A New Earth: Forgiveness Now

The idea of forgiveness and how to go about forgiving has been the hardest for me to grasp. I worried that forgiveness required finding a way to overlook things that had hurt me, somehow suppressing my feelings . I thought that being able to forgive required some quantum spiritual leap, with me still hurt but somehow finding a way to overlook it. In other words, I thought that forgiving someone required me to de different, somehow holier, with a changed perception of what had happened.

Rehashing Old Hurts

The greatest challenges for all of us come when we are identifying with the roles we play in our families or in other relationships. The longer the 'history' of a role, the greater is the stuff of conflict and hurt. We relate to and interpret other's actions based on everything that has ever taken place in our relationship--the past. The more past there is in a relationship, the more there seems to be to forgive.

A New Concept of Forgiveness

True forgiveness has nothing to do with what has happened or with how to frame it mentally. True forgiveness is about being present Now, relating to the person as if there is no history in the relationship and recognizing that the past does not exist Now.

In his book, Stillness Speaks, Eckhart Tolle says, "The division of life into past, present, and future is mind-made and ultimately illusory. Past and future are thought forms, mental abstractions." He goes on to say, "The future, when it comes, is the Now. So the only thing that is real, the only thing there ever is is Now." This liberates us and takes away all reason for non-forgiveness, once it is recognized and we learn, little by little, to live it.

The past cannot exist Now. If one can relate to others without the history of that relationship coloring the moment, one has forgiven all that the history seems to contain. We welcome the idea of forgiveness and being present Now when we prefer to be happy instead of clinging to being right.

A Course in Miracles says "The past becomes the justification for entering into a continuing, unholy alliance with the ego against the present. For the present is forgiveness."

The past cannot be changed Now, and Now is all there ever is, and that realization is the very act of forgiving.

SOURCES:

Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks (Novato: New World Library, 2003 and Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 2003), p. 27, p. 118.

A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1985).