Different Perspectives on Forgiveness

The Bible, A Course in Miracles, and Eckhart Tolle all have different perspectives on ‘forgiveness’ (your definition of this having just jumped into your mind) although I believe all are describing the same concept in different terms and from different perspectives.

I don’t recall Krishnamurti ever speaking directly on forgiveness in ‘do this’ terms as most others might. K was generally speaking from and pointing to a much higher level than most of us are in contact with, and in any case did not prescribe any solution or way of acting or behaving, instead advising us to ‘see the truth of it’ in which case a change in behavior or action may (or may not) naturally occur.

I was intrigued by Tolle’s statement below of ‘offering no resistance’. The enormous inference of this acts to preempt blame and grievances… removing the need for forgiveness. I believe this type of implication is used often by Krishnamurti and ACIM in a masterful way which leads us to… instead of ‘seeing’ and confronting issues…simply overcome these non-issues but not creating them in the first place. They do not exist, as by looking beyond them we do not create them in the first place. It seems to be that is what Tolle is prescribing by ‘offering no resistance’ to life.

So…the way is not to make the issues real and then combat them or even ‘forgive’ them…which we are incapable of doing, but to look beyond them, thus not creating them.

Eckhart Tolle – A Different Perspective on Forgiveness

Selectively quoted from pages 120/121 in ‘The Power of Now”:

“Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life – to allow life to live through you. The alternatives are pain and suffering, a greatly restricted flow of life energy, and in many cases physical disease. Non-forgiveness is the very nature of the mind, just as the mind-made false self, the ego, cannot survive without strife and conflict. The mind cannot forgive. Only you can. ”

Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now

Jiddhu Krishnamurti:

“Forgiveness is not true compassion. What is it to be compassionate? Please find out for yourself, feel it out, whether a mind that is hurt, that can be hurt, can ever forgive. Can a mind that is capable of being hurt, ever forgive? And can such a mind which is capable of being hurt, which is cultivating virtue, which is conscious of generosity, can such a mind be compassionate? Compassion, as love, is something which is not of the mind. The mind is not conscious of itself as being compassionate, as loving. But the moment you forgive consciously, the mind is strengthening its own center in its own hurt. So the mind which consciously forgives can never forgive; it does not know forgiveness; it forgives in order not to be further hurt.

So it is very important to find out why the mind actually remembers, stores away. Because the mind is everlastingly seeking to aggrandize itself, to become big, to be something. When the mind is willing not to be anything, to be nothing, completely nothing, then in that state there is compassion. In that state there is neither forgiveness nor the state of hurt; but to understand that, one has to understand the conscious development of the ‘me’.
So, as long as there is the conscious cultivation of any particular influence, any particular virtue, there can be no love, there can be no compassion, because love and compassion are not the result of conscious effort.”

J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life