Forgiveness is one of the most fundamental aspects of the spiritual path.  It is a constant, much like compassion, that appears again and again throughout human history, across all traditions, across all spaces and times.  While many of us know about it’s healing properties, very often the deep understanding of why forgiveness has the magical effect that it does can be unseen.  Yet, like all things in spirituality, this can be explained if we are able to change our perspective, to see the world from a new angle, one more aligned with the fundamental truth of what truly is.  As we come to do this, new vistas of possibility open to us, allowing us to see the essence of forgiveness and how it changes the substance of our lives for the brighter.

For a moment, let’s talk about what it means not to forgive.  To harbor a grudge or a grievance against our self or another.  About what happens in the body and the subtle architecture of our mind.  Is it a pleasant sensation not to forgive? Is it a sensation of expansion? Or is it a sensation of agitation?  Such things are early tells into the nature of forgiveness in a biological way, where we see the reflection of our grievance with our self or another in the structures of our body.  We see the results of our anger, of our grievance, burning us from within.  And while this is bad enough, it doesn’t just happen once.  As long as we live without forgiveness, the agitation remains, recreating the pain of an event long after it has actually occurred.

Now let’s look at the opposite.  At what happens when we DO forgive.  When we release that which we’ve been holding onto, letting our self and others off the hook.  Can you feel the difference? Can you feel the distinction in the sensations within your form? What does it feel like to have that agitation dissolve, to feel our nervous system drop into calmness?  It’s a beautiful feeling.  An expansive feeling.  More, it’s a release of the vital energies that were being used to keep our grievance alive.  In so many ways, it’s a feeling of freedom.  Freedom from the past.  And with that freedom, the opening into a new future.

It’s a beautiful thing to forgive.  Yet what is forgiveness really about? In my experience, it relates to the fundamental questions into the nature of God’s Will and our relationship with the celestial unfoldment that includes each and every one of us.  It is the essence of the idea that “to err is human, to forgive is Divine”.

Here we ask – What does it mean to be human? It means to be on a path of realization, of gradually coming to discover the patterns, the traumas and treasures that define our consciousness.  It is a process of revelation, of coming to see the reality of our access to the underlying causes of why we do what we do.  At it’s core, it is a hard look at the reality that we can only see what we can see at any given moment, and that error is bound to happen.  It means seeing the reality that the nature of ignorance, that the nature of gaining wisdom itself is an act of learning.  Of coming to acceptance over the limitations in our perspective (and that of others) in the realization that everyone is doing the best they can with what they’ve got.

To deny this, to deny the reality that we are all in the process of learning, is to deny life itself.  To imagine that we are already realized, already enlightened, already free from the entanglements and patterns we share with others in the stories of the world.

Is it easy to forgive? Of course not.  Too often, beings imprison themselves in repetitions of regret, imagining what they may have done, what may have happened if they or another had made another decision.  Such is a contemplation without a solid ground, for it drifts from the reality of what is into the endless halls of the imagination, and is a place that many remain trapped in along their lives.  It is a difficult inquiry, for in the contemplation of events we gain wisdom, yet in the attachment to those events we lose freedom.  In this context, the act of forgiveness becomes a key, releasing us from the prison of the past such that we may step forward into a new world.