Only ego needs forgiveness. Forgiveness is really a shift in perspective, in the telling of the story of “what happened.” This may sound a bit cryptic. Or it may sound like an adequate way to look at things as long as life is going smoothly but not at all realistic when your spouse cheats on you, or your retirement account gets drained. When things go south, it might sound simply ignorant. Somebody has done (been) wrong, you believe, and somebody’s got to pay.
Your perspective on forgiveness depends on your level of conscious awareness. At a lower level of awareness, every injury requires punishment, so the idea that only ego needs forgiveness simply doesn’t seem to work. As you evolve, you can shift your perspective on situations, seeing the transformation that comes out of a challenging experience, and you can forgive those who you believe have harmed you.
When you’re living from the highest level of awareness, you recognize that the truth of who and what you are is love, light, and peace. You recognize this truth in all of creation. At this level nothing needs forgiveness.
At this level, you can even see that your so-called enemy is fundamentally love, light, and peace. At the highest level of awareness, making peace with others is natural; it happens automatically because you can see immediately that whatever wrong someone might have done, you have committed the same or a similar thing yourself—even if only in your imagination. You can also know that their so-called wrong was the result of something you too share, whether that be ignorance, fear, or a deeply ingrained habit. As a result, you empathize with those who look like enemies when viewed from a different level of awareness; you live out of genuinely felt compassion. How can you be at peace with others? There are no others.
Ultimately, making peace with the past is having compassion toward those who originally taught you the false ideas that brought you so much pain.
From the highest level of awareness, you can understand that these people were taught the same things by those who came before them. You can see that generation by generation, they had forgotten their true identity, their essential nature. From the highest level of awareness, you know, you feel, and you embody the truth of who you are. And who you truly are is love, wholeness, and oneness with source. Here you can move out of self-criticism, judgment of others, and seeing things as right or wrong. Here forgiveness doesn’t need to happen; here you can recognize that there is actually nothing to forgive, ever. You see that all there is to do is simply return to the truth.
The correct process of forgiveness allows us to overcome the perception that there is something separate from us and awakens the awareness of the intimate interconnection we have with every form of life.