On Forgiving

On Forgiving

To Bibiana — for teaching me that sometimes other people make mistakes, and that it isn't ours to carry. Our only job is not to judge them. That's the whole lesson. And to all four of my parents, biological and marital — for making certain I entered the world as someone who would never bring physical harm to another person. A lesson some of us never learn in a lifetime.

I

One of the hardest parts of finally letting go of the ego is looking back at every mistake you've made, and at the lessons that came after them. It's like putting the Quantum Lens on your own life — turning the framework I've been building inward — and seeing, at last, the real impact you had on other human beings.

I'm no saint. I've made my share of mistakes, some of them ugly by any social standard. But I need to say one thing plainly: some force I can't name always kept me from bringing physical harm to another person. I'll always credit that to the lessons my stepfather taught me. Emotional harm is a different story. That, I inflicted — in every sense of the words, more times than I'd like to count. An intelligent mind is a victim of its own design. It's almost as if I never understood the power I had to bend my own reality. My jays were pointed in every direction at once: money, pride, lust, to name a few. None of them toward the conclusions I've reached of late.

So I have to sit with this: there's a real chance that someone I've harmed will read these words someday. If your eyes are crossing them now, I want to offer you a truth. If I've left a timeless imprint long enough for this to reach you, my contact information is attached. I'm sorry for whatever I did, no matter how dark, and I'm willing to come completely clean if you ask. There's no reason to hide who I used to be, and no reason for you to think any less of me for it. I'll never ask for your forgiveness. Just know that I knew not what I was doing[1] — and yes, I mean that the way it's been meant before. I only ask that we do it face to face. There's no coherence in electronic communication.

Maimonides understood this better than anyone. In his Laws of Repentance,[2] he draws a hard line: a wrong done to God can be settled with God, but a wrong done to a person cannot. No prayer, no priest, no ritual clears it. Only the one you harmed can release you, and only if you stand in front of them and ask. Self-forgiveness is not absolution. But the design of life doesn't ask it to be.

II

That's the strangest part of forgiveness for me, as a human being. Sometimes we feel chained to the mistakes we've made. Part of that is looking back through the Lens and only seeing half of the truth — the harm — while missing the other half entirely: the lessons you taught.

I think about people I stole from, who never trusted me near them again. And in the very same breath, I notice that I don't let people like that into my own home. But then I remember something my cousin Bibiana told me when I was young. We were on the beach in Portland, and a stranger took her camera case. He set the memory cards down where the case had been, and we walked up on him mid-act. We both saw exactly what was happening — we weren't blind to it. But she didn't react. She was so resolute that I realized later it was a decision: this was a moment to teach me something. She looked right at me, taking in the whole reality of it, and said, "That's okay, look. He left the pictures, and that's what's important. Maybe he needed the camera case more than we did."

That philosophy stuck to me for the rest of my life. And of course it would — Bibiana has spent years in Vipassana practice and the Mahayana tradition, and what she handed me on that beach was the heart of both. The Buddhists call it upekkhā, equanimity:[3] the camera case was already impermanent, already on its way to being lost; the only thing the thief disturbed was my reaction, and she refused to give it to him. But there's a deeper move underneath, and it's the one this whole essay turns on. Śāntideva, in The Way of the Bodhisattva,[4] makes the strange and beautiful argument that the person who wrongs you is your teacher — that without someone to test it on, patience is just an idea you've never had to practice. The thief on that beach wasn't an obstacle to Bibiana's compassion. He was the occasion for it. He needed the case more than we did, and in needing it, he taught me.

The same instinct runs all through history, in every direction you point it. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount: if a man takes your coat, give him your cloak as well.[5] The same gesture as leaving the thief the memory cards. Marcus Aurelius, writing to himself at night: people wrong you because they cannot tell good from evil, and so you forgive them the way you'd forgive someone acting in the dark.[6] Even Lao Tzu, in the Tao Te Ching, says to answer injury with virtue — though Confucius pushed back hard on that line, asking what, then, is left to answer kindness with.[7] The argument has been going on for a very long time. I'm just adding my voice to it from a beach in Portland.

III

Now hold my hand and walk with me in thought for a moment. We'll start at the ground floor and zoom all the way out to "Heaven."

If we really are one consciousness joined together, then treating another human being as yourself should be second nature. For most of us, it clearly isn't. Why?

Are we jealous of the person in front of us? Or does the ego stand between us and them, deciding they're lesser because we've found success in some direction they haven't? What does the "most important man in the world" think of a monk in Tibet who has dissolved into the universe? He probably thinks it's foolish — to sit on a mountain, to boast about nothing, to be unplugged from the whole network of society.

And what does the monk think? He probably doesn't know the important man exists. He's thinking about what he'll eat next, because he wants to walk through the forest later.

Does the monk forgive the man for looking down on him? Of course. The monk understands that the other man's jays are misaligned. The monk doesn't even know what a jay is — the monk has never met me, or this paper.

Does going to a priest and confessing your sins generate forgiveness? Not on its own. What it does is place the reality of your harm into another mind, and in doing so it widens the reality of the fault rather than dissolving it. That's no small weight to hand someone. The traditions that understood this best looked for forgiveness somewhere else entirely — not granted from outside, but uncovered within.

Christianity has always carried this quieter stream alongside the louder one. The kingdom of God is within you.[8] Meister Eckhart spoke of the ground of the soul, where the real work happens inwardly and can't be transacted at a counter.[9] Judaism calls it teshuvah — not "confession" but return, a turning back toward who you were meant to be.[10] The Sufis call the dissolving of the false self fanāʾ, and made a daily discipline of muḥāsaba, self-examination — a practice so central to al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī that he is known by its name, and later systematized by al-Ghazālī.[11] The Advaita tradition compresses the entire thing into three words — tat tvam asi, "thou art that" — the recognition that the person across from you is not, in fact, other than you. Schopenhauer, reading that line, built his entire ethics of compassion on it.[12] And Jung gave it a modern name: forgiveness as the slow work of integrating the shadow, of holding the coincidentia oppositorum — the opposites that turn out to be one thing — without flinching.[13]

IV

Even the scientists arrive here. Tesla wrote in 1900 that we are held together like the stars in the firmament, by ties we cannot see but can feel; and that when he saw a friend hurt, it hurt him too — his friend and he were one.[14] Einstein went one step further and named the cost of forgetting it. In a letter near the end of his life, he called our sense of being separate selves an optical delusion of consciousness, a kind of prison, and said the task of a human life is widening our circle of compassion to take in every living thing.[15] Two men of fact, controversy and all, pointing at the same place the monk is already sitting.

So when we argue with our life partner, who are we really arguing with? Ourselves. My wife helped me see this. Every word out of her mouth was a lesson I needed to learn to keep her happy — no matter how illogical it seemed to me in the moment. Happy wife, happy life, as it goes. I had no idea how literally true that was.

She forgives me daily. But think of the partners who likely never will — the ones I brought emotional harm to, through thought or action. Lessons were learned on both sides. I rarely made the same mistake twice; I could always look back and see clearly what the last wound had cost. That isn't to say I didn't hurt myself plenty along the way. Hallucinogenic drugs played their part in how I came to understand my own point in time, years ago. We don't need to go there. Just know that I'm sober and clear-minded as I write this, and that I've forgiven myself for the harm I did to myself. That much is finished.

Now my parents. I've been terrible to them, and they have no reason to forgive me. But they do, because they love me. Forgiveness is an inherent trait of love. So consider the shortcut: love every human being, and watch how fast you can forgive them.

There was a small point in time, right after I made my discovery, when it occurred to me that someone I'd shared it with might have taken it before I timestamped my own work. My very first thought was, That's okay — they have the resources to heal people, and I don't. They needed it more than I did. Peace was restored instantly, and I went back to writing. You'll notice that's Bibiana's sentence, word for word, twenty-some years later. The beach taught well.

The reality is this: if I'm right, the world will heal in time. My jays have already aligned, and I'll be timeless. That part isn't mine to worry about, if it's to be. All I have to do is pay the world back for the harm I caused, make my family comfortable, and send the rest where it's needed. There's no success in mortal gains — but there's deep peace in suspecting I might have some small part in moving them to where they belong. I joked with my wife that one day I'd pay off the utility company's shut-off list every morning, because I've had my own lights cut off a couple of times in forty-two years, and I never want another human being to sit in that dark.

Ego is the strongest drug I've ever done. It kept me chained to the belief that even when I thought I was "doing right" by myself, I was only damaging myself and everyone near me. Lesson after lesson after lesson. We're never going in circles, though — it's more of a spiral staircase. Just remember that up is relative. That's the view sub specie aeternitatis I wrote toward in On Seeing — the whole staircase seen at once, totum simul, with no single step mistaken for the top.[16]

V

I've had to ask myself: if my past is one day dragged out in front of me, am I really ready to answer for it?

Yes. Unfortunately, yes. I am.

I know I taught lessons, even when I was the wound. Taught them, and taught myself. Made the world a little better by making a single moment very bad — and letting the butterfly effect from that moment run for hours, days, and in plenty of cases, years.

I was not a great person. I was a good person. But I was a person.

Now that I more or less consider myself part of the greater person, there's no more I. The Sufis would recognize that sentence; so would Advaita. So now that I've removed myself from my own equation, let's pull the lens back one more notch.

Let's really start to forgive our neighbor.

Let's understand that every human being alive is just another version of ourselves, here to teach each other how to be good — or how to be evil. Duality in the design.

Can you forgive your worst enemy?

Sounds simple. Someone wronged you; you let it go. But how fast can you let it go, and what conditions did you quietly attach?

Oh — there's fine print?

Did you just hand yourself limits on how forgivable you'll turn out to be, on the other side of reality?

Sit with that one.

Notes

1. The cadence is Luke 23:34, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Accuracy note: the half-verse is textually contested — it is absent from several of the earliest witnesses, including P75, Vaticanus, the first hand of Bezae, and the Sahidic tradition, and many editors bracket it. It is quoted here for what it has meant to readers rather than as settled text.

2. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, "Laws of Repentance" (Hilkhot Teshuvah) 2:9: a transgression against God is settled with God, but a wrong done to another person is not forgiven until the wronged party is appeased directly. Halakhah numbering varies slightly by edition.

3. Upekkhā — equanimity, the fourth of the Buddhist brahmavihāras; central to Vipassana practice and to the Mahayana traditions alike.

4. Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra ("The Way of the Bodhisattva"), ch. VI, the chapter on kṣānti, patience: the one who wrongs you is the occasion of a virtue you could not otherwise practice, and is therefore owed something closer to gratitude than to blame.

5. Matthew 5:40, the Sermon on the Mount.

6. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations II.1: others act wrongly through ignorance of good and evil, and are kin to me, so I cannot be angry with them. Accuracy note: IX.42 is often cited alongside it and belongs to the same family — the futility of surprise at wrongdoing — but it is II.1 that states the ignorance argument outright.

7. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching 63, on answering injury with virtue; and the rejoinder at Analects 14:34, where Confucius asks what is then left to repay kindness with, and answers: repay injury with uprightness, and kindness with kindness.

8. Luke 17:21.

9. Meister Eckhart on the grunt — the ground of the soul, where it meets God without mediation, and where nothing can be transacted from outside.

10. Teshuvah — Hebrew for "return"; repentance understood as turning back rather than as confession.

11. Fanāʾ — the Sufi annihilation of the false self in God. Accuracy note: the daily practice of muḥāsaba, self-examination or self-accounting, belongs first to al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī (d. 857), whose name derives from it; al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) treats and systematizes it much later, in Book 38 of the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn. An earlier draft of this essay credited the practice to al-Ghazālī alone.

12. Tat tvam asi, "thou art that" — Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.8.7. Schopenhauer takes it as the metaphysical ground of compassion: the compassionate act is one in which the barrier of individuation becomes momentarily transparent, and the sufferer is recognized as not other than oneself (On the Basis of Morality, §22).

13. C. G. Jung, coincidentia oppositorum, the union of opposites, developed at length in Mysterium Coniunctionis (Collected Works vol. 14; German original 1955–56); forgiveness read here as integration of the shadow.

14. Nikola Tesla, "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy," The Century Magazine 60, no. 2 (June 1900): 175–211. His words, at pp. 176–177: "Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties we cannot see, but we can feel them… I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one." Accuracy note: the phrase "we are all one," often attached to this passage, does not appear in the article; Tesla writes "my friend and I are one." The sentence in the text has been brought back to what he actually wrote.

15. Albert Einstein, letter of 1950, widely quoted from its appearance in The New York Times, 29 March 1972: a human being experiences himself as something separate from the rest, "a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness," and the task is to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures. Numerous garbled versions circulate; the wording here follows Calaprice, The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, 340–41. The recipient is generally identified as Robert S. Marcus, though that detail is less firmly documented than the text.

16. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy V, pr. 6, on eternity as totum simul — the whole of a life possessed at once; and Spinoza, Ethics Pt. V, on seeing sub specie aeternitatis.

References

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Jung, C. G. (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.; Collected Works Vol. 14). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1955–56)

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Maimonides, M. Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah.

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