Tagged: “Barriers to Forgiveness”
I have a question about what you call the Cosmic Perspective when a person is trying to forgive and to understand the one who behaved badly. You say that this perspective is for those who have a transcendent perspective or a religious perspective. Can you think of how a non-religious person can appropriated the Cosmic Perspective?
Not all people who do not have a religious perspective want to take the Cosmic Perspective. For those who have an interest, I would recommend that they start by focusing on the non-concreted aspects of people, particularly the mind and rationality. The materialist philosophical perspective to date has not been able to account for the mind, which does not seem to have a physical cause because the mind and the brain are not the same. In other words, the person who is trying to forgive can see that all people, including the one who acted unjustly, share an abstract, transcendent issue and that is the presence of the mind.
What if the one who hurt me is not well known to me. How can I come to understand this person? Do I have to make something up about this person?
We help people walk through three different perspectives toward the one who was unfair to them: the Personal, Global, and Cosmic Perspectives. The Personal Perspective is the one that is the focus of your question because this perspective asks you to see the history of woundedness in this person, not to excuse what happened but instead to better understand the one who hurt you. If you do not know the person well, as you say, this Personal Perspective may not be possible for you. Yet, you now can take both the Global and the Cosmic Perspective. I explain these two perspectives in the next two questions because people have inquired about each of these.
Thank you for your clarification about the distinction between forgiving and excusing. When I consult dictionaries, I see that they often equate forgiving and excusing. What do you think of that?
Those who write the dictionary definitions for excusing and forgiving probably are not philosophers and so they are making a mistake in not more clearly articulating the specific difference between these two concepts.
What is the difference between forgiving and excusing?
When you excuse, you are overlooking an offense. In other words, you no longer blame the other for the wrongdoing. When you forgive, you do not overlook the offense. When you forgive, you know that what the other person did was wrong, is wrong, and always will be wrong. When you forgive, you change the way you respond to the one who did wrong. You do not alter your perception of the wrong. You strive for kindness and even love toward the person, despite the wrongdoing.
I am a little confused. Your Process Model of Forgiveness asks the forgiver to examine the history of the one who acted badly. The point, it seems to me, is to see the woundedness in the one who was unfair. If I see that he was wounded, for example, in childhood, doesn’t this act as an excuse for his behavior?
Actually, no, this insight does not act as an excuse for his behavior because he has free will regarding how to respond to other people when he is wounded. Given his free will, he then has a choice to be fair to others or to exploit others . His previous woundedness does not automatically make him a robot who now acts badly.
