Guilt and Forgiveness

I was talking to a friend who was feeling guilty about something which got me thinking about guilt and such. Feeling guilty is not a comfortable thing to feel - I guess like basic cognitive dissonance. So as with cognitive dissonance, one either changes behaviour or beliefs to align them with each other. With guilt this becomes slightly different if you assume that you are feeling guilty about something that your conscience does not believe in. Its not very different except that your conscience is probably very deep rooted beliefs and not something that we really want to change because it really forms the basis of our morality or something. It might be slightly different in the case of feeling guilty when its something someone else asked you to do or not do, but not something you really believe in. In this case, I guess I would feel guilty only if I committed verbally or non verbally to do or not do something, even though I didn't believe in it. Once I made the commitment (even if I didn't agree with it but just made the committment anyway) it would still cause guilt I'm sure. 

Anyway, I guess the important thing for me was forgiveness. In one of the readings I had for the spirituality class, they say the right attitude with which we should forgive people is with “appreciative grace” which is realizing that all creation is essentially good. Without understanding this, the author says ‘forgiveness’ becomes like the forgiver is scoring points where the forgiven is not forgiven at all but his self worth is being further depleted. I was guilty of this for a long time because I thought the thing I was 'forgiving' for was a 'big deal' and that I had done something 'great' by 'forgiving' someone. I kept at it for a long time and when I realized what I was doing was this 'gloating' and felt very bad about it. Eventually though I did forgive myself for that. 

One of the niyamas in Yoga is non acceptance of gifts. (Yamas and Niyamas are things you should and shouldn't do as a spiritual seeker - sort of like sins except that its not that you get damned for anything - its more like the personalistic view of sin as something that drives you farther away from God). The theory is that the spiritual seeker should not accept gifts from anyone (because it creates a sort of obligation) unless it is given completely freely. The same principle can be applied to forgiving where very often the ‘forgiver’ is really thinking of the forgiveness as a gift he is giving and congratulates himself for it. The forgiver wants the ‘forgiven’ to feel obliged as though they were doing a favor.

The author of the article we had to read quotes Richard Ray who says that “forgiveness can be described as the reaffirmation of the essential worth of someone who has become blind to his own self worth”. In this statement, I feel Ray implies a very important point, which is that people find it difficult to forgive themselves. When someone commits a sin, they feel guilty and they carry that guilt with them. They do not feel good about themselves and often this can lead to just thinking of less about the sin consciously or being in denial of the sin they committed. Either of these methods will make them less sensitive to it and is just a coping mechanism. Subconsciously the guilt gnaws away at them making them uneasy and anxious. They are not able to really forgive themselves for it. 

This lack of forgiving oneself makes them more likely to stray further away from God (or perhaps from someone else when the guilt is caused by a commitment explicit or not) perhaps because they subconsciously think that they are not worthy of God’s (or someone elses) love. The idea of forgiveness expressed by Ray is that as a forgiver, you are helping the forgiven in forgiving themselves and removing the weight of the guilt of the sin, so that they can move forward back to their path towards God. In this way of forgiving, there is no feeling of the forgiver as one upping the forgiven, and he should not expect anything in return. 

In a lot of cases though (as in the case with my friend) there is no one else to really forgive you because its not someone specific or anything who one has done something for or against which causes the guilt. In these cases, self forgiveness is the only way to really get over something. A lot of times, people instead of forgiving themselves just deny it or dont think about it. This could be because self forgiveness means you have to admit that you made a mistake. Before this, you can go through the cognitive dissonance part of it where you try to change the beliefs associated with causing the guilt. However, to forgive yourself, you have to have gone through that first, figured out that the belief was more important to you than the action, admitting that you did something you did not believe was right (i.e. that you did something wrong) and then forgiving yourself. 

Self forgiveness though shouldn't be something that we just take lightly as in something we just use as an excuse to keep doing stuff and then 'forgiving' ourselves for it and not feeling bad. What I'm saying is that while people should be encouraged to learn from their mistakes, they should not be allowed to linger on past mistakes but learn from it and move on. Maybe I thought of all this much earlier in life just cause there were things I either had to forgive myself for or wouldn't have been able to go on with life. In any case, self forgiveness has helped me a lot and I think made me a better or at least happier person. Nowadays I find there are less times when I need to forgive myself so maybe that means that I'm getting better at aligning my actions and beliefs.