I Don't Think We Actually Forgive People

Do we really forgive people? Is there anything called as forgiveness in this world? Or do we simply become better at living with the memory of what they did? You see, for me, this is one of the strange jokes of being human. We say, "I forgive you." But what we often mean is: I have accepted that you are capable of hurting me. So I will simply never give you the same opportunity again. Right? That is not exactly forgiveness. That is education. You see, pain teaches us where not to place our hands. If I touch fire, I get burned. Now, I do not sit and forgive the fire. I simply stop touching it. And perhaps human relationships are not very different from that.

Someone hurts us deeply. Let us say we may smile again. We may talk to them again, or we may even say everything is fine. But something has changed, right? It has to be. The door is still there. We just stopped giving them the key. And this is why I think nobody forgives. We just learn to avoid each other better.

Now let me explain. Think about a friendship. Imagine that a friend tells you something private. We all have been there. You trusted them. You thought the information would stay between the two of you. Then one day, you discover that they told other people. What happens? You confront them, and they apologize. They say, "I'm sorry, man. This will never happen again." And so on and so on. And perhaps you accept the apology. You say, "It's okay. I can understand." You shake hands. You laugh with them. You continue talking. But do you tell them another secret? No. Probably not. And that is the interesting part. Your mouth says, "I forgive you." But your behavior says, "I have updated my understanding of you."

Are you seeing what I'm seeing? Before the betrayal, you thought they were the safe place. After the betrayal, you know they are not. The relationship may continue, but the old relationship is dead. We do not always admit this because it sounds cruel. We like the idea of forgiveness because it makes us feel morally superior. We say, "I'm a spiritual person, so I will forgive anyone. I'm a good person, so I forgive them." But perhaps forgiveness is often just a polite name for emotional distance. We do not destroy the bridge. We simply stop crossing it. That's all. And sometimes that is the most honest thing we can do.

For me, trust is like a glass. You can break a glass and glue it back together. From far away, it may look perfectly fine, but if you drink from it again, you remember where the cracks are. That is what happens with people. Trust can return, but it rarely returns in exactly the same form. And this is where our romantic idea of forgiveness becomes complicated, because we are all fooling ourselves. There is literally nothing called as forgiveness. Who is forgiving whom? We imagine forgiveness means returning to the way things were. But why should it? If someone shows us something about themselves, why should we pretend we never saw it? If someone repeatedly lies, and I continue trusting them because I have forgiven them, am I forgiving them, or am I simply refusing to learn?

You see, my mom always tells one thing. She tells that she has a very soft heart and she forgives people, and because of that, you know how many problems she has gotten into. We all run behind these terms of spirituality. We say, "Jesus said, therefore we must forgive. God said we must forgive. Forgiveness is the greatest quality." But all my question is: you forgive, but forgive the right person. You can't forgive a snake because it bit you, and you say, "I'm spiritual, therefore I'm forgiving you," and thinking the snake will not bite you is your stupidity. God has got nothing to do with it. We fall into the pit and then we blame God. How does that work? This is what we all do in the name of spirituality, or in the name of, you know, holy stuff, blah blah blah. We forgive people and then we are hurt tremendously.

Forgiveness means understand that mistakes can happen and set a boundary. That is forgiveness. Forgive the wolf, but close your door at night. That's the way it is. There's a difference between forgiveness and forgetting. I can forgive someone and still remember. I can stop hating someone without trusting them. I can wish someone well without inviting them back into my life. This is something we rarely talk about. We think forgiveness means reopening the door. That is stupidity. It does not have to. Sometimes forgiveness simply means I no longer want revenge. That is all. I do not need to hate you. I do not need to punish you. I do not need to destroy your life. But I also need not give you another opportunity to destroy mine. That is not hatred. That is memory. That is boundary. And memory is one of the few things life gives us for free. Right?

And people fall into the pit in the name of spirituality and forgiveness because they're all fooling themselves. A spirituality that gives you no peace is not spiritual at all. Many people mail me saying it is difficult to live in this world when you're following spirituality. Dude, you are just following wrong spirituality. If your life is getting bothered because you're following spirituality, that's not spirituality at all. If you think—and many people tell me—you have to go through ups and downs in your life to understand the truth. That is bullshit. That's not true at all. You see, a wave does not need to go through tremendous amount of sadness to understand it is ocean. A woman does not need to sit and meditate for eight years to understand that she's a woman. A fire does not go to a seminar or listen to people like me talk to understand that it is heat. You are already divine. You have been divine. You have been the awareness from day one. But you do not wish to see it, because you believe you must listen to people like me. You believe that you must read books. You believe that you must follow a guru or a religion or anything in order to know the truth. That's why we are all fooling ourselves.

You don't need a thing to know that you are. You are because you're knowing it. Right? You are already aware of the awareness. Your true nature is absolute silence. You need not do anything to know it. You have only to see for yourself that you have been divine. And that seeing is not done by you or the mind. It is done by the act of seeing. Knowing the truth is not done by you. It is done by the act of knowing. Seeing is not done by you. It is done by the act of seeing. Once you understand that in you there is only characteristics and no character, there is only personality and no person, that is when life will begin.