I am the forgiveness of the tolerant and the good qualities of those in the mode of goodness.
Śrīmad Bhāgvatam 11.16.31
Forgiveness has long found success in psychological therapy. And with good reason. The practice has its origins in our deepest spiritual roots.
What is forgiveness?
In worldly terms forgiveness is a kind of judgement. To forgive is to release someone from some debt, obligation or guilt caused by some previous action. It means to cancel a clash between expectation and reality. By erasing the expectation, it erases the clash. Such expectations require neither a basis in the actual world nor the consent of the person who has disappointed the expectation.
Forgiveness, in this sense, is a psychological process of giving up the feelings of bitterness attached to disappointed expectation. Psychologists tell us that this method has positive therapeutical effects.
In spiritual terms another reality appears. Vaishnavism teaches that we are an infinite soul in a finite body. The soul, this mysterious, immaterial expression of who we truly are when we are entirely being ourselves, is untouched by mundane matters.
We understand that the obligations that lie behind the need for forgiveness are caused by circumstances. They are the product of our material existence. They appear in the course of lives, and they disappear in the course of our lives.
The same can be said of all those forces in our lives that create expectations: rules and regulations, rights and wrongs, guilt and innocence, morality and immorality. These are all the creation of living souls in time and place. They all grow out of circumstances: social relations, political arrangements that change or disappear as quickly as they arise.
This is why the mundane act of forgiveness only works if the forgiver and the forgiven occupy two completely different positions. Forgiveness is only possible, in worldly terms, from a position suspended outside the offense, outside the guilt, outside the obligation. The judge in the moment of judgement is always beyond the rules. The forgiver holds the power of forgiveness, while the forgiven has none.
And yet we know that, seen with spiritual eyes, the forgiver understands that we are one with the forgiven, that whatever offensive act committed comes from a soul just like our own, struggling, step by step to become itself. We know that there is no offense that the forgiven can have committed that the forgiver could not have committed, or perhaps already did. We know that any offense comes from a longing for happiness, however confused or displaced, a longing to find peace, as distant as it may seem, a longing to be happy, to be one.
In spiritual terms, we know that the moving force behind any offense is the inescapable, irresistible, overpowering search for love, to love and to be loved. Any act done by any living entity, from the most charmed to the most reprehensible, can be traced back, sometimes by an endlessly circuitous path, to the irresistible quest to love.
Seen with spiritual eyes, it’s the material circumstances of any offensive act that are its cause, not the soul that committed it. No soul is created impure or offensive. If offenses are committed, they are the consequence of material constraints. If we manage to detach the circumstantial material act from its pure spiritual source, there is no wrong, no guilt, crime, there is only love.
This love is sometimes distant, sometimes near, sometimes complex, sometimes simple, sometimes timid, sometimes eager. But it is always there, irrepressibly, miraculously, inspiringly drawing us together and lifting us up.
The worldly causes of harm do not belong to our souls. Nor does the sadness or bitterness they may cause. Enlightenment means becoming so acquainted with our own souls that we become indifferent to the material debris that clings to us in our brief passage through this world.
It is always already too late for forgiveness. Not because nothing is forgivable, but because all forgiveness is already given. Forgiveness is already mine and yours. Forgiveness is mercy: it is causeless. To be a soul is to be forgiven, to be automatically and unconditionally released, to be free to give ourselves again and again, to each other, to God.