Difficult personalities are a mirror for the places where we get stuck in judgment, fear, and confusion. - Noah Levine

Everything is impermanent—every pleasure, every pain, every body. But the survival instincts crave permanence and control. The body wants pleasure to stay forever and pain to go away forever.

Forgiveness is not just a selfish pursuit of personal satisfaction or righteousness. It actually alleviates the amount of suffering in the world. As each one of us frees ourselves from clinging to resentments that cause suffering, we relieve our friends, family, and community of the burden of our unhappiness. This is not a philosophical proposal; it is a verifiable and practical truth. Through our suffering and lack of forgiveness, we tend to do all kinds of unskillful things that hurt others. We close ourselves off from love, for example, out of fear of further pains or betrayals. This alone—a lack of openness to the love shown to us—is a way that we cause harm to our loved ones. The closed heart lets no one in or out.

The truth is, going against the internal stream of ignorance is way more rebellious than trying to start some sort of cultural revolution.