Forgiveness
Or, the other f-word
Forgiveness has become a household name, and yet few are really aware of what the genuine article is.
Because true forgiveness isn’t what you think. Sure, it resembles the common forgiveness you were taught — until you read the fine print. Then come the modifications, qualifiers, and endless asterisks.
And who among us actually bothers to read the full text of the fine print?
So here we are. For all intents and purposes, you might as well abandon your old notion of forgiveness and start all over. It’ll be easier that way.
What is forgiveness — and how do we practice it?
You’ll never understand true forgiveness until you accept one fundamental premise: the world we see and live in is a mental construct. A reflection of images and processes occurring in the collective mind.
If you already know this — congratulations. You know what I’m about to say.
If this idea makes no sense to you and you’re preparing to argue until we both turn blue in the face — save your effort. You win. I’m not trying to convert anyone.
But for those somewhere in between — not fully convinced but still willing to listen — I have a story to tell. Many stories, actually.
Bricks feel solid. So do boats and trees. Our world appears solid. But underneath all that? The electrons, protons, and neutrons have nothing solid in the way you’d imagine. At the level of the atom, the rules of the game shift — probabilities instead of certainties, superposition instead of fixed states, particle-wave duality, entanglement, and tunneling.
In that quantum world, nothing is solid. Nothing is even fully knowable. So how can a world made of wave packets appear so firm and real? Can you create a solid object out of non-solidity?
Ironic that — the hard science most committed to uncovering the objective reality — ended up discovering the total subjectivity of existence. True, it all happens at the microscopic level. But still…
Physicists have known about this strange truth for over a century. Bohr, Einstein, Born, Pauli — they all grappled with it. Some kept asking deep questions: What does this mean? How is this possible? Others threw up their hands and said, “Who cares, as long as it works?” And continued to invent and play with ever newer toys.
That second group won out the public affairs tug of war, and their view became dominant. They call it the Copenhagen Interpretation. Not that Bohr ever said it exactly that way, but he might as well have.
So for a while, we swept the uncomfortable implications under the rug. Instead, we tinkered. We built diodes and transistors and superconducting quantum interference devices. We pretended we hadn’t just glimpsed something unfathomable: a world where everything is entangled, where observer and observed are one, where existence is a web of potentiality.
The ancients would’ve simply said: All is Mind, and Mind is All. Hello, Kybalion. Hello, ancient Egyptian and Indian wisdom! We’re slowly rediscovering ancient secrets in our own fumbling way.
So what does any of this have to do with true forgiveness?
Well — if all is Mind, and the mind is all — then who, exactly, is the aggressor? And who is the victim? And if we eliminate the aggression in our minds, can war exist anywhere else if all is Mind?
A lie or hurt then means that Mind imagined it before it showed up in the physical reality. It imagined the characters, the shadows, the scenery, and everything in between. But just as Mind imagined it, so could it un-imagine.
True forgiveness is that process of “unimagination.” The remembrance of this power which doesn’t dwell on wrongs but quietly unimagines them. For the mind awakened to this play, hurt and suffering become only shadows of passing dreams.
If this is true, you might ask — why don’t we all just wake up? Shouldn’t it be easy to do so?
Here’s the kicker: being of the mind doesn’t mean it’s easy. We’ve built habits on top of mental habits. Programs and systems of programs. And you know how difficult it is to break a habit. That’s how hard it is to free yourself from this all-pervasive delusion.
That’s why the ancient yogis focused above all on training the mind. Whoever controls their mind gains the power to unimagine everything. And that is how you gain the world. Or overcome it.
But for the rest? We must start small, or it will hurt and backfire.
Don’t walk into that street traffic declaring that “nothing is solid,” fully intent on “quantum tunneling” through incoming cars. If you see someone waving a knife, remove yourself from that situation — it is not the time to check the knife’s solidity.
For, if your subconscious is still operating under the old paradigm of solidity, you’ll get hurt, no matter how much physics or metaphysics you know. Habit is an awful pain in the neck to break. Only lengthy practice and solid mind control can get you there.
Begin with small experiments, trying forgiveness on a microscopic, safe level. Someone cuts you off in traffic? Let it go. Unimagine the offense. Your neighbor forgets to clean up after their dog — do the cleaning and unimagine it. An earthquake halfway across the globe — if you so desire, send money, blankets, or food to help those living there but also un-imagine it.
You do not condone what happens. You simply build a world around you where all the hurt and misery are unimagined.
Let go of petty thoughts and hurts and grievances. Unimagine them and then wait. Observe. Did your life improve? Did your outer world become less cluttered with injustices or hurts?
If yes — keep going. If not — adjust. Try something else. Nobody is asking you to take all this on faith. Put everything to the test and accept only what comes out true for you.
This is what the practice of true forgiveness on a daily basis is. It is not the big things, but the small instances of letting go that bring you along this path toward true forgiveness. The chopping wood and carrying water.
This is also what true science is about — to test everything for yourself. And to keep only what works, discarding the rest.
Just remember to go one little step by little step. Don’t go to a war zone and try to unimagine a missile — it will never work.
But in your daily life? In your mind? You have the power to forgive — not to be a better person, not to claim the high ground, and certainly not for first-row banquet seating in Valhalla.
Forgive because you’re testing a new hypothesis: that the world is in the Mind. And forgiveness is how we reimagine it.
How does true forgiveness feel?
It doesn’t feel profound, or dramatic, or momentous. It feels more like you’ve reached the end of your patience and have no desire to deal with or dwell on the issue. There’s an overwhelming sense of “That’s it. I’m done with this.” Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt, and … let it go.:-)
