What is Forgiveness?
This post follows on from the previous post exploring “Is Sin good or Bad?”.
The two concepts kind of go hand I hand.
Forgiving
Prior to this discovering this insight, the act of forgiveness for me was based around fundamentally not having any negative energy towards someone (that could be yourself) that has done something that is “bad”.
Well, what is bad? – we explored that in the “Is Sin good or Bad?” post.
The principle of forgiveness though is that first something must happen which could be perceived negatively, then we choose to forgive.
This I have come to learn is a fundamental misunderstanding about real forgiveness…
Nothing
Let’s first explore the behaviour of being unforgiving…
The root of unforgiving behaviour is the act of judgment. Something happens and we judge this event against our values, the event is then classified as either good or bad, and if we are unforgiving, we choose to attach this judgement of the behaviour to the person that committed the act.
So, the root of forgiveness is the outcome of our judgement.
There must be something to forgive for us to practice forgiveness… not quite so.
Real forgiveness if about adjusting our value system to be more empathetic. You see, it is practically impossible to stop the human mind judging (evaluation is hardwired in to our ego) what we can do however is modify the criteria that we use to judge.
Real forgiveness thus is about giving no significance to anything.
You could say to yourself or the other person that you have forgiven them, when in reality, internally within your perception, there was nothing to forgive.
So, if we eliminate Sin as an outcome of judgement, we also eliminate the requirement for forgiveness. What we instead have is acceptance.
The Takeaway
Does this resonate with you? Do you agree or disagree?
If you were to adopt this approach with yourself and your own internal judgements, would this change your life for the better or the worse?
All interesting things to ponder.
Personally, I have found this insight revelatory. Rather than getting bogged down in working through negative emotions that need to be cast aside in order to forgive. I simply short circuit the whole game by accepting what has happened. It is like a cheat code for contentment.
Play around with this in your own mind… see what else you can choose to carry once you are able to drop the baggage of forgiveness in your mind.
Enjoy, for now.