CosmicWise

...lighting the candle of personal awareness & becoming ...

Forgiveness

Comment: Since not all situations are the same and some damage that is done is too severe to overlook, forgiveness is not something that can be done all the time with all people. Besides, not all people deserve forgiveness, right?
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Response: There's a saying, "charity begins at home".. what this means is that before we can give anything away to others we have to have a surplus. If we don't make a habit of forgiving ourselves for the many transgressions we make from day-to-day, how can we expect to have what it takes to forgive others? Not having a "surplus" of forgiveness will cause us to make exceptions when it comes to others. We will imagine that some people are more deserving than others but this is just a misperception that arises from the belief that as victims we are not empowered to do so.

Forgiveness actually has nothing whatsoever to do with being deserving and everything to do with whether we have it to give away. Therefore, forgiveness only seems hard when we are not actively practicing it with ourselves. As we become familiar with the immense healing power that forgiveness carries with it, something that occurs when we are regular recipients of it ourselves, we become naturally merciful towards others, without a second thought and regardless of what happens.

As we practice the art of self-forgiveness, over time we develop a natural ability to see that errors, even the very big ones, are bound to happen by virtue of our differences, and that to NOT forgive the transgressors has a way of gradually rigidifying and embittering us into victims with a punishing mind-set. As such we become not so different from those who have transgressed against us. If we cannot understand and empathize with the wrong-doer, we unconsciously set ourselves up to become like them. In this way, the hope is that we will sooner or later come to grasp, first-hand, what it was exactly that caused them to do what they did to us.

Let it be known as well, there is no middle ground to stand upon when it comes to forgiveness. If we believe that indifference is a neutral position, we are mistaken about that. Indifference is just another stance the victim takes to sidestep the healing process. There are no two ways about it, we are either taking a merciful stance and healing ourselves or we are taking a punishing stance and compounding our injury. This is because we ourselves cannot escape from whatever position we have taken; to forgive or to punish automatically impacts us directly. For instance, to be merciful may or may not heal the one we are forgiving, however, it will surely heal us. Conversely, to remain UNforgiving and punishing is really only damaging to us for the energy of retaliation is the underlying intention we are "swimming" in.

However right we may imagine we are, to not forgive others their transgressions results in more suffering for us since not only have we suffered from the original transgression, but now we are doubling our injury by declaring ourselves a victim as well.

Bottom line, forgiveness is NOT about condoning unacceptable behaviour; clearly, criminal-behaviour must be restrained and locked up for the safety of all. We must not allow the dark elements to grow and perpetuate--we do this by shining the light of forgiveness where it is the darkest. In seeking to punish error, we are inadvertently INVITING the darkness of transgression to come, abide, and act upon us, while practicing mercy works on dispersing the darkness. When we spread only Light, we diminish the shadows of Darkness and in so doing, we make NO room for transgressions to live on.

Demitra M.N.