Entanglements
Re-writing our pasts for good. We all know that the same good I desire for myself, I desire for all beings. Enabling this steps us into entanglement across time. Try it.
It is super slow here in the far north at solstice, literally the sun seems to stand still in the sky for 12 days. It’s expansive: I sense reaching across the millennia, the abundance of this land and its peoples in earlier centuries. With this, the relative nature of time, comes a connection to something we can all do, rewriting the past! There are practices for this too, forgiveness is one to try here.
Slow time
December 1999, 9.25am, Ok Tedi HQ in Tabubil, Western Province, Papua New Guinea. The mine’s CEO is standing on his conference room table. He is screaming at me while forefinger jabs punctuate his points. He’s mercurially mad, I’ve been exposing the mine’s destruction and he is convinced he’s steering the company well for the greater good.
I am one of a handful of world experts on Ok Tedi, a giant copper mine in Papua New Guinea. Ok Tedi is an infamous disaster dumping 80,000 tonnes of waste into the river every day. It mobilises many with two successful class actions acknowledging, to an extent, impacts on everyone’s food, forest and life supports.
It was totally avoidable too, consequences were well known before construction started.1 However, you can’t find anyone who owns the decision making. Rather they truly re-authored themselves and changed their history.
Outrageously, this is a good thing.
But, surely we want justice, deterrence and restitution? Besides which we can’t change the past?
Deeper time
I reach out sensing his emotions. Fear and a desire for safety—wow, from me?! Clear affiliations—he follows others and I should follow him. Dependency—a lot to lose here including his self image. Caution and wanting to avoid the spotlights—I’ve been putting Ok Tedi on global newspaper front pages. Feelings of inadequacy, shortage and deficiency—what else could he have done?2
Looking up at him I ask “what do you need?”
As I feel myself saying that then, and writing this now, my young environmental activist is changing. No matter that I am in the middle of nowhere, no fast way out of the mining town and a little afraid, wondering how smart it is to be here alone.3
Fortuitously, there’s a profound capacity for more. I can be with the simultaneity of this, incorporating empathy for others with my own difficulties, and doing that is juicy, shifting what was, breaking a racket. Holding onto contraction had me in my smaller self as I was amplifying the very same emotions, the anger and fear, that made me shrink.
Redefining time
What do you need?
Power disparity is real. Contrasts between the lives of the PNG people I brought to Australia (to be at the class action) and those in the company are stark. However, forgiveness is not about condoning negatives, halting legal recourses or restorative acts.
Yet, we are all better off if people, like those at Ok Tedi, forgive themselves dropping self-rancour, animosity and self-negative emotional content. Ideally it goes beyond this into accountability, integrity, responsibility and more.
For myself this is powerful too. I’d forgotten the conference room yet being unconscious of emotions does not mean they are gone. Feeling into this, actively embodying, forgiving and shifting the different aspects of it, changes who I am.
Hearts of time: Try it
Long term friendship requires the capacity for deep forgiveness.
David Whyte
Close your eyes if you would like to and can. You can use the audio above to listen to this moment of meditation, starting at the 4:18 mark.4
Center yourself into an awareness of anything and all to be grateful for. It does not matter how minimal you think this is or how magnificently big you think it is. Just find something to be grateful for, for the moment. And feel that sense of gratitude which is beginning to clean up your perceptual window. You may remember all forgiveness is really self-forgiveness because we are letting go of the debris, the mental debris, the resentment, the rancour, the grudges that weigh us down and provide the conditions for guilt, shame and helplessness to flow into our awareness, to reinforce difficulties we tolerate.
When I say the word forgiveness, whoever pops into your mind first—whether it's from many years ago or whether it's from something recent, whoever you have just been given—bring them into your awareness. And see them sitting across from you. Notice any emotions that are coming up in your solar plexus and the rest of your body.
And look at them. Say to them right now, mentally, what you did does not determine my destiny. I am not subject to your act of omission or commission. What you did or did not do cannot affect my destiny. I cut the cord between us.
See yourself cutting the cord mentally and saying “I set you free to live out the true meaning of your destiny as I cut myself free and live out the true meaning of my destiny, I have a great destiny. And, what you did, or did not do, cannot and does not hamper me any more. I forgive and set us free”
Be with that for a moment.
Let's go to one more advanced stage of this. As you see them sitting there say and feel:
“I wish you well. I wish you success. I wish you Prosperity. I wish you well, I wish you success, I wish you prosperity.”
Feel it in your being.
If that is difficult think of someone in your life, maybe even an infant in your family. Think about how much you love them and say to that infant, or that small child, or someone in your family that you love: “I wish you well, I wish you success, I wish you prosperity.” Feel the feeling.
Now shapeshift that feeling to the individual that you're now forgiving: I wish you well. I wish you success. I wish you prosperity.
Feel the shapeshift taking place. You are freeing yourself from future debt because you're not claiming that you're missing something because of their actions. Embrace yourself and give yourself permission to be fully successful, healthy and prosperous in all respects, your needs fully met, fully met.
I give thanks. I allow it to be so. So it is. Make it so.
Good time
the present is not just the “now,” today, the moment or a unit of time. It is ever-originating, an achievement of full integration and continuous renewal.
Jean Gebser5
I have much to forgive. Just one example: if everyone in the world was to live like me we would need three whole worlds to support us all. These difficulties are true for many, the systems around us make it impossible to live within planetary boundaries.6
Consequently, the reality is we all need to re-write the past. This is fundamental for lifting pain and shifting the now.
It calls for several new realities. Most prominently that the paradox of forgiveness can be present with passionate action. I still go to Tabubil. I still expose the company and organise with the PNG Western Province people to win the class action lawsuit.
However, I wish this to go deeper. I don’t need to know what emerges at Tabubil HQ after I leave. I do know that an essence of love, now present, sets conditions for far better outcomes. I’ve prominent sensations of how big this feels, suffusing through my body now.
Another new one is that this matters, we all matter much more than we think.7 We need to do this regardless of historical, linear-time paradigms and we truly do fold time.8 If you like:
Feel into who you are now as you engage with practices like the one above.
Feel into who you were and how that situation now feels, imagine into your new self there at the time.
Lean into what emerges as you are present, now and there, with your fuller potentials.
What has changed? What do you feel? You may like to write down and/or describe those feelings for yourself, where you sense them, the colour, wholeness, aroma, vibration or other parts you notice.
Time folded forgiveness
our modern way of thinking about time is to equate it to a material quantity… But in fact, time is not a material or a spatialize thing we can waste or run away from...
Daniel Pinchbeck9
Empathy and forgiveness bend our timelines, take us into our higher potentials and help us to meet diverse chaos and difficulties. It assists realising societies that fully meet the needs for me, you and all.
Nevertheless, I need some handrails please and nurturing that forgiveness is a key. When we do this we bend time. We heal our younger selves and others. We re-write our experiential timelines enabling abundant and flourishing outcomes in the now.
Pictures: Most are from between 11 pm and 1 am, Solstice 2024. All by Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.
Mineral Policy Institute Smoking Gun Files via Web Archive (I wrote and researched this).
Descriptions are drawn from
’s superb Core model. We all have tethers like these, in differing intensities and specifics. Often they are younger social and emotional versions of ourselves (for example self-centred foci on our wants) that are waiting to be integrated.These perspectives and anchors are a focus of my holistic coaching work: what we see in others are always in us too (and that’s me!). Feel free to reach out, Simon>. I’m always delighted to talk about this, it is such an alive and powerful place to explore.
This is an edited version of an original meditation by Michael Beckwith from his Take Back Your Mind podcast. Watch it here>
Quoted by Maria Popova in The Ever-Present Origin
Realities are classically regarded as linear: x causes y and then we get z. There are multiple cases when this is not true. For a summary see Blindfolds and balls part 2: Grandma goes technicolor here> and consider the case that the Second World War started in 1939 and you would not have called it that until much later. That’s changing time and see Quantum Social Science by Alexander Wendt for more (amazon & public library). To go deeper into these entanglements, connecting quantum physics microscopic within a reality-ontological philosophy, see Karen Barad Meeting the Universe Halfway (amazon & public library).
Gebser thought we were inevitably approaching a new “structure” of consciousness, a new realization of time and space, which he called “integral-aperspectival.” Unlike the linear, inherently dualistic perspective of the mental-rational stage, the integral-aperspectival consciousness is characterized by a holistic, multidimensional realization. Gebser emphasized "diaphaneity" or "transparency" as key characteristics of the integral stage. This transparency allows individuals to perceive the essence of things beyond their appearances, sensing the interconnectedness of all existence. By transcending distinctions between subject and object, self and other, we attain a nondual realization with no fixed center or ego-bound perspective. With a decentered awareness, we can hold a more expansive, fluid perception that includes multiple overlapping “truths” or paradoxical realities.
What resonated most for me was your words around gratitude, and its capacity to dissipate stormy inner weather.