The Importance of Self-Forgiveness

There's a lot of talk these days about forgiving others and how important this is for our own inner peace. When we hang on to our grievances regarding what others have done to us, we feel constricted and leaden inside. Forgiveness serves to release us from this tightness. However, what is often neglected is the equally important necessity of forgiving ourselves. We all have mistakes in our past that sometimes continue to plague us into the present. We wish we could reverse the video recorder, as it were, and redo those parts of our lives where we "messed up." But we unfortunately cannot, so we seem to be stuck with all of our mistakes. Obsessing over past errors then becomes like an unhealed wound that festers and will not heal. It is easy, therefore, to understand why - in our own religious culture - so many people, especially evangelicals, find a theology of substitutionary atonement so appealing. If one can say: "Jesus took the blame and punishment for all of my sin, thereby releasing me from guilt," then the resulting liberation can be experienced as quite powerful.

However, for those of us who do not find release in having someone else - especially someone as special as Christ - be punished and killed for our misdeeds, there is another way of release. And that is to realize that the "self" which "blows it" is not the True Self after all. To the contrary, our REAL self is a vast lake of love and awareness that underlies the more superficial parts of our personality, which correspondingly form the "sunlight diamonds" dancing up on the surface of that lake. Those flecks of light are the things we say and do - sometimes helpful and sometimes not so helpful - during the course of our daily lives. Our temptation, however, is to consider those glints to be who-we-really-are, causing us to miss out on the vastness of our underlying Identity. Therefore, we actually NEED those times when we mess up in order to move us - forcibly, almost - to a deeper level, where we REALLY and TRULY dwell on the level of Being. All character development, in fact, is simply a deepening awareness - through both thick and thin - of this deeper Self.

And for those seekers who are Christ-followers, the liberating truth is the fact that this deeper Self is actually the ever-present reality of  . . . Christ!  Christ, Buddha-Nature, Brahman, Tunkashila, Gaia, Sophia, the Tao, Yahweh, Allah, Wakan Tanka, Ein Sof, the No-Self - they are all THERE, on that deeper level! But we could never KNOW the majesty of that vast Lake of divinity unless it were lit - you guessed it - by the sunlight diamonds of our more superficial selves dancing up on the surface! Forgiveness in this context comes in realizing that we can let go of our mistakes (AND our accomplishments) in order to identify instead with the deeper level of the vast True Self.

Oh, and one more thing. A lot of the talk these days about self-love or self-forgiveness can seem quite shallow in its tendency to remain caught up in a solipsism of "me, myself and I." In truth, the Self is a community, and the "I" who does the self-forgiving is actually not simply "me" but is instead . . . . [ ] !

Photos: (Top) Rosy and Western Yellow Paintbrush blooming above Saint Louis Lake near Fraser, CO, August 8, 2015; (Middle) Elephanthead blooming on the shore of one of the Twin Crater Lakes, Rawah Wilderness, CO, August 14, 2015; (Bottom) Fireweed and Arctic Gentian blooming on the shore of Lake of Glass, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, August 15, 2015