Thoughts on Forgiving

Forgiving needs the willingness to consciously deal with what has happened, to see and feel oneself as the victim and the other person as offender. This includes giving space to all the feelings around the event. As long as anger and pain come up with the memory of what has happened, forgiving is not possible. So forgiving requires a process which we cannot direct. In the course of this process, rigid feelings and thoughts resolve and open up for a broader view.

Pardoning means to get out of the entanglement of victim and perpetrator. I stop to focus on my wounds and to suffer from them. As long as I am fixated on what injustice or evil has been done to me, I am stuck – stuck in what has happened and stuck in judging the other person. There is a wrongdoer as long as there is a victim. Forgiving means also to release the perpetrator from being a perpetrator. Only by this I free myself from being victimized. I accept myself in my dignity which is inviolable and always present whatever happens or whatever is done to me.

From this dignity, true forgiving comes. And I also accept the inviolable dignity of the wrongdoer which has not been affected by the unawareness, limitation and self-oblivion which had befallen him by hurting me.

Forgiving means to see the other person who has hurt me, in his/her own history of hurts without putting myself in a superior position.

I am only able to forgive when I have realized that the other person had not treated me badly simply due to an individual deficiency of personality but because he/she could not have acted better in that situation due to patterns of behavior imprinted in the past and due to the mood in the moment.

By this I can realize that the action which has offended me was not directed against me but had happened without consideration (the other person was not present in doing what was done) or that the action came out of revenge – and was actually directed against someone in the history of the wrongdoer with whom I have been mistaken in the present situation.

So one can say that the victim arises in the perpetrator to eventually defend oneself, even though at the wrong time and at the wrong place, against the wrong person.

I can only forgive when I have understood that people are not simply evil but that they sometimes act in an evil way because they have been treated mindlessly which makes them prone to situations in which their range of action is limited as well as their view of other people.

Someone steps on my toes or makes me wet by driving by. My first impulse is to think that someone wants to harm me but the second insight is that someone has not managed to be attentive enough due to stress. When I remember my own limited ability to be attentive and aware, I manage to forgive. Also I am often careless, also I have ignored or overseen other people’s needs and perspectives.

„Also I…“ is an exercise which reminds me of my equality with other people, neither better nor worse, but equally human. What has happened has added another story to the infinite carpet of human stories. By looking closer, I might realize that this event which has been so awfully hurtful for me contains a tiny threat of humor, spun from the ineradicable imperfection of humankind. So I might be pardoned to smile at my own variation of imperfection which I tend to perform over and over again in some degree of perfection.

Rule 30: Noone to Blame

The true Sufi is such that even when he is unjustly accused, attacked and condemned from all sides, he patiently endures, uttering not a single bad word about any of his critics. She/he never apportions blame. How can there be opponents or rivals or even “others” when there is no “self” in the first place? How can there be anyone to blame when there is only One?

A wise person shows people the way to holistic consciousness. In this realm, there are no judgements or blamings any more. To reach this state, we do not only need patience, a thick skin, a special ability to bear suffering or withholding aggression. Rather it is about a change in consciousness which does not have anything to do with discipline but with an enlargement beyond the confinements of one’s own personality.

So such extraordinary persons do not need any admiration. They deserve to be imitated, but not in the sense of holding on to a task or standing up to challenges, but more in the sense of inner growth. This cannot be attained by training and consistent practice alone. It is the by product of leading a life consciously and carefully. The enlargement of humans happens to the degree they succeed in including more and more aspects, details and habits of the world, in embracing all of this as one’s own which does not belong to one but which one is part of.

We realize that we are members in a great whole called the world. All the funny creatures which play their roles there, all the absurdities and oddities, all the evil and bad, the nice and good events are the other members of this cabinet of curiosities. We are all connected with one another, we take part in the same game. The others play those roles for which we are not so good at.

As an example: the other person plays the role of a rascal, and by this he represents our own evil parts which are hidden in the shadow of our personality. So we meet an aspect of ourselves when we encounter someone who is acting in an evil way towards us or towards others. When we condemn him for being like this, we do the same to ourselves. Someone could treat us disrespectingly. The behaviour of this person points at our own tendencies of respectfulness. By condemning the other person for it, we condemn ourselves for our acts of disrespect.

Of course, this does not mean that we are not allowed to name evil actions for what they are. It does also not mean that we should not be committed to impeding and stopping such behaviour. We have to do this in order to bring our environment back to balance when a derailment has happened. But we should be aware that what we accuse has something to do with ourselves. So there is no place for rising up above the other person in the sense that we are better because we have not committed this error. There is noone without an area of shadow, this is a structural attitude of our complex human nature.

We easily tend to assume that there is nothing evil about ourselves, when we see it on the outside. But in reality we strengthen our evil parts as soon as we react evil against evil. If we want to weaken this side in ourselves, it is necessary to accept it as our shadow, to look at it and thus bring it into light. As soon as we can embrace it from our inside, because it is a part of ourselves, chances will grow that one day we can embrace it when it comes to us from the outside. Then we just see a part of ourselves which has been neglected and unloved for a long time.

Someone might say: But I am not bad. – You are human, and it would be a miracle when nothing evil ever came to your mind. And even if it were so, there is something else in you which is incomplete and worthy of improvement. Being human means being imperfect by knowing about perfection at the same time. We will never reach it, though we know about it. Each new experience offered by life to us can be again something we grow with.

Perfection would be the end of growing and learning, and would be the end of the process of life.


The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com