Video Transcript • March 2007

Rev. Lyndon Harris and Dr. Fred Luskin on "Forgiveness" (transcript, part 2)

Lyndon Harris and Fred Luskin | Video Transcript |

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This transcript is from the IONS Conversations from the Edge series in 2006.

In this, the second part of the transcription, Dr. Marilyn Schlitz, Rev. Lyndon Harris and Dr. Fred Luskin engage in a conversation about forgiveness.

Marilyn Schlitz (MS): So, thank you both. How brilliant, both of you, just stunning, thank you. I think people have different perceptions or definitions of forgiveness and I think that, in a way you're using a very precise definition, and I wonder if we can just unpack that, first, before we go into some of the ways we can begin to practice this and the research?
Do you want to start?

Dr. Fred Luskin (FL): There are two ways that I have defined forgiveness. The simplest is to simply say that no matter what has happened in any of our lives, at this moment we can be at peace. That forgiveness is the experience of being at peace, right now, no matter what story, no matter what drama, no matter what has occurred five minutes ago or five years ago. And so I refer to forgiveness as an assertive, a creation of peace in the present. The second aspect of it, that's the most simple and the easiest for people to grasp. The second part of it is that we are the ones who created the lack of peace, so we're the only ones who can remedy that situation. That life happened and then we objected to life and it was our objecting to our own life, to saying no, this is not the way life should have been, it should have been that way, our objecting to our own life causes emotional and physical and spiritual turmoil. Forgiveness is the resolution of our objection. It really has nothing to do with life or the people in it, because life just happens in all of it's myriad of experiences and arisings and we object to part of it. So, forgiveness is, in that context, again, it's making peace when you didn't get what you want. And that allows an umbrella. The first part of that is most important, and that is that you're making peace, but the second part is that you're making peace with some situation or experience where you didn't get what you want and you objected to it.

MS: One of the things I heard you say in the past is that forgiveness doesn't imply that you have to accept or condone or make the best friend of this person who you feel a grievance with, but that really it's about what you said, it's kind of a world view shift within ourselves. Is there anything to add to that?

Rev. Lyndon Harris (LH): I really like Fred's work. And when he talks about changing a grievance story into a hero's journey, basically to take the grievance that we have carried around with us for five minutes or fifty years and to shift our approach to that and our relationship to that and to let go. Forgive life, forgive ourselves, forgive other people and to change our role in the story so that we're not victims, but are victorious. (We) are overcomers, heroes, and that's not easy to do, I mean, forgiveness is one of the hardest things to do, but one of the best things to do as well. I think so many of us, perhaps here tonight and I've been there and I'm still there sometimes. Carry around a whole lot of weight we don't need to carry around. It's about liberation really, it's about opening up our heart, being courageous enough to open our hearts to the possibilities of the future. And to give up all hope of a better past. It's a hard thing to do, especially when you think of things as atrocious as, for example, the holocaust. We're not saying that everybody has to forgive. We want to put on the menu for everyone who is able and willing to embrace it. And each person comes at that point from their own life story.

MS: So given how hard it is, you know, you think about things like aggression or some of the less socially adaptive qualities that we have within us. And those are part of who we are, so what is the evolutionary benefit of holding grudges or not wanting to forgive?
You know, tribalism is, and I think about some of the work I've done in the Amazon where the cultures there are constantly at war with each other. So is there an adaptive reason for why this perseveres so strongly in our psyches?

FL: You know it's an interesting thing, because some of the brain scanning research has shown centers in the brain for altruism and loving kindness and centers that light up when we think about revenge. That human beings come with the whole package, so there have to be some kind of evolutionary place for it all. The question, I think, is for each of us, or for cultures (is) 'how much do you want to be reactive and how much do you want to be thinking creatively of where the appropriate manifestation of, say, aggression or tolerance?
And that's what we don't do very well, it's clear that if you are a parent and somebody is about to harm your child, you want to stop them. And you want to stop them with everything you have available to you. And for an hour or two afterwards, you're going to be processing through that threat and you're going to be processing through the horror of possibly losing your child and even the horror of what that brought out in you. So there's this whole thing, and then you're going to have some residual resentment toward the person who initiated that. That to me is normal, adaptive, human experience. Then, I believe we go off into the mal-adaptive which is, we start telling 30 people about how unlucky we are and how unfair it is that happened to us. And then we label that person as evil or bad because they caused us to have this experience instead of us continuing to process it through until we're back at a less prejudice point. But we retain the choice all the time as to what we do past the biological imperative. And the biological imperative is strong. You have to protect people, and you have to steer yourself through some very difficult waters which requires some defenses and some aggression and some assertiveness. It's just the question is, when and how do you cease that, and I believe human beings have done a very poor job at that.

LH: Well, I just want to reiterate what Fred has said so well. Forgiveness does not mean we can't defend ourselves. Forgiveness does not mean condoning evil acts. Forgiveness does not mean that we preclude or exclude justice. It simply means that we decide not to reciprocate the cycle of violence, beyond whatever necessity there is for self defense.

FL: Lyndon and I have had a couple of conversations as to whether or not we're 100% pacifists. And I don't think either of us is, from what I understand. And both of us, since we've struggled with these questions for so long, are aware of the tendencies within ourselves to strike back and to protect and to, you know, all that stuff. But we're also aware within ourselves of how much choice we have about what to do with our impulses and where they're appropriate. That we have found through our work can be educated into people. That can be educated.

MS: It's kind of about building different habits, right?
One of the things we're talking about is if we, I just love to think about how, I don't know what your number is, but if you've told the story seven times, stop. How many times can you say I'm a victim of these things before I'm starting to really, actually change the hardwiring in my basic brain structure to begin to repeat and to live up to those expectations. And so you're offering a way of rebuilding our cognitive process so that, in our hearts, it's not only our brains, but our reactive centers.

FL: There is some interesting information. I don't know if there's a number of times where it becomes hardwired in, but there's some information to how many people we tell our story of woe to. And it turns out that people recover from difficulty better if they limit the number of people they complain to. That what's really effective research wise is to choose one, two, three maybe four people who you share how difficult things are and keep your mouth shut to the rest of the world. About that aspect of it, but get real support from those people. That care and support is essential. So it turns out the people who tell a small number of trusted people, that research is, they get through it. People who tell nobody and don't have support, they have the hardest time, but right behind them are the people who are blabbing to everybody how tough it is. You know, there is a research number in quantity. I don't know if there is an exact number as to how many repetitions, but it's the same thematic.

LH: Forgiveness is a trainable life skill. It's one that we need to do a lot of work to reeducate people about its power, the definition of forgiveness and what it means and doesn't mean. It's a trainable life skill.

MS: So let's talk some about the research. You've done some extraordinary projects where bringing mothers of children who have died in the conflict in Northern Ireland together, for example, Protestants, Catholics and engaging in emotional intelligence kind of training. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that.

FL: We did three research projects where we brought man and women who had grievous personal losses from both sides of the violence in Northern Ireland and we brought them together and spent a week with them and taught them how to forgive. The first group was mothers from both sides of that conflict who had had their sons shot. The second group was people from both sides who had simply had an immediate family member murdered. And the third group was people who they, themselves had been brutalized by that violence and were now in the community. We did this research and we spent maybe 15 hours total with these individuals. And again it's from people from both sides and again, I don't know what we did. We just created a container and taught some skills. But we did number crunching on this experience and a week of that kind of training, reduced stress in one of the groups by about a third. Reduced depress by about 40% and increased forgiveness. It's just part of it and that's just some of the research. I'll just tell you one of the other projects that I'm in so you can see the whole gamut of it. We're doing ongoing research projects with financial service advisers. And we are training these people, it started right after the stock market crash of 2000 and they were miserable because their business had fallen apart and their clients hated them, for loosing so much money. So we started with 15 financial service advisors in upstate NY and we taught them emotional competent skills based on forgiveness and then tracked their stress and their sales for a year, after going through this training. And were able to show almost a 25% increase in sales and an almost 20% decrease in stress from not driving themselves crazy about their lives. We got results like that from both kinds of experiences. One the horrible murder of somebody and one the stock market wasn't cooperating. But my interest now is more in the stock market kind of stuff than the deep horror, because I want to make forgiveness just a normal life skill, as Lyndon says 'trainable' that's my spiritual imperative.

MS: One of the things I remember about the Northern Ireland project was, and this will take us into the forgiveness garden and the social aspects of this. I remember you talking about how these women were able to experience this forgiveness and the emotional shift that occurred with their own transformation, but that when they went home, the community wasn't ready for that and wasn't even happy that they'd had these kind of epiphany moments and so how are we able to ground what is an individual, personal development, within the fact that we live within a context that either supports us or not?

FL: Why don't I detail a little bit more about the women and then let Lyndon talk about the community stuff, because that's more his expertise. One of the things that was most poignant and provocative about doing this work, was that I did it with a partner who was a minister at Stanford and we did this forgiveness work together. I did the forgiveness part and he did the minister part. He drew a rectangle on the board. And the rectangle had the word murder in it. Then he had two arrows coming out. And one of the arrows was to the individual whose family the person who was murdered was from, and the other arrow was the community, the Catholic and Protestant. And what he described was to have both sides tried to own this murder. The Catholic or Protestant side tried to own the murder, so they would have an other wedge of vengeance and resentment against the other side The family tried to own the murder to grieve the loss but to get some public sympathy from it. They were in conflict because the need of the community to maintain its antagonism toward the other side at time trumped their willingness to protect their own members who had been violated. And so many of these people found that when they came back into their communities and expressed any less viciousness toward the side that did it, they became pariahs in their own community. That's what I think you're specifically referring to and that was chilling to me.

LH: Yeah, that's the power of community to coerce and co-opt and the form is significant and that's why we want to take Fred's methodology and this research and propagate it on the humanity levels. We want to take this research and use it as a tool for community organizing. One of the things we've learned a little bit about, I think, since 9/11, is that we haven't done a very good job with coping with public tragedy. You know, every year at ground zero we have, you know, it's heart breaking, one year the children will read the names, the next year the parents will read the names, the next year the spouses will. We don't have the imagination to come up with something that will enable and empower us to grieve sufficiently and then to release the antagonisms that we have and to embrace the future. And that's one of the things that keeps me awake at night. I don't have the answers to that, but I'm working on that. But it is something that we need to do, to take this work and to integrate it into the lives of communities around the country and that's the concept behind the garden. The garden should be a beautiful space, of course, that the local community will cherish and be pleased to be apart of but that's the starting point, not the finish line. The garden itself becomes a vehicle, if you will, for the forgiveness training and the group work that we want to do.

FL: Let me just say one thing. This has been interesting to me as someone who lives 3,000 miles away from New York. When Lyndon and I first started to talk about this, it was very specifically to put a garden in, right near ground zero. And it was very specifically to try to show that out of the worst horror that Americans had experienced that we could have a little tiny space which said 'no' to violence. And it's not that we've had any more struggle than anybody else trying to make anything about that site. We've just been caught up in incredible confusion and political disaster of that experience. We now are working with a group in Poughkeepsie, New York, I'm just responding to Lydon's thing about the community, and somehow that community really gets the power of this. And Lyndon and I went there a few months ago and gave a talk to energize the community and they had about 50-60 community leaders there from religions, and psychologists and historians and the mayor and the council and judges and they've actually taken this idea on and we're going back in a couple of weeks to do a symposium at Vassar. But that community will have a garden of forgiveness. It will have one probably by next spring. The mayor has offered land. The college may offer land, I mean it's just, there's a sense there that they get. That boy, this is a nice thing, to provide space for people to reflect upon an alternative to violence. And so one community, the ground zero community, was closed to this, at least from what we can see, and another community, and I know other people who will start gardens, but that community is really embracing this. And they want me to train people in their community to deliver this message and Lyndon is working with them relentlessly to sell tickets and organize the events and it's a social phenomenon, there's no one person who can do this.

LH: One point I'd just add to that, it's so interesting, you know, we try to figure out what to do with the prison industrial complex in our country and all the travail about incarceration and all that. One of the leaders in the garden of forgiveness in Poughkeepsie is a municipal judge and when he has to deal with a felon, what he requires is not anger management training, but forgiveness training. Isn't that interesting? Wouldn't that be a great model for judges around the country and police departments and all that to take into consideration the possibility of rehabilitation through forgiveness. It's an idea whose time has come.

MS: Yeah, that's really true. It seems to me, now we hear so much about the negatives and yet, you know, the amount of organized violence in the world is significantly down from where it was ten years ago and the amount of illiteracy is significantly down from where it was ten years ago. I think there are many markers like that that suggest that maybe it's starting to work. Maybe the people that are adopting these things are sort of front line adopters. But it is beginning to cause a ripple effect into the popular culture. We also think about consciousness as something inside our individual heads and if I do an emotional intelligence training program that I'll be different. But it really is true that our consciousness is shaped by the collective and our language and our metaphors. That's one of the beauties about thinking about the garden it's a beautiful, organic, you know, vital kind of metaphor.
I wonder how it is we begin to balance what's happening in the science domain with then, almost what we could call a moral order. We think about forgiveness coming out of the churches, these are some of the moral guidelines that we get from the spiritual traditions. And yet, science is amoral in its intention. How do you balance that?

FL: Well, I'll respond very clearly. The fact that I was a scientist working at Stanford has done as much or more for forgiveness because of the culture that we live in than many of the churches have been able to accomplish in this country. And the fact that I could stand there and say, I have this data and I'm at this world class university, that's the consciousness that reaches into contemporary America. And what we're all (doing). I know what Noetic Sciences is to do. I'm not sure that these things are as disparate as we might think they are. We're just consciousness. It manifests itself in many different ways, but it's just it's just consciousness and I don't want to resist the fact that science may be the language of 21st century America. I think that's terrific. That means you've got to do the right science.

LH: I see no conflict at all. I think it's a wonderful synergy that's happening now, especially with the leaders at the Metanexus Institute, and Templeton Foundation, and others. It's really remarkable work in the convergence of science and religion and I think that too is an idea whose time has come and let's see what we can do together and let's see what the benefit can be, so we take the ideas that we have but then we put legs on them and we actually make an impact, we make a difference in our communities, we make a difference in the world. And that's how we change the culture, that's how we change the world, that's how we make a difference.

MS: We talk about these learnable skills, what are they, how can we learn to be more forgiving?

FL: Just buy my book [laughter]; that was an easy one.

MS: Through osmosis I will touch the pages. Any advise you might give us since we're all here on a Friday night?

FL: I'll think about that. There is of course a glib answer to that and then there's a more subtle aspect and it gets into a deep question of what allows people to change and it's always an intersection of technique and desire or technique and will or technique and luck. We developed a forgiveness training based on four very simple trainable skills. Become more grateful, practice that religiously, relentlessly. Open your heart all the time to what you have so you recognize what the open heart is, that's an essential practice of forgiveness. Because the opposite is what we do, which is the world didn't give me enough and therefore I'm entitled to complain. You want to focus on the fact that the world did give you enough and there's nothing to complain about, to balance that out. Second it's a stress management approach. You have to calm down your nervous system, you just have to do that, otherwise the stress chemicals are going to cause your thinking to become very limited and very narrow and very hostile. So if you don't manage the stress of the unforgiveness, it's very hard to get past it. Third, and Lyndon alluded to this and when I talked to Marilyn the other day and both of them were struck by the simplicity and the necessity of changing that story you tell and how many people are just attached to a story that paints them as helpless victims of something unpleasant. That story is probably the worst thing we do to ourselves, not the events that happen to us. A story of helplessness creates a helpless immune system, creates nervous system disregulation. Creates all sorts of patterns in the brain for thinking, that's just what happens. When you change the story to something else, you give your body different pathways to function and you give your mind different pathways to open to. That in itself is a very simple trainable skill. And last, we teach certain arguments, very simple arguments about whether or not the world owed you anything different. Like prove that there really was an error and you didn't deserve the mother you got, I mean, prove that. [laughter]. And so these simple skills are trainable, but I would have to say I still don't know how to teach forgiveness. I can teach these skills and they tend to make people more available to forgiveness, but there's still something ethereal or consciousness or spiritual or grace or something that still has to fill that human space beyond just those skills and I still don't know what that is.

MS: Well just from a scientific point of view it seems as though there's a nested set of qualities or practices, and how would you or can you, is there value in trying to pull out forgiveness from gratefulness from compassion or does one need to see them as a composite and begin to think about some kind of integral methodology that would allow us to approach the entirety in the context of something like an emotional intelligence training program.

FL: What do you think? Really, if you were going to answer that question what do you think? and then I'll be happy to tell you my answer, but I don't want to just keep on answering questions in a vacuum. What do you think to that?

MS: Well, I think that again, there is a split between what a scientist is trying to do by understanding, really trying to identify what are the salient variables that if we're going to put our money or our time on something, should I be spending it over here or over here? And you know, reduction is the way of science. And then we think about what's the outcome we're aiming for, so the difference between a physician who is really just trying to see their patient get better so whatever they throw at it, that's fine, compared to the investigator who says this worked for this one can it generalize to the next?

FL: What actually is the active and the more inert ingredient ?

MS: Yeah, and I would say that, you know, I'm very interested in the integral approach, but I'm also thinking that there are some benefits to us trying to pull out and isolate, what are the qualities of gratefulness? That is, in a sense, a very positive and affirming kind of meditation. Forgiveness you tend to lock into something where it's in reaction to something. I mean, I could see where there may be differences in these kinds of qualities and you must have thought about this as you were designing research.

FL: This, this is a very difficult question to answer.

MS: That's why he asked me to answer it [laughter]

FL: I am of two minds, of that one is I tend to, let's put it this way, I don't think there's one answer to that question. I tend to think that there is a great degree of overlap within the positive emotions. That the physiologic experience of gratitude, the physiologic experience of compassion and the physiologic experience of forgiveness, may not be that far apart. And the brain pathways that are made available by those, may not be that diverse there may be subtle differences but more than likely the variance they share is more than the variance that they hold distinct. That being said, my sense is that forgiveness as a specific quality, is harder to develop than gratitude and compassion. And may require, at least the way we teach it, and we may not have done enough work on this, one of the foundational things that we teach, besides just gratitude is, I hammer people with the sense that everybody suffers. Have compassion for them, look around you and see beyond your own woundedness and open your heart to that too. So my thinking of it now is that there's a lot alike. An open heart or a gentle demeanor or a vibration of peace, the parasympathetic system intercedency probably lead people to be more grateful, compassionate and forgiving. But there is something about forgiveness that appears to be harder to train directly. And some people may require the development or the opening to gratitude or compassion first and then forgiveness can be built on top of that. How's that?

MS: Very nice thank you, I knew you could answer that question. How about play and humor? How is that, when you start to think about often times when we get into these grudges and these places of real negativity. How therapeutic is, you know, we're looking at these tools of transformation, how therapeutic is something like lightening up about it? Just, you know, letting go of the kind of negative affect and trying to cultivate something that's much more playful. Either one of you?

LH: Well, a sense of humor goes a long way. I can give you a couple of examples. We had this one guy, who was a part of relief effort at ground zero for that eight and a half months, he would show up about every 3-4 weeks. We called him 'Black-market Greg.' Well, Black-market Greg had some kind of interesting connection with our friends south of Florida in the land of Cuba, who are gifted at making cigars. So he would get these shipments of Cuban cigars, bring them in, we'd take them into ground zero and deliver them. Now, some people would say, 'Oh, my God, you're encouraging smoking!' That really is a lack of a sense of humor. Those moments help us deal with the tragedy, the scale of the tragedy. They enable us to wrestle with them. They enable us to live! What was the film of the Italian director did (Life is Beautiful) the comedy on the holocaust. When I first heard about it I was totally offended. I thought, how in God's name could you do a--it was one of the best movies I'd ever seen! But we have to use comedy and levity to be able to wrestle with the enormous scale of tragedy we see from time to time.

FL: I think Lyndon could even talk more about that. From what I understand of that relief effort, it included massages and music and so many levels of care and attention to people. It wasn't just, here's a place to rest or here's a place where you're going to eat. You should say more about that. It was a multi-dimensional effort.

MS: And while you're doing that if people have a desire to join the conversation we have a microphone over here and you can begin to cue up.

LH: It was more than just coffee and bagels. You think about the bare necessities that people need. Here is food and you can enjoy it and here's food that's going to sustain you. No. We wanted to have the best food that we could get, we wanted to have the best resources available to care for these people and the massage therapists were much more popular than the clergy. [laughter] And a sense of humor also with regard to the podiatry that happened on site. St. Paul's chapel was the oldest Christian church in New York City, founded in 1776. And when George Washington was inaugurated as our country's first President, he came to St. Paul's chapel to give thanks to God for that. St. Paul's was his church. There's a box pew in St. Paul's bearing his name. And so when the podiatrist asked us where to set up, well, of course, given the Valley Forge campaign, where else would we put them but in Washington's box pew? That brought a continuous trail of smiles to the faces of people coming in. It was an oasis of hope, and I know we have to have that.

MS: That's beautiful.

FL: Lyndon told a wonderful story yesterday that I'm still chuckling over. We were responding to Marilyn, Marilyn had talked to us and we were talking about the hard sell that forgiveness can be. So Lyndon was giving me a humorous sense of what it's like to talk to people about forgiveness and he said this, or something like quoting someone. He said, Preacher, you've gone from preaching to meddling when you talk about forgiveness. [laugther]

LH: Cross that line.

MS: The same may be true with scientists, you cross the line. Okay, let's start the conversation.

(watch for Part III: Q & A from the audience)