[written, in 2011, for Don Stevens]
Looking for a way to begin—a chance to start
without knowing how—I take a ‘fal’ or sortes
from the poetry of Hafiz. My finger finds this line:
When there is no
purity, one are the Ka’ba and the idol-house.[1]
Encountering these words immediately suggests
two insights. First, that forgiveness is a work of purification on which rests the very
possibility of authentic religion, that is, religion as the practical love of
Reality as opposed to the mere veneration of self-projected idols, what Meher
Baba defines as the religion of life.
The Religion of Life is not fettered by mechanically repeated formulae
of the unenlightened, purblind and limited intellect. It is dynamically
energized by the assimilation of Truth, grasped through lucid and unerring
intuition, which never falters and never fails, because it has emerged out of
the fusion of head and heart, intellect and love.[2]
Second, that the work
of forgiveness, for all of its difficulty and seeming impossibility, proceeds paradoxically, not unlike the act of taking a ‘fal’ from a text,
through the freedom of an essentially negative
condition, in the midst of the experience of not knowing, not
remembering, not worrying.[3]
Real forgiveness is necessarily on the way to forgetfulness, a state of being
that, rather than leading to oblivion, proceeds by the mind’s own perception that there exists an infinitely
important unknown what at once beyond and
essential to itself. As Meher Baba explains, such forgetful forgiveness
arrives at real remembering.
[W]hen the same mind
tells him that there is something which may be called God, and, further,
when it prompts him to search for God that he may see Him face to face, he
begins to forget himself and to forgive others for whatever he has suffered
from them. And when he has forgiven everyone and has completely forgotten
himself, he finds that God has forgiven him everything, and he remembers Who,
in reality, he is.[4]
Here we must consider the relation between
these two dimensions of forgiveness, between what it is and how it is. The
necessity of the act of forgiveness
defines the identity of forgiveness and its act. Over and against the narrower
impulse towards forgiveness as project, towards what can be accomplished by
means of it, what matters here above all is that
one forgives, regardless of the result. The external power of forgiveness, its
ability to open ways out of intractable individual and collective problems,
rests wholly within its intrinsic value, in its being its own ‘reward’. This
means that forgiveness is not simply a virtue or something good to do, but a true value in the sense elaborated by
Meher Baba.
Mistakes in valuation
arise owing to the influence of subjective desires or wants. True values are values which belong to things in their own right. They are intrinsic,
and because they are intrinsic, they are absolute and
permanent and are not liable to
change from time to time or from person to person. False values are derived
from desires or wants; they are dependent upon
subjective factors, and being dependent upon subjective factors, they
are relative and impermanent
and are liable to change from time to time and from person
to person.[5]
So forgiveness demonstrates the truth of its
value by virtue of being itself an exercise in freedom from subjective factors.
In these terms, the impulse to forgive is to be understood as something
different than a desire or will for
something. Instead, forgiveness is ordered toward the actualization of its own
truth, the making real of its own potential to be.[6]
One forgives, not so much by aiming at some concrete end, such that one could
definitively arrive at the success or completion of forgiveness, but rather by staying within the truth of forgiveness,
by not transgressing the imperative to forgive. Thinking of forgiveness in this
way, as the activity of remaining inwardly free from (and not necessarily rid
of) the forces that cannot forgive, helps to clarify the deep relationship
between forgiveness, spontaneity, and forgetfulness. Meher Baba’s words on this
relationship are inextricably linked with the idea of freedom from results. With
regard to the practice of forgiveness as a kind of good work, we find the
general principle that service or work bound to the objective good of others,
though “of immense spiritual importance,” is from the perspective of the goal
of life, a kind of interminable dead-end.
[A]s long as the idea
of service is . . . tied to the idea of results, it is inevitably fraught with
a sense of incompleteness. There can be no realisation of Infinity through the
pursuit of a never-ending series of consequences. Those who aim at sure and
definite results through a life of service have an eternal burden on their
minds.[7]
The principle of freedom from results is
defined more absolutely in Meher Baba’s description of the purposelessness of
divine, infinite existence, our arrival at which is the very goal, or purpose,
of everything.
Reality is Existence
infinite and eternal. Existence has no purpose by virtue of its being real,
infinite and eternal. Existence exists. Being Existence it has to exist.
Hence Existence, the Reality, cannot have any purpose. It just is. It is
self-existing. Everything—the things and the beings—in Existence has a
purpose. All things and beings have a purpose and must have a purpose, or else
they cannot be in existence as what they are. Their very being in
existence proves their purpose; and their sole purpose in existing is to
become shed of purpose, i.e., to become purposeless. Purposelessness is of
Reality; to have a purpose is to be lost in falseness. Everything exists only
because it has a purpose. The moment that purpose has been accomplished,
everything disappears and Existence is manifested as self-existing Self.
Purpose presumes a direction and since Existence, being everything and
everywhere, cannot have any direction, directions must always be in nothing and
lead nowhere. Hence to have a purpose is to create a false goal. Love alone is
devoid of all purpose and a spark of Divine Love sets fire to all purposes. The
Goal of Life in Creation is to arrive at purposelessness, which is the state of
Reality.[8]
Forgiveness enters this purpose-enflaming
fire. Rupturing the chain of never-ending consequences, it relieves beings from
the burden of results and opens the way into actually living within the
inherent purposelessness of Reality. Far from fleeing life, forgiveness gives
life back to itself as the very place of freedom.
This realisation must
and does take place only in the midst of life, for it is only in the midst of
life that limitation can be experienced and transcended, and that subsequent
freedom from limitation can be enjoyed.[9]
Felt from the perspective of this goal,
forgiveness is less a duty or responsibility than the radical activation of the
seemingly passive power of not-worrying, a very difficult and profoundly enjoyable
exercise in the freedom of one’s inherent divinity. The exercise of forgiveness
accordingly has a spontaneous character or style. Practicing it might be called
a form of immediate cooperation between the impasse of experience and the
ultimate independence of reality.
[B]y virtue of being absolutely independent it is but natural for God to
exercise His infinite whim to experience and enjoy His own infinity. To
exercise a whim is always the mark of an independent nature, because it is
whimsicality that always colours the independent nature.[10]
Meher Baba thus
places forgiveness within the broader category of positive forgetfulness, a happy state combining awareness of and
non-reaction to both adverse and favorable circumstances that flowers in
conspicuous creativity.[11]
Positive forgetfulness . . . and its steady cultivation develops in man
that balance of mind which enables him to express such noble traits as charity,
forgiveness, tolerance, selflessness and service to others. . . . Positive
forgetfulness, although it lies at the very root of happiness, is by no means
easy to acquire. Once a man attains this state of mind, however, he rises above
pain and pleasure; he is master of himself. This forgetfulness, to be fully
effective for the spiritual life, must become permanent, and such permanence is
only acquired through constant practice during many lives. Some people, as a
result of efforts towards forgetfulness in past lives, get spontaneous and
temporary flashes of it in a later life, and it is such people who give to the
world the best in poetry, art and philosophy, and who make the greatest
discoveries in science.[12]
The practical crux of positive forgetfulness lies
in this developmental relation between steady cultivation and spontaneity, in
the fostering of an impulse not to react that bears abiding and unforeseeable fruit,
what Meher Baba calls “manifestations of genuine spontaneity of forgetfulness.”[13]
The doing of forgiveness resides in dynamic relation to the inevitable
unfolding of perfect, universal individuality.
The limited individuality, which is the creation of
ignorance, is transformed into the divine individuality which is unlimited. The
illimitable consciousness of the Universal Soul becomes individualised in this
focus without giving rise to any form of illusion. The person is free from all
self-centred desires and he becomes the medium of the spontaneous flow of the
supreme and universal will which expresses divinity. Individuality becomes limitless by the disappearance of ignorance.[14]
The imperative to forgive
must thus be understood in the broader phenomenal context of the paradoxical
correlation between habit and freedom. Forgiveness is spontaneous, but its free
exercise is a development of habitual practice, the liberating result of ongoing
intentional action.
The life of true values can be spontaneous only when
the mind has developed the unbroken habit of choosing the right value.[15]
The crucial distinction to be drawn, the distinction
across which the decision to forgive operates, is thus between habits that bind
and habits that set free, between, on the one hand, actions whose impressions [sanskaras] limit life and intensify separateness
and ignorance, and, on the other, actions whose impressions liberate life and
generate knowledge and enjoyment of its inherent unity—a spontaneous state of
being also known as love.
In love . . . there is no sense of effort because it
is spontaneous. Spontaneity is of the essence of true spirituality. The highest
state of consciousness, in which the mind is completely merged in the Truth, is
known as Sahajawastha, the state of unlimited spontaneity in which there
is uninterrupted Self-knowledge.[16]
The core of this distinction (between binding and
liberating actions) lies in the inevitable deconstruction of the ego, “the
false nucleus of consolidated sanskaras.”[17]
The restrictive and ultimately eroding ego is the recurring obstacle on the
path of experience, the imprisoning framework that each and every action works
to reinforce or destroy.
Any action which expresses the true values of life
contributes towards the disintegration of the ego, which is a product of ages
of ignorant action. Life cannot be permanently imprisoned within the cage of
the ego. It must at some time strive towards the Truth.[18]
As a mode of relation to this inevitable
disintegration or decay of the limited ego—limited because it persists only in
ignorance and active denial of the inviolable unity of all life[19]—forgiveness
is definable as a movement of giving experience over to the unitive gravity of
spiritual reality. Taking direct action against the very constraints of action,
against the psychic chains that would determine it as re-action, against the
interminable self-condemnations encapsulated in the separative rallying cry of never forget!, forgiveness forcefully
and non-violently asserts the absolute spontaneity of reality, the inescapable
freedom of which the pseudo-whims of personal interest are a pale shadow.
At the pre-spiritual level, man is engulfed in
unrelieved ignorance concerning the goal of infinite freedom; and though he is
far from being happy and contented, he identifies so deeply with sanskaric
interests that he experiences gratification in their furtherance. But the
pleasure of his pursuits is conditional and transitory, and the spontaneity
which he experiences in them is illusory because, through all his pursuits,
his mind is working under limitations. The mind is capable of genuine freedom
and spontaneity of action only when it is completely free from sanskaric ties
and interests.[20]
Forgiveness is an act
of relinquishing interest, not for the sake of becoming disinterested, but on
behalf of a deeper interest that absolutely exceeds the framework of determined
interests. The one who forgives is not uninterested in the particular problem
that forgiveness addresses. The one who forgives is instead hyper-interested in the problem,
interested to a degree that is totally uncontainable by the relation to the
problem as object of worry or negative concern. Forgiveness puts into play a
profound need to relate to reality in a non-reactive way, to become more
intimate with it precisely by remaining outside
the confining and ultimately uninteresting patterns of self-interest.
Forgiveness thus partakes of the “divinely human life” embodied in the Avatar whose
appearance, like the advent of forgiveness itself, takes place in the middle of
seemingly terminal conflict:
The Avatar appears in
different forms, under different names, at different times, in different parts
of the world. As his appearance always coincides with the spiritual birth of
man, so the period immediately preceding his manifestation is always one in
which humanity suffers from the pangs of the approaching birth. . . . There
seems to no possibility of stemming the tide of destruction. At this moment the
Avatar appears. Being the total
manifestation of God in human form, he is like a gauge against which man can
measure what he is and what he may become. He trues the standard of human values
by interpreting them in terms of a divinely human life. He is interested in everything but not concerned about anything.
The slightest mishap may command his sympathy; the greatest tragedy will not
upset him. . . . He is only concerned about concern.[21]
This does not at all
mean, however, that forgiveness should be conceived as a solely individual
process of human spiritual self-development. Like the unseen work of the
God-Man that occurs on all levels of being and is only partially perceivable to
humans,[22]
the mystery of forgiveness is that it is radically for the other and the world
itself. One does not ring the doorbell only for oneself, for the ringing of it effects
a real alteration in the objective world, in oneself and others. This fact is essential to the meaning of Meher Baba’s
description of the “charity of forgiveness”:
People ask God for forgiveness. But since God is everything and
everyone, who is there for Him to forgive? Forgiveness of the created was
already there in His act of creation. But still people ask God's forgiveness,
and He forgives them. But they, instead of forgetting that for which they asked
forgiveness, forget that God has forgiven them, and, instead, remember the
things they were forgiven—and so nourish the seed of wrongdoing, and it bears
its fruit again. Again and again they plead for forgiveness, and again and
again the Master says, I forgive.
But it is impossible for men to forget their wrongdoings and the wrongs
done to them by others. And since they cannot forget, they find it hard to
forgive. But forgiveness is the best charity. (It is easy to give the poor
money and goods when one has plenty, but to forgive is hard; but it is the best
thing if one can do it.)
Instead of men trying to forgive one another they fight. Once they
fought with their hands and with clubs. Then with spears and bows and arrows.
Then with guns and cannon. Then they invented bombs and carriers for them. Now
they have developed missiles that can destroy millions of other men thousands
of miles away, and they are prepared to use them. The weapons used change, but
the aggressive pattern of man remains the same.
Now men are planning to go to the moon. And the first to get there will
plant his nation's flag on it, and that nation will say, It is mine. But
another nation will dispute the claim and they will fight here on this earth
for possession of that moon. And whoever goes there, what will he find? Nothing
but himself. And if people go on to Venus they will still find nothing but
themselves. Whether men soar to outer space or dive to the bottom of the
deepest ocean they will find themselves as they are, unchanged, because they
will not have forgotten themselves nor remembered to exercise the charity of
forgiveness.[23]
Forgiveness is charity, not only because it expresses
divine love, but because it actually gives
something to the other, something better than all other possible gifts. What
does forgiveness give? The answer lies in connection to the question of sanskaras or impressions, the very of
medium of conscious experience.
There are two aspects of
human experience—the subjective and objective. On the one hand there are mental
processes which constitute essential ingredients of human experience, and on
the other hand there are things and objects to which they refer. The mental
processes are partly dependent upon the immediately given objective situation,
and partly dependent upon the functioning of accumulated sanskaras or impressions of
previous experience. The human mind thus finds itself between a sea of past sanskaras on the
one side and the whole extensive objective world on the other.[24]
Forgiveness gives a
new past. This is not only a metaphor, but a literal and actual fact.
Forgiveness effects a real and palpable alteration in the impressional stuff through which the limitations of
past actions remain operative in the present. It accelerates the decay of dead
forms and clears new pathways to “the Present, which is ever beautiful and
stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future.”[25]
More than the violence and suffering to which it most characteristically responds,
forgiveness participates in and attests to the struggle of life itself.
All life is an effort
to attain freedom from self-created entanglement. It is a desperate struggle to
undo what has been done under ignorance, to throw away the accumulated burden
of the past, to find rescue from the debris left by a series of temporary
achievements and failures. Life seeks to unwind
the limiting sanskaras of the past and to obtain release from the mazes of
its own making, so that its further creations may spring directly from the
heart of eternity and bear the stamp of unhampered freedom and intrinsic
richness of being which knows no limitation.[26]
For no less than
evil, goodness must be also be forgiven.
[1] The
Divan-i-Hafiz, trans. Wilberforce Clarke (London: Octagon Press, 1974),
216.3.
[2] From a message sent by Meher Baba to Mildred Kyle in
1948, published in Seattle by Warren Healey, and cited in Bal Natu, Glimpses of the God-Man, Volume VI: March
1954-April 1955 (Myrtle Beach: Sheriar Foundation, 1994), 87.
[3] Such a relation between forgiveness and unknowing is
suggested by Jesus’s “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”
(Luke 23:34), which presents forgiveness as grounded in the knowledge of
ignorance, in the recognition of not knowing. Nor is it necessary to read the
line as predicating forgiveness on intellectual superiority and/or better
knowledge of the other. My knowledge that the other knows not what he does can
very well include and in fact grow from recognition that I also know not what I
do. So the words might be rescribed into a general imperative description of
the act of forgiveness: do not what you
know.
[4] Meher Baba, The
Everything and the Nothing (Beacon Hill, Australia: Meher House
Publications, 1963), 69-70.
[5] Meher Baba, Discourses,
6th ed., 3 vols. (San Francisco: Sufism Reoriented, 1967), 3.139,
original italics elided.
[6] Insofar as
forgiveness is constituted by a negative movement, a decision not to be angry, hate, seek revenge, and
so forth, and more deeply, a decision in some sense not to decide, it participates in the negative essence of freedom
or potentiality, which resides not in the ability to do as one wants, but in
impotentiality, or the ability not to
do. As Giorgio Agamben explains via Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, it is precisely impotentiality that
preserves ethics from reduction to law: “Our ethical tradition has often sought
to avoid the problem of potentiality by reducing it to the terms of will and
necessity. Not what you can do, but
what you want to do or must do is the dominant theme. This is
what the man of the law repeats to Bartleby. When he asks him to go to the post
office (“just step around to the Post Office, won’t you?”), and Bartleby
opposes him with his usual “I would prefer not to,” the man of the law hastily
translates Bartleby’s answer into “You will
not?” But Bartleby , with his soft but firm voice, specifies, “I prefer not” . . . But potentiality is
not will, and impotentiality is not necessity . . . To believe that will has
power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a
decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always
potentiality to do and not to do)—this is the perpetual illusion of morality”
(“Bartleby, or On Contingency,” in Potentialities:
Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
[Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999], 254). Impotentiality is
proportionally essential to Meher Baba’s cosmology with respect to the infinite
whim that causes the created cosmos: “Whim after all is a
whim; and, by its very nature, it is such that “why—wherefore—when” can find no
place in its nature. A whim may come at any moment; it may come now or after a
few months or after years, and it may not come at all. Similarly, the original
infinite whim, after all, is a whim, and too, it is the whim of God in the
state of infinitude! This whim may not surge in God at all; and, if it surges,
either at any moment or after thousands of years or after a million cycles, it
need not be surprising” (Meher Baba, God
Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose, 2nd ed. [New
York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1973], 83-4).
[7] Meher Baba, Discourses,
1.133. Cf. “Worrying about the results is no good and of no use. If a person
wishes to do anything for others, he must do it sincerely. And having done it,
he should not worry about the results, for results are not in human hands. It
is for humans to do, for God to ordain. To remain aloof from results is
not difficult, but men do not try. Because it is human nature to think of the
results of one's actions, however, it does not mean one should worry! Man must
think, but he must not worry” (Meher Baba, cited from Bhau Kalchuri, Lord Meher, 5.1866,
).
[8] Meher Baba, The
Everything and the Nothing, 62.
[9] Meher Baba, Discourses,
III.12.
[10] Meher Baba, God
Speaks, 83.
[11] “One who is not equipped with this positive forgetfulness becomes a
barometer of his surroundings. His poise is disturbed by the slightest whisper
of praise or flattery, and by the faintest suggestion of slander or criticism;
his mind is like a slender reed swayed by the lightest breeze of emotion. Such
a man is perpetually at war with himself and knows no peace. In the exercise of
this positive forgetfulness, not only is non-reaction to adverse circumstances
essential, but also non-reaction to favourable and pleasurable circumstances.
Of these two the latter is the harder and is less often described, although it
matters just as much” (Meher Baba, God
Speaks, 213-4).
[12] Meher Baba, God
Speaks, 213-214.
[13] Meher Baba, God
Speaks, 214.
[14] Meher Baba, Discourses,
I.41, original italics elided.
[15] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II.64
[16] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II.192
[17] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II. 66.
[18] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II.65
[19] “Only spiritual freedom is absolute and unlimited.
When it is won through persistent effort, it is secured forever. Though
spiritual freedom can and does express itself in and through the duality of
existence, it is grounded in the realisation of the inviolable unity of all life, and is sustained by it” (Meher Baba, Discourses, III.101).
[20] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II.162.
[21] Meher Baba, Discourses,
III.15, my italics.
[22] “It is very difficult to grasp the entire meaning of the word ‘Avatar.’ For mankind it is
easy and simple to declare that the Avatar is God and that it means that
God becomes man. But this is not all that the word ‘Avatar’ means or conveys. “It would be more
appropriate to say that the Avatar is God and that God becomes man for
all mankind and simultaneously God also becomes a sparrow for all sparrows in
Creation, an ant for all ants in Creation, a pig for all pigs in Creation, a
particle of dust for all dusts in Creation, a particle of air for all airs in
Creation, etc., for each and everything that is in Creation. When the five Sadgurus
effect the presentation of the Divinity of God into Illusion, this Divinity
pervades the Illusion in effect and presents Itself in innumerable varieties of
forms—gross, subtle and mental. Consequently in Avataric periods God mingles
with mankind as man and with the world of ants as an ant, etc. But the man of
the world cannot perceive this and hence simply says that God has become man
and remains satisfied with this understanding in his own world of mankind”
(Meher Baba, God Speaks, 268-9)
[23] Meher Baba, Everything
and the Nothing, 69.
[24] Meher Baba, Discourses, I.54. The situation is not,
of course, exclusively human. Rather, human consciousness is itself the last stage
in the evolution of individualized consciousness through the various pre-human
kingdoms (stone, metal, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal), the form through
which the soul exhausts all impressions: “It is the evolutionary struggle that
enables the soul to develop full consciousness as that in the human form, and
the purpose having been achieved, the side-issues or by-products of
evolutionary travel (the nuqush-e-amal
or sanskaras) have to be done away
with, while retaining the consciousness intact. The process of reincarnation
therefore is to enable the soul to eliminate the sanskaras by passing through the furnace of pain pleasure” (Meher
Baba, God Speaks, 29 note).
[25] Meher Baba, cited from Bhau Kalchuri, Lord Meher, 5809,
).
[26] Meher Baba, Discourses,
I.113, original italics elided, my emphasis.
