Forgiveness and Free Will

Forgiveness is letting go of wishing that the past was any different than it was. 

If we are able to let go of the expectation we had of that person, of that situation, that's where forgiveness lies. But if we can't, if we just want the past to be different, we'll be stuck in it. 

Of course, that’s your choice. But we should also examine the idea of free will in this context of forgiveness. 

We always want to think of things in a dualistic binary capacity, but it's not that there is or isn't free will. It's that free will lies on a spectrum. And the spectrum of free will, of the choice that you have or think you have, is directly important. 

Proportion, your awareness, and consciousness. Haven't we all experienced that? At certain points in life, it seemed like we didn't really have a choice in how to react or how to act in a certain situation, and all of a sudden, later in life, after we grew and learned, suddenly we find we have more… range of motion, in that situation. 

That's more choice. That's more freedom. 

So when it comes to forgiveness, what does free will have to do with it? Well, let's look at the person who is at the receiving end of our forgiveness, the person who perpetrated something from our point of view. 

What was their choice? Did they have a choice? Or was the causality – the causal stream we’ve discussed previously – what led up to that action such that they really didn't have a choice in it?

As horrific as the action was, as much as we want to bestow upon them full 100% free will that they could have chosen differently… could they have? Really, could they have?

We like to think so, but we can't know the full causal stream of a person's trajectory. This could be very hard to take because we want to blame someone, want to hold someone accountable for having wronged us. 

But there's an opportunity to rise above that, to extend compassion no matter how painful, no matter how horrible that person’s actions may seem. This is the opportunity of a reframing of free will in respect to forgiveness. 

When it comes down to it, our emotional reactions can point towards some possible woundedness, some possible incompletion. So in order to be radically forgiving, ultimately all forgiveness is going to come down to self-forgiveness, to full acceptance of ourselves exactly as we are… to self-love. 

That's what's really being pointed to here. Because it's often us that gets in the way of forgiveness. We take things personally because of how we interpret the situation. And letting go of that leads to freedom.

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” – Lewis B. Smeade

 Haven't we all felt that at some point? What we discover here is that on the other side of forgiveness lies freedom. 

Which means the corollary is true, right? By withholding forgiveness, where do we end up? 

Where does that leave us?