Mechanisms of Forgiveness
The Process of Internally Setting Yourself Free
The internal process of deep forgiveness goes well beyond accepting an apology from someone who has hurt you. Sure, an apology can pave the way to forgiveness, but what happens when we will never get one? Do we just have to stay hurt and angry forever? No, of course not. The other alternative is to choose forgiveness, regardless of the other person’s behavior.
In order to deeply forgive, it is essential to set aside any expectation about how the other person should respond to your forgiveness or behave moving forward. After all, they may never apologize, validate your pain, or even recognize that they hurt you. Forgiveness is a totally inside job. It involves only your internal conscious process.
To think about forgiveness as something that involves two parties is inherently a dualistic way of thinking. It splits reality into “good” and “bad.” And the process of deep forgiveness does not happen from a place of dualism.
Although it can be a useful exercise in keeping your ego in check, deep forgiveness isn’t even necessarily about acknowledging what you did wrong. Considering what you did wrong - although potentially more fair and balanced - is still approaching the issue from a dualistic place of “right” and “wrong.” For that reason, it also misses the mark. Deep forgiveness is much bigger than keeping an accurate score of exactly who did what.
It involves abandoning the dualistic based ideas of “right” and “wrong” all together; and stepping into your authentic self (or “soul”). The idea here isn’t to mitigate, but transcend the ego through forgiveness. Only from a place outside the ego’s dualism does it really become possible to respond from a place of compassion and forgive, rather than react out of anger and fear. Although this is difficult to do, it’s possible.
When attacked in some way, our minds and bodies get pulled into a dynamic with the other person. After all, we practically have to tend to whatever threat is presented to us physical reality. That said, we don’t have to stay in that headspace forever. At any point - even decades after an incident - we can choose to enter into the transcendent process of forgiveness.
The process of forgiveness actually can initiate - or be a conduit to - entering into conscious awareness. From within that conscious awareness, it becomes clear that everything in physical reality - even the things that hurt your ego/body - is truly interconnected. There is a logical cause and effect to the world. People reacting from their ego will cause harm to other people’s egos/bodies. That’s the way it works. It’s extremely complex in scope, but logically as simple at 1+1=2. Hurt people, hurt people. That’s all there is to it. It’s not about who was right or wrong. The blame for the hurt you have experienced is so much infinitely bigger than the person is who hurt you. Your pain did not originate with them. It is much older than that. The pain they inflicted upon you came from the pain within them, and the pain within them came from the pain that others inflicted on them, and those other people got their pain from many other people, and so on and so forth on a global scale throughout millennia. You - and the person who hurt you - are in a pyramid scheme of pain.
This pyramid scheme of pain is so vast and complex, that there’s no way to win from within it. If you get hurt and respond by hurting others, you only enmesh yourself (and everyone else) in it further. You have to make a decision to step outside of it all together any play by different, compassion-based rules. Once the change is made, you start spreading light in the same way that darkness spreads: by touching other people with your compassion and forgiveness.
As it happens, if you do make that decision to mindfully initiate the process of forgiveness, there can be some unexpected benefits. Because deep forgiveness involves stepping outside of the web and into our authentic selves, we can learn some things while we’re there. One thing that becomes apparent is that unlike our egos/body, our authentic selves can never be damaged. Your authentic self remains the same, regardless of what happens in physical reality. Some say it even survives death. And if your authentic self can survive death, it can survive whatever else is throw at it during life on earth. Taking that stance, you step into immeasurable inherent power. It is here that deep forgiveness happens.
Think about it.
-Tara
P.S. And while you’re at it, consider this story:
An army general was disemboweling people across feudal Japan. His reputation spread far and wide as a cruel cruel man. He then comes into this one village and he says to his adjutant. Tell me what’s happening and the adjutant replies, “All the people are frightened of you and they are bowing down. All the monks in the monastery have fled to the hills but for one monk.”
He was outraged at this one monk. He gets up and goes to the monastery and pushes open the doors. As he walks into the courtyard there’s the monk standing in the middle of the courtyard. He walks up to him and he says, “Don’t you know who I am? I could run my sword through your belly without blinking an eye.”
“And don’t you know who I am? I could have your sword go through my belly without blinking an eye.”
The general bowed deeply and left the monk in peace.
(citation link)
Now, that is next level. Don’t think about deep forgiveness in terms of dualism, but from this perspective of unshakable certainty of your inherent transcendent power. That’s the spot.
