The Essence of Forgiveness and Being | Eckhart Tolle

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, oh, 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 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 are 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 happen over many centuries to many religious people. Impossible to recognize 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 thinks 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 there's a. You're looking for an identity and you're grasping some. 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. 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 are a human being. The being beyond the human is actually not touched by suffering. So you have to find 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.