The Essence of Forgiveness

My friend Luke told me that one of his professors of philosophy once said: “Forgiveness is when we give up hope for a better past.”

This was remarkable. A new thing to notice in my mind.

The constant revision of the past, the repetition, being fueled in a sense, by my desire for it to be different. And I think if I go over it again and again, I will figure something out, that it will become different. Sometimes indeed, we do find that with some thought, we have found a deception or an illusion we were subject to. But because we did not find it at the time, it is still subject to error. Fundamentally, memory is flawed. There is error. We cannot in fact gain new data from old data. New experience comes from the present alone. There is no new experience in the past, no new knowledge, no new insight.

Desperate for such things, we invent them through an imaginative process. This process contributes to the fundamental error of memory. It is proven that psychologically, our brain cannot truly determine the difference between memory and imagination. When I see this in myself I see that the past and the future are entirely constructed from memory and imagination.

There is absolutely no escape from this, through thought. The use of thought is memory and imagination. The use of thought is constructed from past experience. And this past experience is inalterable because the only access we have to it is in the realm of thought, through the use of thought. Because we can only enter this realm with thinking, it is limited. It is fixed, and it cannot be altered fundamentally.

Why can it not be altered, fundamentally?

Because it is thought, and the only alterations we can make to it is through thought. Fundamentally, it is only thought. New experience exists outside of thought, but instantaneously. The habit I notice most is how quickly, in fact, just as instantaneously, my present experience becomes thought. Sooner than I can perceive the shift, direct experience has been recorded and old recordings have been added to it. Therefore, it seems to me that even the act of perception is within the domain of thought.

Can I approach the border where perception is happening and where reality is happening?

The ancients texts suggest not. So long as I carry this image of myself, this identity, this ego, this ‘I’ that is ‘me’, which is constructed entirely of memory and imagination, which is carefully, painstakingly, marvelously the masterpiece of all the thought and memory and imagination that goes on within me, I cannot.

I cannot bring ‘me’ into the present moment. Me is not the present moment. Me is thought, as memory and imagination. So long as I have a ‘me’, every time I try to become present, I fail. There is no ‘I’ becoming present. There cannot be. If there is an I being present, there is not presence. There is either ‘me’ or there is ‘presence’.

This is my understanding tonight.

Forgiveness is giving up the hope for a better past.