Originally posted by
Seikou-Kishi
There is also the concern, in any case, that when one "forgives" it is not a passive-aggressive mechanism whereby unhealthy baggage is handed over wholesale to the "forgiven".
Forgiveness is within the faculty of each of us; it is not required that such forgiveness be made known to the forgiven — to require it would be to have a "spiritual bureacracy" — the Catholic Church of the soul.
I'm not saying this is the case in any of the specific instances mentioned above; I speak in general terms here.
— Edit —
Forgiveness is a releasing. Indeed, it is the original meaning of the word; as "to forego" is to go without, "to forgive" is to release, to unbind. That is, it is to untie the karmic bonds between two individuals, or in a strictly personal sense, to unfetter ourselves from the Jacob-Marley bonds guilt slides about our ankles in our complacency.
Forgiveness is not a "giving for or on behalf of", it is a "complete giving". It is among the last vestiges of a class of words found today only in archaisms and colloquialisms. (Why is it that "forgive" should be the hardiest of these words? Is it a greater part of the human being than we assume?).
Forgiveness is the key to karma because karma is in its essence a relationship. The idea that there is "good karma" and "bad karma" is a value judgement (this is not a criticism) based upon the nature of that relationship. If two people go through their lives loving each other, helping each other and being thoroughly good to each other, they may, as generous people often do, diminish in their own minds the good they have done and magnify the good that has been done to them. Thus they may wish to repay the kindness in another life. This is a bond of karma as surely as the bond between a murderer and the murdered is a bond of karma.
To forgive is to release these bonds. It is to slide out of our casing and sublimate into a world in which there is freedom. Karma is the antithesis of freedom even when it is "good" karma. It is the antithesis of freedom and a true binding even when the karma is good because insofar as two beings incarnating to process good karma are, within their lives, behaving even thoroughly decently with one another, that goodness is only a qualified goodness and not a pure goodness because it is a goodness born out of obligation, however subtle.
And like "bad" karma in which one offence prompts a response which itself prompts a response, the "good" kind works in the same way: kindess imposes a debt which prompts repayment, which prompts a debt in the other person's mind. Thus, karma of whatever stripe either subtly or bluntly operates to enchain a spirit in an endless cycle of incarnation.
In forgiveness we dissolve these relationships, our momentum changes or disappears and we achieve serenity.
While karma works between people, forgiveness need not. Karma is marriage and forgiveness is divorce: Karma, like marriage, requires two people, but forgiveness, like divorce, requires only one. Your forgiveness of somebody no sooner has to be permitted by them than you require their permission to sue them for divorce. It takes two to make a relationship, but it only takes one to break it.
And since we have spoken about karma as momentum or inertia, let's consider Pluto and its largest moon Nyx. The barycentre of the orbit of the "moon" actually occurs outside Pluto's mass, and thus it is incorrect to call one a dwarf planet and the other its moon, but rather to talk of them as binary planetoids orbiting each other. This is like a karmic relationship in that there are two bodies connected to each other by the nothingness between them. Pluto's gravity holds onto Nyx and Nyx's gravity holds onto Pluto and so they continue on as they have done for ages.
Gravity propagates at the speed of light. We think of it as immediate, but this is not so. The distance between Pluto and Nyx is negligible for this consideration, so we'll replace Pluto with the Sun and Nyx with Earth. The gravity relationship between the two of them holds the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. But let's imagine for a moment that the Sun disappeared. The Earth would continue on its orbit for just under another nine minutes before careering off into space. This is because the Sun's disappearing act would alter the gravity "playground", but the message would take just under nine minutes to reach the Earth, so like a far-off colony in the age of the telegram, the updates would take a while to come into force.
By forgiving ourselves and others, we "unflag" ourselves as objects in the karma playground. Those karmic entities (other people we have forgiven) will continue with their karmic momentum until they realise there is no longer an opportunity to keep realising their karma and go careering off in some other direction. Hopefully they will realise what that implies and shed their karma too, but that is up to them.
But "forgiveness" comes in many different flavours. Many believe we haven't truly forgiven somebody until we can like them or allow them into our lives. They believe they must force a feeling of positivity in order to forgive, but none of this is true. To forgive, all that is necessary is to say "this dies in the moment", to relinquish our requirements.
Bad things happen to us. Forgiveness isn't being happy with that. It isn't condoning it. It's saying that people have treated us badly, but we do not need them to go through what we have gone through. It's realising that this punitive justice magnifies rather than reduces the negativity and suffering in the world.
If somebody does you harm, do you need them to feel it through your bones and see it through your eyes, or do you say "once was bad, twice is worse"? I said on the child abuse thread that there is a point at which one says "you don't understand what it's like" not as an admonition or an accusation, but as an expression of relief. No they probably don't understand, and isn't that a good thing? Otherwise we'd all have to suffer as the most miserable of us has suffered before any of us could leap out of this spin cycle that goes nowhere.
All that is necessary to shake off the bonds of karma is that: to declare that the debts of life will die with the body. All those debts you have accrued, both the harm you have done and the kindness you have received — it rots away with your corpse. You will not be obliged by any notion of debt, good or bad. You also declare that all credit to your name dies with the body, too. All those times you volunteered at the soup kitchen or ran marathons for Cancer Research — that dies with you too. Either you're a spiritual accountant anally recording every credit and debt, or you're a free, serene and sovereign spirit that pays no regard to either. Forgiveness entails this too: not just the rejection of indebtedness, but all the credit to your name, too.
And, when you release all the idea of Brownie points for every good deed you did — for every time you bought fairtrade because it seemed the thing to do and every time you protested to object to social injustice — you're going to have to accept that none of this amounts to a savings deposit of good deeds to be leveraged at a future time or held as a badge of honour, but "merely" that you helped your fellow beings. And this is how we see that forgiveness even of the good makes it purer: Our complete forgiveness frees and ennobles us.
You can't pay me back; you're not in my debt.
All of this comes with a big however. This is the personal aspect of forgiveness and how it relates to karmic relationships. Often forgiveness will not remedy discord between two people but aggravate it: when a person believes that justice is on their side, the idea that somebody could presume to offer them forgiveness is an outrage to their sensibilities. Unless you know that your forgiveness will be well-received (for example, in the case of one who feels guilt), it is better that your forgiveness be silent. In any case, like many things when forgiveness is too ostentatious, we run the risk that it is merely that: forgiveness done for show (and thence the pretension of moral superiority).
The crux is this: forgiveness requires nothing — least of all that it is accepted!
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