Ordinary Forgiveness
That which many of us consider to be forgiveness involves trying to let go of the past by saying, “I’ll let bygones be bygones.” This type of forgiveness is called ordinary forgiveness. When we practice ordinary forgiveness, we let go of the past, but hold onto the idea that we have been wronged by another person or by a situation. This method usually requires a great deal of time to feel any results. We may even come to the point of thinking we’ve forgiven people until another situation arises which brings up our deepest feelings of anger, sadness, or victimization towards them.
Why is it that ordinary forgiveness doesn’t easily enable us to come to a place deep forgiveness? When we try this type of forgiveness, we often feel two desires that are in direct opposition. The first desire is to forgive, which is an abstract idea. We don’t want to feel angry or resentful and like the idea of only feeling love towards all people and situations. However, we also hold the deep desire to condemn the person or situation that we think made us feel bad. We may feel that the fact of the situation is that we were wronged: someone stole from us, lied to us, or hurt us in some way. From a very young age, many of us learned to judge ourselves and others. Since judgment has been with many of us for most of our lives, it is a pattern of thought that is difficult to release. Colin Tipping states, “In trying to forgive the willful perpetrator of what we see as a crime against us, the desire to forgive is in direct opposition to our need to condemn.” (http://www.iloveulove.com)
Ordinary forgiveness maintains the idea that we were victims. We may say that we’ve let the situation go, but we still hold true that the person did something wrong to us. It is the powerful archetype of the victim that keeps people from releasing their emotional baggage. Core beliefs of the victim archetype include the feeling that we need to be responsible for everyone else, that we would have much better lives if we had different childhoods, that we don’t deserve to be loved, or that other people are more important than us. The belief that we have been victimized is a necessary part of our structures of reality. If the key belief that we are victims is removed from our realities, the whole pyramid of reality that we have spent our lives creating will crumble. The power of the archetype of the victim extends past an individual to the mass consciousness as well. It has been a part of our mass consciousness for thousands of years. According to Colin Tipping, Jesus was the embodiment of forgiveness; however, Jesus was made to seem like the ultimate victim of us all. Why is it that this archetype has been able to remain a part of mass consciousness for so long? According to Colin Tipping, this is “because the victim archetype is sustained by the Ego, that wholly false belief system that holds that we are separated from God and that God is angry with us and will one day punish us.” To change this belief is the key to our freedom from victimization. Even though the belief that we are victims may play a large role in our present realities, we can shift the way we look at ourselves and the world.
In his book Walking Between The Worlds (1997) Gregg Braden states that it is the belief that we are separate from our Source that is at the core of all our fears as well. Braden states that there are three basic fears: the fear of abandonment, fear of not being enough, and fear of trusting. In looking at our lives, we can question our feelings of inadequacy, victimization, and self-doubt and see how they stem from a belief of separation. When this happens, there is an opportunity for us to recognize that we choose to hold this belief. It is merely a choice and not a fixed reality. Quantum physics has been discovering that there is an infinite potential for reality. We may choose to see things the same way every day, but this is merely a choice. Infinite possibilities mean that in one reality we are not separate from our Source. In fact, quantum physics says that we are all connected at the energetic level. When we shift this belief to the one that we are all eternally connected to our Source, our three fears hold no grounding. We can never truly be abandoned or inadequate. Neither can we ever be victims. We are always perfect and so is everything else. This is the beginning of radical forgiveness.