Forgiveness: The Cosmic Passage from Karma’s Bondage to the Soul’s Freedom

⏱ 13 min read

Human history, from beginning to end, can be read as a chronicle of wounds, injustices and revenge. When we turn and look at our own lives, the picture is hardly different; in nearly every heart there are wounds that have refused to close for years, betrayals we have never been able to forget, and quiet resentments we keep carrying in silence. So why is it that, for thousands of years, every ancient teaching, every sage, every prophet and every spiritual path has whispered the same single, luminous word into the ear of humanity? Why do all these disciplines, in different tongues and across different ages, call us back to the very same place — to spiritual forgiveness?

When we forgive the one who has wronged us, who has burned us, who has perhaps turned our whole life upside down — to whom are we really doing a kindness? Whom are we truly forgiving? These questions reach far beyond any surface morality; they touch the very purpose of our existence in the universe, the evolution of the soul, and the cosmic laws themselves. Forgiveness, contrary to what is often assumed, is not weakness, not surrender, not swallowing an injustice in silence. Spiritual forgiveness is the soul cutting away the shackles that have bound its own feet — it is an act of the highest consciousness and of the deepest will.

Why Spiritual Forgiveness Feels Impossible: Inner Accounts and the Addiction to Suffering

We all know how noble a virtue forgiveness is; yet the moment we try to live it, a wall of stone rises inside us. Why does spiritual forgiveness feel so impossibly hard? The answer lies hidden in our own psychological darkness, in the depths of what the old teachings call the “false personality.”

Maurice Nicoll, in his monumental Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, explains with great discipline why we cannot forgive through the concept of “inner accounts.” Without ever noticing it, we keep a constant ledger of debts inside our minds. We feel that life owes us, that God owes us, that the people around us owe us. Nicoll observes that as long as we go on keeping these inner accounts, we will always feel that someone is in our debt — and that this sense of being owed brings our inner growth to a complete halt.

When we believe someone has wronged us, the “false personality” within us begins to take an almost sickly pleasure in the resentment. Most people cling so tightly to their sorrows, their grievances and their sense of “being in the right” that they cannot bear the thought of surrendering that suffering. In Nicoll’s words, these inner mutterings and negative emotions turn our psychological country into a swamp thick with poisonous mosquitoes.

The Turkish teacher Ergün Arıkdal explores this same theme at depth in his Knowing Oneself and Positive Living series. For Arıkdal, so long as we take orders from our own lower self and weigh every event through the distortion of those impulses, we are merely running blindly after our own narrow interests. At the slightest touch to the ego, at the smallest bruise to our pride, we rush to defend ourselves and begin to nurse a grudge. Yet to release the negative energy and accumulated blockages within, Arıkdal reminds us of the words of the great Sufi master Jalāl ad-Dīn Rumi:

If there is hatred, malice or enmity in your heart, empty them out; and in their place pour love, tenderness and mercy.

Jalāl ad-Dīn Rumi

You cannot pour the water of love into a cup already filled with bitterness. And this is exactly where spiritual forgiveness begins. We cannot forgive because forgiveness asks us to step down from the “victim” throne we secretly love, to lay down the arrogance of the lower self, and to surrender the pride of being right. Forgiveness is the ego’s hardest examination; the real battle is never truly with the one who wronged us, but with that stubborn voice within. To recognize that inner voice is one of the quietest — and most shattering — thresholds on the path of knowing oneself.

Whom Are We Really Forgiving? The Cutting of Invisible Cords

When someone harms us and we refuse to forgive, we imagine we are punishing them. The truth is the exact opposite. Holding on to bitterness is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. So when we turn toward spiritual forgiveness — whom are we actually forgiving?

The truth is that we are forgiving ourselves; we are setting our own soul free. With every person we refuse to forgive, an invisible dark cord of energy forms between us and them. The anger we carry chains us both to that person and to the traumatic moment itself. The spiritual guide White Eagle, in his work In Love There Is No Separation, offers the reader this quiet but shattering truth:

Do you not know that in forgiving others, you set yourselves free? So long as you judge your brothers harshly and refuse to forgive them, you are pronouncing the very same judgment upon yourselves.

White Eagle — In Love There Is No Separation

White Eagle reminds us that life is governed by the law “As you sow, so shall you reap,” and that as long as forgiveness truly lives in our heart, we are releasing ourselves from the bondage of our karma. At this point spiritual forgiveness is no abstract moral gesture; it is a concrete step the soul takes toward spiritual freedom.

Shakti Gawain, in Creative Visualization, describes spiritual forgiveness from a psychological and energetic angle — how forgiveness dissolves the weight we carry. She suggests bringing to mind those who have hurt us, and quietly telling them that we forgive them and set them free. At the end of the practice, she reminds the reader to turn inward and say: “I forgive myself, completely, for everything I have ever done — here, now, and forever.” In that moment, the greatest forgiveness of all becomes one we offer to our own soul. What we forgive is not the other person’s act itself, but the dark hold that act has kept upon us.

Why Must a Human Being Forgive? The Wheel of Karma and Cosmic Justice

All spiritual teachings agree on one point: for the human being to evolve — that is, to walk the path of spiritual evolution — forgiveness is an absolute necessity. Why must we walk the path of spiritual forgiveness? Because the cosmic laws do not operate through revenge; they operate through cause and effect. In the universe there stands an unerring mechanism of divine justice known as karma, and it overlooks no one’s account.

Edgar Cayce, in his work The Destiny of Man, explains with striking clarity why forgiveness is vital. For Cayce, the commandment “Forgive, and you shall be forgiven” was not given in vain. Revenge is oil poured upon fire; it creates a new strand of karma and keeps the evil circulating. When someone wrongs us and we respond with hatred, we tighten the karmic knot between us and them, and lock ourselves into that destructive frequency. Cayce teaches that spiritual forgiveness is the one and only way to put an end to a negative karmic bond.

Dr. Karl Nowotny, in A Doctor’s Messages from the Spiritual World, approaches the same truth from the side of inner healing. “Were it not for this tiny little word, forgiveness,” he writes, “there would be no end to crime and murder.” The greatest error of the human being is to imagine that every wrong must necessarily be paid back with punishment. Yet understanding and forgiveness are the ultimate law of psychological care and true healing. To carry no wish for revenge — to forgive — is to break the spiral itself.

The Evolution of Conscience: Dr. Bedri Ruhselman and the Divine Order

Among the sources that treat forgiveness most systematically from the standpoint of the soul’s evolution, pride of place belongs to the majestic works of Dr. Bedri Ruhselman, who compiled the teachings received from the Great Mission Plan for the benefit of humanity — Divine Order and the Universe (İlâhi Nizam ve Kâinat) and Destiny and Necessities (Mukadderat ve İcabat).

Ruhselman explains human evolution through the “mechanism of conscience” — and places spiritual forgiveness at its very core. Conscience, he shows, is not a static thing; it is a duality — a balance — that climbs to ever higher levels as the human being grows. On the lower rungs of evolution, conscience wavers between “taking revenge” and “seizing what belongs to another.”

But as the human being develops, the very realities shift. Ruhselman offers a shattering example through the feelings stirred by a murderer who has killed one’s own father: to a person living in the lower realities, killing the murderer in return can seem like a matter of conscience, almost a right.

Yet when the human being widens in understanding and rises into the higher realities — love, compassion, tolerance — the poles of conscience reverse completely. For such an elevated soul, the question is no longer “Shall I take revenge or not?” That great human being, feeling the immense suffering the murderer will undergo under universal law for the terrible deed, begins instead to ache with compassion for him. The higher conscience arrives at a different question altogether: “How can I lighten the spiritual anguish of this human being?”

This is the vast perspective Ruhselman offers, and it shows exactly why spiritual forgiveness is a cosmic necessity. To forgive is to break loose from the cords of the lower reality — resentment, hatred, revenge — and to leap to the threshold of the mission plan: to universal love, to divine consciousness. The person who wrongs us is, in truth, a demanding “springboard of evolution” the universe has set before us so that we may strengthen the muscles of patience, endurance and forgiveness, and free ourselves from the narrow reality we had been living in.

The Divine Secret of True Forgiveness: Seeing the “Other” Within Yourself

One of the summit figures of the Islamic Sufi tradition, Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, shows in Tafsir-i Kabir Ta’wilat and Fusus al-Hikam how spiritual forgiveness binds the human being to the Divine itself. For Ibn Arabi, to respond to the one who has wronged us with kindness and with the most beautiful conduct is to subdue the lower self, to defeat the satanic pull within, and to take on the character of God. God Most High is Ghafur — the Ever-Forgiving — and Rahim — the Ever-Merciful.

Ibn Arabi reminds us that the Divine, through its own light, veils the dark states, the sins and the errors of its servants. When a human being forgives another’s fault and draws a veil over it, that human being becomes a place of manifestation — a locus — for a Divine quality. To do the opposite is to let hatred and anger darken the heart, and to veil oneself from the lights of the higher realms.

But while the anger inside us is still so alive, while the ego keeps shouting “I am the one in the right,” how can we forgive? How do we climb to that higher station?

The answer, once more, emerges from Maurice Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. The Gurdjieff teaching offers the reader this luminous psychological secret, capable of opening a real inner awakening: we judge others because we believe them to be filled with faults, and we refuse to admit that those same faults live in us. Yet true spiritual forgiveness only begins the moment we recognize, within ourselves, the very flaw we have been condemning in another. Nicoll formulates this shattering truth with precision:

Remember that to find in yourself the very thing you have been judging in another has a magical effect — it neutralizes the whole situation. This is true “forgiveness.”

Maurice Nicoll

The other person has hurt us mechanically, unconsciously, driven by impulses like a machine. But are we, too, not so often mechanical, unconscious, self-centered and full of our own faults? The one who observes himself honestly, who can truly see his own contradictions and his own darkness — his own false personality — how could such a person go on nursing hatred toward another? If you can see the person before you as yourself, and yourself as that person, you will find it impossible to hold violence or bitterness toward them. You and they are, in truth, woven from the same cloth. Mercy, compassion and ultimate spiritual forgiveness are born precisely from this realization of oneness.

In Closing: The Alchemy of the Soul and Cosmic Freedom

In the light of all these teachings, spiritual forgiveness does not mean approving the harm that was done, bowing before injustice, or turning a blind eye to broken boundaries. Spiritual forgiveness is a leap of inner understanding. It is giving balm to the wound that still bleeds within us; it is drawing our own soul out of the dungeons of the past, of anger and of pride.

From the teachings gathered by Dr. Bedri Ruhselman to the wisdom of Ergün Arıkdal; from White Eagle’s tender guidance to Edgar Cayce’s karmic readings; from the Sufi depth of Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi to the searching psychological analyses of Gurdjieff — every source cries out the same universal truth: while hatred and bitterness nail us, like heavy lead, to the coarsest vibrations of the earth, spiritual forgiveness lightens us, shatters the wheel of karma, and lifts us toward the universal light to which we truly belong.

When you forgive someone, you cannot undo the painful event of the past; but you most certainly reshape your own future and your own spiritual destiny. The shortest answer to the question “Why must we forgive?” is this: because we must evolve. And at the end of that long, dark captivity, you come to understand that the one you truly forgave, the one you truly freed, the one whose chains you finally broke — was all along your own self.

Sources Consulted

• White Eagle, In Love There Is No Separation
• White Eagle, The Bridge Between Two Worlds
• Edgar Cayce, The Destiny of Man
• Ergün Arıkdal, Knowing Oneself
• Ergün Arıkdal, Positive Living
• Karl Nowotny, A Doctor’s Messages from the Spiritual World (Vol. 1)
• Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vols. 1–5)
• Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, Tafsir-i Kabir Ta’wilat (Vols. 1–2)
• Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, Fusus al-Hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom)
• Shakti Gawain, Creative Visualization
• Dr. Bedri Ruhselman (compiler), Divine Order and the Universe (İlâhi Nizam ve Kâinat)
• Dr. Bedri Ruhselman, Destiny and Necessities (Mukadderat ve İcabat)