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

Who have you hurt that you’ve never apologized to?

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 (the habit, borrowed from physics, of stepping outside of time to read one event from every place it was seen, yours and theirs alike, with all that led up to it and all that came after) on your own life, 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 (the felt moments a life is built from, each lived from the inside and each leaning toward or away) 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, you’ll find how to reach me at the end. 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 Yes, those are borrowed words, and I mean them the way they were first meant: I couldn’t see the harm while I was causing it. I only ask that, if you’re willing, we do it face to face. There’s no coherence for me in an apology made through a screen.

None of that is where I live now. I’ve come a long way, I’ve learned more from those mistakes than I can count, and I spend each day trying never to live them again. Growth looks different from the inside than it does to anyone looking in. Sometimes an apology doesn’t water growth, and sometimes growth doesn’t flower into forgiveness. But understanding where you went wrong, and how you can be a better person, is integral to internal peace. Forgive yourself too.

Maimonides asks more of the one who did the harm. 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. Not by repentance alone, not even by Yom Kippur. You have to go to the one you harmed, give back what you owe, and ask. If they refuse, you go again, a second time and a third, with three friends beside you. After that, by his ruling, the weight moves: the one who still won’t forgive is the one in the wrong. 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. A moment that sours between two people turns, for each of them, into a lesson.

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 years of Buddhist practice behind her, and what she handed me on that beach was the heart of it. 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. There’s a deeper move underneath. Śāntideva, in the Bodhicaryāvatāra, his guide to the bodhisattva’s way of life,⁴ makes the strange and beautiful argument that the person who wrongs you is, in effect, your teacher: without someone to test it on, patience is just an idea you’ve never had to practice. The thief on that beach gave Bibiana’s compassion somewhere to go. He needed the case more than we did, and in needing it, he taught me.

Plenty of others have stood on that beach in their own way. Jesus, in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain: if a man takes your cloak, don’t stop him from taking your coat as well.⁵ The same gesture as letting the thief walk off with the case. Marcus Aurelius, telling himself each morning that the people he’d meet that day would wrong him because they couldn’t tell good from evil, and that since they were his kin, he could neither hate them nor be angry with them.⁶ The Tao Te Ching, traditionally Lao Tzu’s, says to answer injury with virtue. In the Analects someone puts that same maxim to Confucius, and he asks what, then, is left to answer kindness with.⁷ The argument has been going on a 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, one thought meeting itself in every face it passes, then treating another human being as yourself (the Golden Rule) should be second nature, even toward the one who hurt you.⁸ 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 essay.

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 so the fault widens. That’s no small weight to hand someone. Many traditions go looking for forgiveness inside instead.

Christianity has always carried this quieter stream alongside the louder one. The kingdom of God is within you.⁹ If heaven sits in there, its opposite does too, and which one you’re living in depends on which way you’ve turned.

Meister Eckhart spoke of the ground of the soul, where the real work happens inwardly and can’t be transacted at a counter.¹⁰ Judaism calls the turn teshuvah: return, a turning back toward who you were meant to be, with confession only one part of it.¹¹

The Sufis call the dissolving of the false self fanāʾ. Their daily discipline was muḥāsaba, self-examination, so central to al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī that he is known by its name; al-Ghazālī gave it, with vigilance, a book of the Iḥyāʾ centuries later.¹²

The Upaniṣads compress the entire thing into three words (tat tvam asi, “thou art that”), and Advaita made it one of its great sayings: the person across from you is not, in fact, other than you. Schopenhauer, reading that line, built his entire ethics of compassion on it.¹³ Jung’s word was integrating the shadow, and I take it as forgiveness by another name: the slow work of holding the union of opposites (the opposites that turn out to be one thing) without flinching.¹⁴

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.¹⁵ Einstein went one step further and named the cost of forgetting it. In a 1950 letter of consolation to a grieving father, he called our sense of being separate selves “a kind of optical delusion” of consciousness, and said that striving to free ourselves from it is “the one issue of true religion.” A longer version that reached print years later calls the delusion a prison, and makes the task widening our circle of compassion to take in every living thing.¹⁶ Two men of fact, controversy and all. The monk was already sitting where they pointed.

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 (the framework these essays grow out of), 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 do more good with it than I can. 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, near enough word for word, twenty-some years later. The beach taught well.

Here’s my hope, and it’s only a hope: that in time the world will heal. Maybe my Jays have already come into line, and some part of me will be timeless: a Trace, the ripple my intent keeps sending through time after I’m gone. 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 don’t go in circles, though. Not unless we choose to. It’s more of a spiral staircase. Just remember that up is relative. That’s the view sub specie aeternitatis: the whole staircase seen at once, with no single step mistaken for the top.¹⁷

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 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.

Forgiving someone doesn’t need their permission. You can forgive a person who never asks for it and never wants to be redeemed, and the forgiveness is still real, because it was yours to give. Coherence between the two of you is different. That takes both of you, and it only comes when forgiveness meets remorse. And here’s something that makes the letting go easier: gratitude. If you can be grateful for the experience, even for having been wronged, because of the lesson it left you, the person who wronged you starts to look like a teacher, and a teacher is far easier to forgive.¹⁸

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?

Somewhere, you’re the one who never apologized.

Did you just hand yourself limits on how forgivable you’ll turn out to be, limits you’re already facing, on this side of reality?

Sit with that one.

· · ·

As I said above, if you feel I’ve ever wronged you, my inbox is open. I have nothing to hide, and I’m no longer ashamed of my mistakes. I finally understand what I had to learn along the way, and one of those things might be that I owe you an apology. You don’t have to forgive me. But if you want to hear the words from my own mouth, reach out and let me know. I promise humility and honesty; it’s all I have left to offer.

author@legibletraces.com

Notes

1. The cadence is Luke 23:34 (KJV): “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” The half-verse is absent from several of the earliest witnesses, including P75, Vaticanus, the first hand of Bezae, and the Sahidic tradition, and many modern critical editions print it in double brackets. Eubank, “Disconcerting Prayer,” argues that it is original and was later deleted. It is quoted here for its plain sense, whatever its textual history.

2. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 2:9. Repentance and Yom Kippur atone only for wrongs between a person and God; a wrong done to another person is not forgiven until the wrongdoer gives back what is owed and appeases the one wronged, going to them repeatedly if need be. If the wronged person still refuses after three approaches made with three friends, the wrongdoer may let the matter rest, and the one who refuses is then counted the sinner. At 2:11, when the wronged person has died, confession is made at the grave before ten people. Halakhah numbering varies slightly by edition. Maimonides asks that the wrongdoer go to the person; the face-to-face meeting asked for earlier in this section is my own request, not his.

3. Upekkhā (Sanskrit upekṣā), equanimity, the fourth of the brahmavihāras after loving-kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy; central to Vipassana practice, and present under its Sanskrit name in the Mahayana traditions. Nyanaponika Thera, Four Sublime States.

4. Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra, chapter 6, the chapter on kṣānti, patience, especially verses 107–111. The enemy is a treasure found at home, a helper on the path to awakening; patience cannot be practiced without someone who means harm, so its first fruit is owed to the one who made it possible. “Teacher” is my word for what Śāntideva describes.

5. Luke 6:29, in the Sermon on the Plain: “him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also” (KJV). Matthew 5:40, in the Sermon on the Mount, gives the same gesture with the order reversed and sets it in a lawsuit.

6. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book 2, section 1, an exercise for the start of the day. The people he will meet are meddling and ungrateful because they cannot tell good from evil; the wrongdoer shares his nature and his mind, and so he can neither hate him nor be angry with him. Book 9, section 42, on the futility of surprise at wrongdoing, belongs to the same family.

7. Tao Te Ching 63, traditionally ascribed to Laozi; Lau renders the line “Do good to him who has done you an injury.” Laozi, Tao Te Ching. In Analects 14.34 (14.36 in Legge’s numbering), an unnamed questioner asks Confucius about repaying injury with a good turn; he answers that injury is repaid with straightness, and a good turn with a good turn. Confucius, Analects. The line is missing from the oldest Laozi manuscript, the Guodian bamboo slips of about 300 BCE, and the maxim probably circulated before either book; neither text presents the exchange as a reply to the other.

8. The Golden Rule comes in two forms. The positive asks you to treat others the way you would want them to treat you; Luke sets it two verses after the cloak and the coat (Luke 6:31). The negative asks you never to do to anyone what you would hate to have done to you; Hillel, asked to teach the whole Torah while his questioner stood on one foot, gave it in that form (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a). Both are read here from the other person’s side: what they would wish for, or hate to have done to them, and not what you would.

9. Luke 17:21 (KJV). In Greek, entos hymōn can mean “within you” or “among you,” and most modern translations prefer “among you,” since the words are spoken to Pharisees. The inward reading is the King James Version’s and that of many early interpreters, and the one taken here. Reading heaven and its opposite as directions a person faces, now, is the author’s.

10. Eckhart’s Middle High German word is grunt: the ground of the soul, where the soul meets God without mediation, and where, he says, God’s ground and the soul’s ground are one ground. Eckhart, Essential Sermons. McGinn treats the ground as the master metaphor of Eckhart’s thought. McGinn, Mystical Thought. The counter is my image.

11. Teshuvah comes from the Hebrew root shuv, to return. Maimonides makes spoken confession before God, vidui, a required part of it, together with regret and the resolve not to repeat the act, and he applies the same requirement to wrongs against people. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 1:1.

12. Fanāʾ, the passing away of the self in God. Al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī of Baghdad (d. 857) takes his name from muḥāsaba, the examination of one’s own conscience. Smith, Early Mystic of Baghdad. Al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) treats it, with vigilance, in Book 38 of the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn. Ghazālī, Vigilance and Self-Examination.

13. Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.8.7, where tat tvam asi first sounds as a refrain repeated through 6.16; Advaita Vedānta later counts it among its mahāvākyas, the great sayings. Schopenhauer takes it as the standing formula for the knowledge behind compassion, in which the barrier between oneself and the sufferer becomes, for a moment, transparent. Schopenhauer, Basis of Morality, §22. The work appeared in 1840, in a volume dated 1841.

14. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, on the union of opposites, the coniunctio oppositorum; the German original appeared in 1955 and 1956. Reading forgiveness as the integration of the shadow is the author’s, not Jung’s.

15. Tesla, “Problem of Increasing Human Energy.” His words: “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 cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one.” The phrase “we are all one,” often attached to this passage, does not appear in the article.

16. Einstein, letter to Robert S. Marcus, written after the death of Marcus’s young son: a human being “experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion.” This letter mentions no prison and no circle of compassion. Those belong to the longer version printed in the New York Times on March 29, 1972, which several sources trace to a second letter of March 1950, to Rabbi Norman Salit; its wording varies from one printing to the next, and it is paraphrased here rather than quoted.

17. Spinoza, Ethics, part 5, on seeing things sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity: for Spinoza, conceiving things as they follow from the necessity of the divine nature; taking it as a whole seen at once is my reading. Boethius defines eternity as interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, the perfect possession, entire and simultaneous, of a life that has no bounds, and for him that possession is God’s alone. Boethius, Consolation, book 5, prose 6. Lending a staircase of human lessons a glimpse of it is my extension. Johnson, On Seeing, imagines a vantage that holds past, present, and future in one view, without foretelling any of it.

18. Psychologists have tested something close to this. Undergraduates who spent twenty minutes writing about what they had gained from someone’s hurtful act (a new strength, say, or a closer relationship) grew more forgiving toward that person than those who wrote about the harm itself or about their plans for the next day. McCullough, Root, and Cohen, “Writing about the Benefits.” Finding the gift in a wrong doesn’t make the wrong right.

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