deny what it said in "The Secret". May be I need to learn. For sure I am not 'there' yet but at the same time I do not 'know it' either.
Rather than see "Foregiveness" as some Holy Joe, doo-gooder things; if you just see it as the "stoppng banging your head on the wall" advice, it tastes a lot better. I don't see that an abuser or abusive system can or should be "forgiven" until they have come to a realisation and repentance of their wrong doing themselves, and it has been reformed. A bit like South Africa via the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission.
Given the choice between some crones parading their virginity as the most supreme forgiving virtue, I'd rather ask for a 'Duty of Care' programme and some public accountability before I thought about 'forgiveness' for the BKWSU. And I would no more walk up to a rape victim or victim of child sex abuse and accuse them of "victimitus" than I would some of the BKWSU road kill and tell them it was "their karma".
I do think that the abused REALLY has to get the message of how not to be abused into their heads, and sometimes that can take months or years to get over. Likewise, pursuing the abusers to change does not confer bitterness, hatred, vengeance or any other pejorative word. My experience of life has been that as soon as you think you have sussed every trick or kind of trickers, lie presents you with a new kind of animal, a new experience that you have not met before.
In the Western spiritual tradition (perhaps too in the East) there the concept of "The Worth Opponent". The Worth Opponent was someone or some spirit that was equal to you, but opposite on the other/dark side. The equal and opposite enemy to the hero, who save for the tragic circumstances of his life, upbringing, politics, or financial situation, might have been the hero's best friend. Unfortunately, though, they must be the hero's opposition.
"Without the aid of a worthy opponent, who's not really an enemy but a thoroughly dedicated adversary, the apprentice has no possibility of continuing on the path of knowledge."
From 'The Don Juan Papers' (Ross-Erikson, 1980).