In the moment I’m editing a book of a man who has done horrible things in his life: he probably killed a few people, raped women, hurt and stole from hundreds. He is now off drugs and says he’s come “clean” since a few years. He sits in front of me, smiling at me with friendly eyes. He has not hurt me. Still, I wonder if I can trust or forgive him. Can I put the things I learnt about him (through his own voluntary confession) behind me and not judge him? Do I really want to? How much can we ever really forgive each other?
“Forgiving and forgetting means to throw valuable experience out the window”, is what I was taught as a child. Still, I learnt that we all say and do things that in hindsight seem like poor choices – at the time, it seemed it “needed to be done”, as we followed spontaneous reflexes and urges. Each one of us lives with a few regrets like that.
In a person with a violent track record, this reflex toward violence might always be alive. His/her body remembers experiencing violence and their own violent response, the brain is hot-wired that way. We live with our memories of violence, consciously or unconsciously (in our dreams). The question is: can we ever learn to control the physical impulse during a violent provocation? Are we roaming time-bombs that can go off anytime our buttons are pushed? And if that happens: are we “responsible” or can we rightfully blame it on our animal side, our instincts, our body’s “self-defense mechanism”, our bad conditioning?
All these thoughts go through my mind sitting here with this man. I realize also how I identify myself immediately with the victims in his story, the easier choice. Why don’t I identify with him, the culprit? In this lifetime I haven’t acted out this kind of violence. Even though I have been the victim of violence on various occasions. I feel comfortable using the women-are-victims, guy-are-culprits paradigm. In “Beauty and the Beast”, who wouldn’t rather identify with Beauty?
Throughout our many cycles of return to this material plane, we all have been women and men. We all have been saints and murderers, victims and culprits. To tell it as the old “men suppress women” saga means to disregard the fact that this world and everything in it is constantly turning: each one of us has been the oppressor and the oppressed, as women or men, as individual or as part of an entire gender, throughout the millennia. We ALL are equally involved in this ongoing cycle and therefore equally responsible. Equally guilty – and equally innocent. Being aware of this makes forgiving each other so much easier – and blaming each other much harder.
It is my opinion that all violence we experience in this lifetime we have inflicted in another lifetime. All violence we inflict we have experienced in another spacetime. The challenge is to break the cycle of repetition. When we experience violence and transform it into knowledge, we no longer have to act out our trauma.
I see cultures who were forced to look in the mirror and acknowledge their cruel and violent behavior. Nazi-Germany was publicly humiliated and forced to admit guilt in the eyes of the entire world. This process has created a level of self-reflection inside the culture that has lead to less violence and more forgiveness. The victims of Nazi-Germany were never forced to examine themselves and transform their pain. The ongoing violence of Israel towards Palestinians is a direct result of undigested pain.
The purpose of forgiveness is not to let the culprit off the hook. The purpose of forgiveness is to heal and transform the victim. It is to end the repetitive, kharmic cycle of violence. Each time we manage to stop ourselves from acting out violently we contribute to this enormous work in or world – to transform violent and hateful energy into love and creativity. This is how we transform our world, moment by moment.