A Deeper Understanding of Forgiveness, with Eckhart Tolle

If other people did something bad, then what is called guilt, then that becomes you have a resentment or grievance towards somebody else. And again, it is quite possible that more likely that whatever happened at that time, almost certainly it was perpetrated by a human being who was, maybe he, she still is now, if they're still alive, who was unconscious, the forced by the egoic, the dysfunction of the egoic self to perpetrate that. And again, the danger is if we equate the unconscious action of another, if we make an identity for the other out of that, that is also a trap for the ego. Again. So whether you do it to yourself, in which case it is guilt, a guilt ridden sense of self, or somebody else did something to you, and then you have a. You are burdened with a sense of deep resentment or grievance or a sense of having been a victim of somebody. And then you adopt a victim identity, which again is a very strong egoic identity. So you see yourself as a victim, you think of yourself as a victim of this or that event or those actions. But those are all egoic identities. So you can recognize what somebody did in the past and you may not. Forgiveness is something we need to be very careful with because it's often used in a superficial sense. People say you need to forgive yourself for something you did. And they say you need to forgive somebody else for what they did. And then sometimes people say, I forgive you, but how deep does it go? Perhaps they have an image of themselves as quite spiritual and then that what they say corresponds. They want to simply to reinforce the image they have of themselves as a spiritual person who does not harbor resentment. I'm too spiritual for resentment. I forgive you, you're fine. But deep down they still. There are many negative emotions. When you have a strong self image of a particular kind, for example, spiritual or religious, you have that this is who I am. Then it can easily happen that you deny certain things that contradict your belief in who you are. They're the exact opposite of your belief of being a spiritual or religious person. So there are many cases that happened over many centuries to many religious people. Impossible to recognize the, the negative emotions within themselves because they would have conflicted with their self image. And if you then repress them, they get even worse. And then they come out in bursts of extreme anger or even violence. And then the mind, even that is justified then by the egoic mind. So the unconscious parent who beats their child in a rage, but who think of themselves as spiritual, say I'm doing it for Your own good. So they reinterpret what they are doing, which is bad. They reinterpret it so that it fits in with their self image as a good person. So you lie to yourself continuously crazy. So all these things happen because there's lack of awareness and you're looking for an identity and you're grasping wherever you can find your identity in the past. You're grasping at some things, certain memories, images, so you haven't found your deeper identity, which is the indwelling consciousness itself. And then you need some substitute identity. So these are all cases where people have substitute identities. They have conceptual identities of who they are. And basically you live in a kind of in your own matrix, conditioned my egoic mind. And you cannot see reality, you can't see what you are doing. Jesus said the famous words on the cross, forgive them for they know not what they do, what he means. Of course, maybe if it had been in recent times, he would have expressed it slightly differently, would have said, forgive them for they are totally unconscious. Now. The forgiving, the real forgiving happens when you recognize that there is a dimension in you that has not been affected by whatever happened to you, whatever anybody did to you. There's a dimension in you, which is why we're here, to access that more deeply. And again, whether we call that the stillness, the consciousness itself, the unconditioned consciousness, or if you are religious, Christ consciousness, the Christ within, the inner Christ, the inner Buddha, Buddha nature, whatever you want to call it, there is something that actually cannot be touched by anything that happens to you as a person. As a person, you can suffer a lot in this world. And some people suffer more than others, but everybody suffers as a person. You suffer as a human. You suffer the being beyond the human. Because as you know, you're a human being, the being beyond the human is actually not touched by suffering. So you have to find that, that timeless essence that is within you, that is the inner aspect of what we call the world soul, which also. The world soul also is beyond suffering. And the world soul continuously creates and recreates all the things die all the time. The world soul, there's already been four can remember four or five mass extinctions on the planet over millions and millions of years. When each time life on the planet became 80% destroyed, 70%, even 90% on one mass extinction on the planet, almost all life forms wiped out. And you would say this is definitely the end. But it wasn't the end. The planet regenerated after several mass extinctions, it regenerated Again, just took a while, not too long, just a few million years. It regenerated. And then the life that then arose was of an even greater complexity of life forms. There was something that could not be destroyed even when the meteorites hit. They say the last extinction, perhaps, was when the dinosaurs became extinct. A huge meteorite hit the planet and led to an extinction of life, a lot of life on the planet. But there was something beyond it. There was this planetary intelligence. Anima mundi is the soul of the world. But one aspect of the larger soul of the world is the soul of the planet. The soul of the planet is an aspect of the world soul, and your soul is an aspect also of the world. So they're not separate. So the planet is a life form that has its own intelligence, which is an aspect of the one intelligence, and that is not that. Out of that, the recreation happens again and again. And each time chaos erupts and destroys it, a higher order develops out of the chaos. Which is not to say that we should welcome the next extinction that we perhaps create. And so we should. It is our task to learn to recognize again the sacredness of life on the planet that is vital part of the awakening of human consciousness.