On Forgiving Everyone

This is something that came up recently and when it came up, I felt like I was less disconnected when I looked at a common struggle in all of the people in the world. 

It would seem that, the philosophy that the situation of our lives demands is not the perfect philosophy. 

The philosophy that the situation of our life demands is the one that allows us to get through the day and live another day without breaking. 

While we do not seem to have the energy to perform Christlike miraculous surgery on our own wounds, to keep up with life seems to be more like patching up whatever wounds surface with Band-Aids and moving on.

I don’t remember the last time that the concept of forgiving everyone was brought up in my world, but it is a concept that I have thought about for over 20 years. 

Early Internal Conflicts

Well, this takes me back to some of my darker periods in my early spiritual development.

Among other scenarios I would fantasize, I remember running through this scenario for hours at night, trying to reconcile this unreconcilable issue, to figure out where I was, who I was, where I stood on a cosmic fence. 

I think it was this, I would lay up at night imagining that I had decided to defend Satan against God. 

I think that extended to imagining that I decided to defend humanity against God. 

I tried to reconcile this and what it meant for maybe years, that I chose Love for humanity above God. This was difficult because it made me wonder if I sided with the devil. 

Over time I began to determine that I wasn’t against God, I was against a bad interpretation of religion..

Two Difficulties in Forgiveness

There appear to me to be two immediate giant issues for forgiving everyone.

The first is that, if forgiving people means moving on, then you can’t get retribution, you can’t get your justice. 

Wanting justice is when you won’t move on, when you won’t let it go until you get your justice. For most people I have seen, their inability to forgive is that they have not yet received their justice. 

The second is a more hidden fear, it is something like this, 

If I forgive and accept those who have done atrocities of great evil, do I accept that evil? And do I become evil by accepting that? 

I think this is a really good question.. 

It seems the heart can only open up to so much. If we were to attempt to open up the heart to love and accept someone who is wicked, their evil might flood our heart and overtake us.

Even if this were not the case, it feels a certain amount of suffering and pain would break us, that seeing a certain amount of darkness would leave a mark on our hearts. 

How much power does the heart really have?

For many people it seems as though the pain and jadedness of the heart start to close them off. 

And yet real people, people who became real, seem to remain real and open and their hearts never seem to be phased. 

There are teachers that say that love is an endless fountain that if you keep pouring it out, it never runs dry, and so this appears to be their secret. 

Well, do I think that it’s possible to forgive all the people that hurt you personally and traumatized you? 

I do think it’s possible, and that it’s like the second half of a story when a healing journey begins. 

Do I think it’s possible to forgive everyone in the world? 

I don’t know the mechanics of that, it appears to be related to the developmental stage of a being. 

But I can share what is true in my private heart and experience on the matter.

I went through some pretty severe  developmental spiritual changes this year, There were deaths to my previous understanding and there were changes to my being.. I was broken open in different ways and I gained some powers and strengths that I didn’t have before. 

If I looked at before these changes, there were people that I have pretty critically judged. 

Sadhguru is one example. Seeing even the image of Sadhguru was offensive to me, looking to be a fraud, an imposter, a fake, an idiot, a fool. 

After my changes, I have to admit that my “love for humanity” just grew.. it wasn’t a matter of forgiveness, more like a felt sense of understanding and love that supersedes any human flaw. 

And that is as simple as I can say it, my heart radiates warmth towards any human, no matter who it is really. As in, I sense a fondness for people.

Though I have not tested it on the truly evil out there, I now see that hated figures are hated often with no deep motivation, it’s just programmed into us. They are just “the bad guy”. But for me, I sense a shared humanity with them. 

At a certain developmental level, morality falls away. I used to think this meant that Good would disappear, but good doesn’t disappear because goodness exists. 

And then humanity is just like children.. people don’t know what they don’t know, and if they knew, they wouldn’t do it. 

This is the perspective of love.. or you could say, God, or the soul.. 

Now that I look at it, there is still a desert that love in my heart has not reached. 

I can feel warmth to a friend,

I can feel warmth to an enemy who hates me like a real life living Nazi,

But what about a deep state politician who may be indifferent to me, someone they say for example, drinks the distilled tears of children in order to not die from spiritual starvation? –[a common conspiracy theory]

I don’t know if that’s true, but there is no compassion in my heart that has extended to that direction. 

What I do know now though is, although it is not easy to articulate, we are all really of one true self.. 

Friend and Soma Yoga Teacher Bobbie Ellis shared her depth of wisdom in a comment to this article,

"If there is no good and evil or light and dark or god or godless…. What anchor do we have but the sweetness of this dear earth, sky, water and air itself….and humanity which you pointed to as well. If we drop all of the theories and thoughts and scholarly way to try and figure out the unknown..we can float….I like that feeling! To float in my own biology of fluid wisdom…."