On why the one who cannot say “I am truly sorry” has not yet begun the only work that heals — and why the good, gazing daily at the vile, are quietly becoming what they fight.
I do agree with the author's warning about the abyss that the usual human response to hatred is answered with more hatred. This erpetuates the wound and there is genuine danger in becoming psychologically inhabited by the very thing we oppose.
I do, however, question his conclusion that there is “exactly one thing” that breaks this cycle, and that thing is forgiveness.
What if forgiveness is not the source of freedom at all
What if forgiveness is one possible consequence of something deeper, namely the freedom of mind.
Consider the question:
"How would your life change if you were free of the whims of your mind?
What would that feel like if you directed your mind and never, for a single moment, the other way around?
That changes the meaning of Nietzsche's abyss.
The danger now is not simply that I gaze into darkness, the danger begins when what I encounter there gains authority over my mind.
Someone harms me.
Anger arises.
Resentment arises... perhaps even hatred arises.
Those responses are real, but they are not commands.
The moment I recognize that distinction, another possibility appears where I can choose to experience what my mind produces without being governed by it.
That, to me, is freedom.
From that freedom alliws ne the choice andI may forgive or I may not.
I may seek reconciliation, restitution, separation, justice, compassion, or simply refuse to return the injury.
I do not have to forgive someone in order to refuse to hate them.
I do not have to forget the wound in order to stop allowing the wound to direct my life.
This is precisely why I hesitate over the author's movement from “beast” to “human” to “divine.”
Humans are not standing outside nature upon some spiritual ladder.
We remain equal participants in the same interdependent circle. Nature does not keep a moral ledger of apology and forgiveness.
I don't see relationships are disturbed and equilibrium is continually sought again.
We humans have placed words such as sorry, forgiveness, debt and redemption upon that process and sometimes mistake the symbol for the thing itself.
Perhaps “I am truly sorry” matters not because the words possess some intrinsic healing power, but because they can represent recognition, ergo, that I understand that something I did disturbed the relationship between us.
Perhaps forgiveness matters when it represents another movement in that I will no longer allow what happened between us to govern what I return to the world.
But neither word is the thing itself.
The deeper thing is agency.
The author writes that the vile person can come to “live rent-free” in the mind of the person who opposes him.
I agree, but eviction does not necessarily require forgiveness it only requires reclaiming ownership of the mind.
That is where the cycle actually breaks.
The abyss can show me hatred without requiring me to hate.
A wound can give me reasons for vengeance without requiring vengeance. Fear can demand protection without being allowed to determine my behaviour, and my mind can produce all of these things... and still I can CHOOSE.
Perhaps that is the freedom we have been searching for, not a mind emptied of darkness but a consciousness no longer obedient to everything the mind produces.
It is pethaps there that forgiveness finds its proper place.
It is no longer an obligation, no longer “the only way out,” and no longer a debt owed by the wounded to the person who wounded them.
It becomes one of many things a free mind may choose.
I bringbup the circle, that does not require me to forgive, its only requirement asks only what I will return to it.
And when the wound no longer determines the answer, I am free.
The author's model still contains a subtle “must” in that the action of "you must forgive" is a requirement to become free.
Mind freedom reverses the causality.
"When I am free, forgiveness becomes something I may choose, not something I must perform in order to become free.
Good push, and I'll answer it straight. Forgiveness, as I hold it, is universal — the beginning of healing. I don't see how anyone becomes whole without it: not the whole of freedom, but the gate to it. The wound carried un-released keeps carrying you, however sovereign the witness sitting on top of it. Even the Zen master who has crossed the river carries the water until, in some form, he sets it down. That setting-down is forgiveness. The road runs on past it — never around it.
One guard I suspect you'll want held too: this is an inner release, never a counsel to stand in the blow. The one who truly releases a wound is the one who can walk away clean. Boundaries aren't conditions on love; they're what love looks like when it's wise.
And as for freedom — the only true freedom is freedom from desire, from attachment, and finally from the ego itself. That's exactly the ground the Vertical is turning to now, so let's do this properly, not in a comment box. There's a cluster of pieces coming over the next week — forgiveness and the ego, read through Jung and the archetypes, including the Passion. "From The Matrix to Black Swan" — the shadow read as a ladder — is already up, and there's more coming on how the process of self-healing actually manifests, in Jung's own terms. Keep an eye out. I'd rather have one reader who pushes me here than a hundred who nod.
Hmmm... What a thoughtful rebuttal, and I want to acknowledge and thank you for that. You don't see much of that here.
This exchange reminds me of the time immediately after my NDE, as I was struggling to formulate a fitting chronological account of the experience—what transpired, but also trying to inject the proper weight of the feelings into it, which seemed important in their own expression.
I was sitting there, having been asked to write down my experience for the NDERF website—the Near Death Experience Research Foundation.
For days I struggled to come up with a description worthy of the feelings the experience evoked.
Finding and choosing the proper words to immortalize it was, for me, extraordinarily difficult because the words didn't seem to exist.
What I can assure you without hesitation was that the NDE experience humbled me to my core.
Before my experience, I thought myself a pretty smart dude.
I had accumulated knowledge, concepts, explanations, and perhaps even confidence in my ability to understand and relate to things.
Then, "poof".
All of a sudden, something happened that made that entire ego architecture provisional.
What I had regarded as unassailable truth lay scattered on the ground, burning in effigy.
The security blanket I fashioned and relied on was unceremoniously stripped away.
I lay naked before the reality of my new existence.
So words—and certainty in my thinking—took on a different meaning and relationship for me.
I do not feel my experience makes me any smarter or better than anyone else, nor do I claim otherworldly knowledge either.
The only thing I learned was humility.
I think my difficulty here is less that I disagree with your conclusion than that I can't yet properly evaluate it.
When you write God = Love = Truth = Consciousness = Brahman, you've given me the equation without defining the variables.
I don't know your experience, so I struggle to understand what your personal relationships with words like God, Love, Truth, and Consciousness mean to you.
These words do not have a universal understanding.
Pretty much everyone holds and carries different referents for different people, so the shared symbol can create an illusion of shared understanding that I don't feel is there.
Until I know the values of x, y and z, I can't know whether I agree with the equation—and, by your own argument, I can't follow the symbols all the way to their referents.
As an example, you say:
“Setting down the wound is forgiveness.”
My first reaction isn't necessarily to say you're wrong.
It's to ask:
What would it feel like if you directed your mind, and never, for a single moment, the other way around?
Is setting down the wound necessarily forgiveness? Is it freedom? Release? Acceptance? Equilibrium? Or are these simply different symbols we have attached to an experience that may precede all of them?
Perhaps the Zen master doesn't become free when he puts down the water.
Perhaps he becomes free when he realizes he can choose whether to carry it.
Putting it down may then follow. Forgiveness may follow. Love may follow.
Lots to unpack here in a well thought out post.
I do agree with the author's warning about the abyss that the usual human response to hatred is answered with more hatred. This erpetuates the wound and there is genuine danger in becoming psychologically inhabited by the very thing we oppose.
I do, however, question his conclusion that there is “exactly one thing” that breaks this cycle, and that thing is forgiveness.
What if forgiveness is not the source of freedom at all
What if forgiveness is one possible consequence of something deeper, namely the freedom of mind.
Consider the question:
"How would your life change if you were free of the whims of your mind?
What would that feel like if you directed your mind and never, for a single moment, the other way around?
That changes the meaning of Nietzsche's abyss.
The danger now is not simply that I gaze into darkness, the danger begins when what I encounter there gains authority over my mind.
Someone harms me.
Anger arises.
Resentment arises... perhaps even hatred arises.
Those responses are real, but they are not commands.
The moment I recognize that distinction, another possibility appears where I can choose to experience what my mind produces without being governed by it.
That, to me, is freedom.
From that freedom alliws ne the choice andI may forgive or I may not.
I may seek reconciliation, restitution, separation, justice, compassion, or simply refuse to return the injury.
I do not have to forgive someone in order to refuse to hate them.
I do not have to forget the wound in order to stop allowing the wound to direct my life.
This is precisely why I hesitate over the author's movement from “beast” to “human” to “divine.”
Humans are not standing outside nature upon some spiritual ladder.
We remain equal participants in the same interdependent circle. Nature does not keep a moral ledger of apology and forgiveness.
I don't see relationships are disturbed and equilibrium is continually sought again.
We humans have placed words such as sorry, forgiveness, debt and redemption upon that process and sometimes mistake the symbol for the thing itself.
Perhaps “I am truly sorry” matters not because the words possess some intrinsic healing power, but because they can represent recognition, ergo, that I understand that something I did disturbed the relationship between us.
Perhaps forgiveness matters when it represents another movement in that I will no longer allow what happened between us to govern what I return to the world.
But neither word is the thing itself.
The deeper thing is agency.
The author writes that the vile person can come to “live rent-free” in the mind of the person who opposes him.
I agree, but eviction does not necessarily require forgiveness it only requires reclaiming ownership of the mind.
That is where the cycle actually breaks.
The abyss can show me hatred without requiring me to hate.
A wound can give me reasons for vengeance without requiring vengeance. Fear can demand protection without being allowed to determine my behaviour, and my mind can produce all of these things... and still I can CHOOSE.
Perhaps that is the freedom we have been searching for, not a mind emptied of darkness but a consciousness no longer obedient to everything the mind produces.
It is pethaps there that forgiveness finds its proper place.
It is no longer an obligation, no longer “the only way out,” and no longer a debt owed by the wounded to the person who wounded them.
It becomes one of many things a free mind may choose.
I bringbup the circle, that does not require me to forgive, its only requirement asks only what I will return to it.
And when the wound no longer determines the answer, I am free.
The author's model still contains a subtle “must” in that the action of "you must forgive" is a requirement to become free.
Mind freedom reverses the causality.
"When I am free, forgiveness becomes something I may choose, not something I must perform in order to become free.
free.
Thoughts?
Dave —
Good push, and I'll answer it straight. Forgiveness, as I hold it, is universal — the beginning of healing. I don't see how anyone becomes whole without it: not the whole of freedom, but the gate to it. The wound carried un-released keeps carrying you, however sovereign the witness sitting on top of it. Even the Zen master who has crossed the river carries the water until, in some form, he sets it down. That setting-down is forgiveness. The road runs on past it — never around it.
One guard I suspect you'll want held too: this is an inner release, never a counsel to stand in the blow. The one who truly releases a wound is the one who can walk away clean. Boundaries aren't conditions on love; they're what love looks like when it's wise.
And as for freedom — the only true freedom is freedom from desire, from attachment, and finally from the ego itself. That's exactly the ground the Vertical is turning to now, so let's do this properly, not in a comment box. There's a cluster of pieces coming over the next week — forgiveness and the ego, read through Jung and the archetypes, including the Passion. "From The Matrix to Black Swan" — the shadow read as a ladder — is already up, and there's more coming on how the process of self-healing actually manifests, in Jung's own terms. Keep an eye out. I'd rather have one reader who pushes me here than a hundred who nod.
— The Architect 🕯️
Hmmm... What a thoughtful rebuttal, and I want to acknowledge and thank you for that. You don't see much of that here.
This exchange reminds me of the time immediately after my NDE, as I was struggling to formulate a fitting chronological account of the experience—what transpired, but also trying to inject the proper weight of the feelings into it, which seemed important in their own expression.
I was sitting there, having been asked to write down my experience for the NDERF website—the Near Death Experience Research Foundation.
For days I struggled to come up with a description worthy of the feelings the experience evoked.
Finding and choosing the proper words to immortalize it was, for me, extraordinarily difficult because the words didn't seem to exist.
What I can assure you without hesitation was that the NDE experience humbled me to my core.
Before my experience, I thought myself a pretty smart dude.
I had accumulated knowledge, concepts, explanations, and perhaps even confidence in my ability to understand and relate to things.
Then, "poof".
All of a sudden, something happened that made that entire ego architecture provisional.
What I had regarded as unassailable truth lay scattered on the ground, burning in effigy.
The security blanket I fashioned and relied on was unceremoniously stripped away.
I lay naked before the reality of my new existence.
So words—and certainty in my thinking—took on a different meaning and relationship for me.
I do not feel my experience makes me any smarter or better than anyone else, nor do I claim otherworldly knowledge either.
The only thing I learned was humility.
I think my difficulty here is less that I disagree with your conclusion than that I can't yet properly evaluate it.
When you write God = Love = Truth = Consciousness = Brahman, you've given me the equation without defining the variables.
I don't know your experience, so I struggle to understand what your personal relationships with words like God, Love, Truth, and Consciousness mean to you.
These words do not have a universal understanding.
Pretty much everyone holds and carries different referents for different people, so the shared symbol can create an illusion of shared understanding that I don't feel is there.
Until I know the values of x, y and z, I can't know whether I agree with the equation—and, by your own argument, I can't follow the symbols all the way to their referents.
As an example, you say:
“Setting down the wound is forgiveness.”
My first reaction isn't necessarily to say you're wrong.
It's to ask:
What would it feel like if you directed your mind, and never, for a single moment, the other way around?
Is setting down the wound necessarily forgiveness? Is it freedom? Release? Acceptance? Equilibrium? Or are these simply different symbols we have attached to an experience that may precede all of them?
Perhaps the Zen master doesn't become free when he puts down the water.
Perhaps he becomes free when he realizes he can choose whether to carry it.
Putting it down may then follow. Forgiveness may follow. Love may follow.
But freedom came first.
Cheers!
gazing into the abyss of my news feed. Feeling the tug of the algorithm and the abyss. Grateful for the reminder.