Thoughts on Forgiveness

It is interesting that so much of religion centers around guilt. I believe that this is because, ultimately, we all know when we are doing things that, if done to us, we would find to hateful.

This can be something as small as making someone feel bad just so we don't have to feel bad by ourselves, to undermining other peoples work to minimize their success or fulfillment, to exercizing force not because it is necessarry but because we can.

And it always seems like we are justfied in doing these things at the time we do them.

But later, after the exhaltation has warn off, we wish that we had not done them. This is particularly true when we do something small just to make things interesting, but then find that the damage being wrought by our little jest is far reaching. We find ourselves in the position of almost wishing that we would be caught out just so we could make restitution and not have to carry the added weight of the guilt around for the rest of our lives.

For most of us, our little injustices are actually rather petty. But for some reason, the memory of these little injustices, and there results, float up into our consciousness at the worst possible times, like during or right after something bad happens to us, and they always seem to have the same weight of self-loathing that they did when we first discovered that we had once again allowed ourselves to mislead ourselves into doing something that we would not want someone else to do to us.

It may be the source of the concept of Karma.

I think Karma can be considered 'real' in at least this limited sense: doing an act of harm does tend to affect other people in the way dropping a stone into a pond will effect the water throughout the pond. It tends to ripple outward, but the ripples tend to wash back toward the source of the original disruption after a time.

When we rationalize taking actions toward others that we know would clearly be merely rationalized by others if taken toward us, we seek forgiveness from the Divine because we know that we will not likely forgive ourselves. But the forgiveness from the Divine is a rationalization in itself, because the Divine made us rationalizing beings.

If you want to limit the load of guilt you must bear, don't take actions that you will be unable to forgive yourself for, because your own forgiveness is the only forgiveness you will likely ever get.