What would it take to honestly tell someone you loved them, if they have done something destructive towards you?
I’m wondering what it would take for me…I think I’d have to have a deep understanding of my own self, of my own values and my highest ideology, so that I was not attached to anything in the outside world. If this were true, is there anything anyone else could do to me that I could not look past, and be able to honestly say that I love them, because I would see myself in them and in everything that they do?
I’d have to have healed my past, corrected the injustices I had done to myself and others, and be totally ok with my very real and human impulse to be destructive in any form. I would have to be able to see any act of destruction as an effect (not a cause) of who the person is, by realizing that my destructive acts do not make me who I am, but that they are effects of me. I would have to acknowledge that I am, at least in part, responsible for the state of our world, and of the environment that this person grew up in that influenced them to choose to believe that being destructive in any form is a means to an end that is good.
If I could do that, I would consider my time on this earth worthwhile.
M.
3 Comments
Forgiveness of others — those who have harmed you — is truly a profound state, you are right.
I have a question for you, Mark. Let’s think not of someone who has harmed us, but of someone who has harmed a person we love. I agree when you say that to achieve forgiveness requires such a deep understanding that one is “not attached to anything in the outside world”. But, and here is the question, if this were true, would this detachment also mean that one has ceased to love? I wonder what you think.
Yeah I think it all starts with yourself and how much of the forgivness comes from deep with in yourself.Before forgiving someone you would have to be at peace with yourself.I could say more,but I’d just be repeating all your thoughts.Mark you have a keen mind that sees and hears so much.I love how you are always questioning your values in order to be a better person in this world.
Btw I am watching the Michael Jackson memorial tribute service on tv and stevie wonder is performing.That me me think of you for a little bit.
I believe that the forgiveness and the love that you offer someone who’s hurt you has to last beyond you. You have to instil that feeling into your children too. Your ‘other profound states’ bleed into concepts of justice and honouring the memory of people wronged. It’s messy. Look at Israel and the Palestinians as just one example of people locked in profound emotional states.
Your time on earth would certainly have been worthwhile – as long as the sentiment didn’t die with you. Having said that, though, – that you must pass on forgiveness and love on to your children – it’s a very difficult thing to deal with your own children being wronged. You’re right to say it’s a very human impulse to be destructive. The parental instinct that kicks in to defend your young is to destroy, I can vouch for that.
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