Forgiveness - a Golden Quality

Today it is July 11 or 7/11, as it is called in India. On this fateful day, the bustling city of Mumbai was attacked with seven bombs and hundreds of people died. I was reading an article related to the aftermaths of these bombings and the last few statements of the article moved me. This article tells the story of a son who went searching for his father's body after the bombings. After some investigations, he found that a poor construction laborer had falsely claimed the body hoping that he will get the compensation. The laborer even cremated the body according to Hindu rites. The son was heartbroken that he couldn't see his father's body but he was happy that he atleast got to perform the last rites with his father's ashes. What was most touching was, when police wanted to arrest the laborer for false claims, the son refused to lodge any complaint and forgave the poor laborer.

Forgiveness is beautiful quality, which is rarely found. We are not talking about forgiveness with ego; we are talking about forgiving completely without any ego at all. Most of the times, if somebody does something, we do forgive but with ego. We put ourselves at a higher pedestal and look down upon the other person as a wrong-doer and then forgive him. And why do we do that? Just to instill guilt in the other person and hence, boost our ego.

Here we are talking about forgiving completely and freeing the other person of any guilt. When something happens to us, the first thing we do is to either accuse others around us or blame the situation. We constantly build negativity inside us about other people who have hurt us. Forgiving wholeheartedly only relieves us from that negativity. It just removes any kind of negative energy blocks that we may have accumulated in us.

Another important point is whenever such incident happens where we think we are hurt, we think the person is at fault for our suffering. Most of the times, it is not the person who has hurt but it our own expectations as to how the other person should have acted or behaved, bring us that suffering. So who are we to throw our anger on others or spew out negative words and blame others? We see people keep that anger and negativity towards the other person for years together, sometimes even till their death.

During the first level meditation courses, Life Bliss Program 1, our Master takes us through a beautiful gratitude meditation where we offer gratitude to everyone, even our enemies and forgive if anyone has done any thing to us. I have seen people breaking down during this meditation. People find it the most relieving meditation. All the built-in negativities towards others which we have suppressed overtime just evaporate with these two - forgiveness and gratitude.

When we forgive whole heartedly and replace that it with love and gratitude, we are transforming and our transformation transform people around us. That is Paramahamsa Nithyananda's message - transformation of humanity through personal transformation.

(You can read the article here.)