FORGIVENESS AND HEALTH
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A wizened old man from Ghana, West Africa, gave me a saying a long time ago that has stuck with me for...it must be 15 years now. I always see the old man's face when I recall what he said, and I've said it to myself many times. I even related it to John, a misled colleague who assumed that, because he had inflicted an injustice on me, I would be bitter and resentful toward him. Apparently, my distress would have made him happy. I am sure he wanted my life to be miserable. It seemed that this gave him great satisfaction.
The saying came from the Akan people, the ancestors of the wrinkled old Ghanaian man with a small tuff of grayish hair at the center of his chin and ashy black complexion like the zinc on the back side of a mirror. It was strange. I had never seen the old man before, and I have not seen him since. I don't know why he approached and spoke to me--unless perhaps something in my face indicated that I needed to hear the saying. Maybe he came from nowhere for no other reason than to deliver it then just disappeared. It was the strangest thing!
The Akan are descendants of a migrating group of people that came south, probably from the Sudan into Volta River Valley, at the beginning of the 13th century. "The elders have many mysteries which can be understood only through experience and acceptance," said a much younger man from Ghana, in an attempt to help me understand where the old man with the ashen black skin had come from.
He tried to explain to me how much of African philosophical thought had a dogmatic yet Zen-like aspect to it that paralleled many of the paradigms arising from the weird non-causal connectedness in advance physics.
One day, I ran into my colleague, John, who had intentionally blocked a promotion that I more than deserved; that over the years would have netted me more $40,000. I saw him crossing the parking lot where we worked. He seemed ready to celebrate his continuation of the injustice by saying: "I’m still here," meaning as long as he was here I would never get promoted, but he was put off by my smile.
At the time, I was unconcerned about him, smiling about life. He stopped. He was puzzled. "Are you always this happy?" he said. "Or are you faking?" I took him to mean: I've done something really harmful to you. Why are you so happy upon seeing me?
That was the only time I used the saying as a boast. I said "John, the Akan of ancient Ghana have a saying: You are not in the world. The world is in you. Anything that is in the world that is not loved and blessed is something in you that is not love and not blessed. I loved and blessed myself by loving and blessing you a long time ago." He walked away.
"Nothing stands more directly in the way of knowing and expressing our magnificence than does our blameful non-forgiveness"
The next day when I was on the elevator in the building where we worked, the door opened and John was waiting to get on. He saw me and turned away, refusing to board the elevator. After that, whenever we passed each other in the hallway, I smiled even more broadly and he looked away.
Soon afterward, our new mutual boss, not knowing that there was friction between John and me, said that John was retiring.
"Why, What's wrong?" I asked with real concern.
"A health condition." Ah, it was he who had not forgiven me for being happy, I thought.
But then I stopped thinking about it because over the years I had done some research in Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI): how the mind stimulates the nerves and creates an effect on the immune defenses of all innervated tissue. I had learned to immediately stop myself from thinking about anything that might send negative electromagnetic impulses and neurochemicals down my nervous system to the nerve endings or synapses causing them to flood my blood stream and hormonal system with toxins, yes, toxins that is how I thought of the process.
I was as sincere as I could be in wishing him well. I shut down the vengeful concept: "God don't love ugly." With so much ugliness in the world, that would have meant that we are all condemned. I smiled not at his misfortune but at the idea that God is not in the world, the world is in God and anything that is in the world then must be loved and blessed.
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