Part 3 - Life in Awareness

Forgiveness

It is usually understood as something that happens after harm has been done. Someone does something hurtful or unfair. Pain follows. Trust is disturbed. Something in the relationship is damaged. Then, if the person admits what they have done and asks to be forgiven, forgiveness may be offered, and the wound is considered healed, at least enough for life to continue.

This ordinary understanding has its place. It belongs to human relationship. It can bring relief, repair trust, and allow two people to continue without the past standing between them in the same way. Sometimes the words “I forgive you” are deeply needed. Sometimes they open a door that had been closed for a long time.

But there is another layer.

When seen from awareness of life itself, forgiveness is no longer only an act between two people. It becomes a way of seeing what harm actually is, where it comes from, and what happens inside us after we have been hurt.

Harm is real. That must be clear from the beginning. Awareness does not ask us to pretend that something did not happen. It does not ask us to become vague, spiritual, or superior. It does not ask us to stay close to someone who continues to harm us. A boundary may still be needed. Distance may still be wise. Consequences may still belong to the situation. In human life, responsibility matters.

But awareness changes the inner place from which all this is held.

When a person harms another, something in them is not seeing clearly. They may be acting from identification with a mind-based sense of self, with all the fear and confusion that come from it. They may be caught in the old movement of self-protection, where image and wanting are already mixed with fear and old pain. The action may still be serious. The wound may still be deep. But the root is unawareness.

A person who is deeply present does not need to be told not to harm another human being. Such actions belong to confusion. They belong to inner division. They belong to the state in which the other person is no longer fully felt as alive, but has been reduced to whatever the mind needs them to be inside its own story.

This does not excuse the harm.

It explains the atmosphere from which harm comes.

That distinction is important. The mind often fears that if we understand someone, we are letting them off. It fears that if we see their confusion, our own pain will be denied. It may even believe that blame is the only way to protect the truth of what happened.

But blame and clarity are not the same.

Blame keeps the other person fixed in the role of offender. It repeats the image of what they did and who they are. It holds them in the mind as the one who caused the wound, and it often holds us as the one to whom the wound was done. In this way, the event continues to live inside identity. The original hurt may have happened once, but the image can remain alive for years.

When you hold hurt, are you holding only the event, or also the image of the one who caused it?

This is where forgiveness becomes more subtle. It may not begin with generosity toward the other person. It may begin with seeing what still remains active in us. We may notice that the mind keeps returning to the wound, not only to understand it, but to preserve the shape it gave us. The harmed one. The betrayed one. The one who was not seen, not valued, not treated with care.

These feelings may be completely understandable. They may need to be felt honestly before anything can loosen. Forced forgiveness can become another form of violence against ourselves. It can push pain underground while the mouth speaks noble words. That is not forgiveness. That is a new layer of dishonesty.

Before forgiveness can be real, truth must be allowed.

Something happened. It hurt. It mattered. Perhaps it changed the relationship. Perhaps it changed how safe we feel. Perhaps it showed us that someone cannot be trusted in the way we once trusted them. Awareness does not remove any of this. It allows it to be seen without immediately turning it into hatred.

This is the beginning of a cleaner relationship to harm.

We can say: this happened, and it was not all right.

We can also say: it came from unawareness.

Both can be true at the same time.

The same clarity is needed when we recognise that we have been the one acting from unawareness. Awareness does not ask us to collapse into shame, nor does it protect the image we have of ourselves as a good person. It allows us to see what happened, listen to the pain we caused, and take responsibility without making our own discomfort the centre of the situation. We may need to apologise and repair what can still be repaired. Trust may not return as quickly as we wish, and forgiveness cannot be demanded simply because we have admitted what we did. What matters is whether the seeing is deep enough to change how we live.

When you realise that you have caused harm, what arises first: the willingness to see it, or the need to protect yourself?

From there, forgiveness no longer has to mean returning to the old relationship. It does not have to mean approval, reconciliation, or forgetting. It does not even require the other person to understand what they have done. Sometimes they will never understand. Sometimes they will never apologise. Sometimes they will continue to defend the very behaviour that caused the wound.

If our inner freedom depends on their understanding, then we remain bound to their level of awareness.

That is a hard thing to see. Many of us wait for the other person to admit the truth before we allow ourselves to be free of the burden. We imagine that once they see it, once they apologise properly, once they feel the weight of what they did, then something in us can rest.

Sometimes that happens, and it can be beautiful.

But sometimes it does not happen. Then we have to ask whether our inner peace will continue to depend on the other person recognising what they have done.

Forgiveness, in the deeper sense, may be this release. Not the release of responsibility, but the release of inner bondage. The other person remains accountable for what was done. But they no longer occupy the centre of our inner life. Their unawareness no longer has the same authority over our being.

Can someone remain responsible without remaining imprisoned in your inner world?

When this begins to happen, something changes in the body. The story may still be remembered, but it no longer tightens around the whole of us in the same way. The person may still be part of our past, but they no longer have to be held as a living enemy inside the present. The wound may still have tenderness around it, but it is no longer fed by constant identification.

This is not something the mind can simply decide. We cannot command ourselves into forgiveness. We cannot say, “I should be beyond this now,” and expect the body to obey. The body may still be marked by hurt. The heart may still need time. Anger may appear again. Grief may return in waves. Awareness does not judge this. It allows the whole human process to be honest.

But while the pain is being felt, awareness also sees more widely. It sees the harm. It sees the one who caused it. It sees the pain that arose afterward. It sees the mind wanting to preserve the wound as proof. It sees the old identity forming around what happened. And in that seeing, something begins to lose its grip.

The other person becomes human again, even if distance remains. Not harmless. Not necessarily close. Not necessarily trusted. But human. A person shaped by the same pain, fear, and blindness that shape human beings until they begin to see more clearly.

This is not sentimental. It is sober.

To see unawareness in another person is not to excuse them. It is to stop making them more powerful than they are. They were not some final force of darkness. They were a human being acting from the limits of their own awareness. Their action may have been damaging, but it did not come from clarity. It came from confusion wearing certainty.

And perhaps this is what begins to release blame. Not because we become morally generous, but because we see more accurately.

Blame depends on the belief that the other person could see clearly and chose blindness with full awareness. Sometimes, in human terms, that may appear true enough. People can choose badly. They can ignore what they know, refuse to listen, and continue acting in ways whose consequences they should have understood.

Still, at the deepest level, the root remains the same. The person was acting from unawareness and identification. The mind-made self was trying to secure itself in the only way it knew. The person was unable to see clearly or respond freely.

This does not make forgiveness into a virtue we must perform. It makes forgiveness a consequence of clear seeing. The clearer the seeing, the less natural it becomes to keep hatred alive. Hatred requires the other person to remain fixed in one shape. Awareness cannot quite do that. It sees the action, but it also sees the condition from which the action came.

Then forgiveness may not appear as a grand inner gesture. It may arrive simply as the end of looking at someone in the old way.

We may still say the words, “I forgive you,” where those words are useful and true. But inwardly, the deeper movement is not the making of a noble statement. It is the falling away of a burden that belonged to confusion.

The harm was real, and so was the pain. The boundary may still be real too.

But the identification around the wound begins to loosen. The person who caused harm is no longer the keeper of our inner life. The story no longer has to be retold in order for our pain to remain valid. What happened does not disappear, but it no longer defines the whole field.

Perhaps forgiveness is not the greatness of the injured person over the one who caused harm. Perhaps it is the moment when awareness sees deeply enough that hatred no longer feels like truth.

Not because the harm was small.

Because unawareness was finally seen for what it was.