Are you forgiven?
 
Do you care if you are forgiven?
 
When you think about the world… When you think about the behavior of people… When you contemplate your own behavior, how much time do you spend considering how what you are doing will affect that other person and/or do you even care?  Once you have done something that negativity affected the life of that other person, do you spend any time seeking forgiveness and attempting to remedy what you did that hurt that other individual?
 
Really, take a moment and think about this. How much hurt have you unleashed whether consciously or not? What did you do after the fact? Did you seek forgiveness? Did you try to fix what you did?
 
If you wish to trace the true problems of the world to their very source, this is where you will find it.  
 
Virtually all religions tell people to be good; do only good things, and not hurt other people. Sure, there are few radical sects of certain religions that proclaim that the hurting of other, non-believers, is okay. But, at the heart of all things good and right, we each understand that is not true.
 
In virtually all of the world religions people are taught to be good for a reason. In Hinduism and Buddhism if you are good, in your next incarnation you will live a better life. If you are bad, your next life will be filled with pain and unhappiness.
 
Christianity is arguably the most precise in how and why one should be good, verses being bad. If you are good, you go to heaven. If you are bad, you go to hell. In fact, in Christianity you are always taught to recognize your sins and to seek forgiveness from the lord. As a child, growing up in a Christian family, it was constantly put in my mind that I was bad and that I must strive to become better while seeking forgiveness.  Each night I would say my prayers, focus on what I believed I had done wrong, and ask forgiveness for my wrongful actions.
 
How about you? Was this programming placed in your mind as you were growing up.
 
Though one can most certainly argue that this style of programming can be very detrimental to the emotional development of a child, in some ways it is a good thing in that it makes the child, who will later become the adult, understand that there are consequences for wrongful actions, especially for those actions that were directed towards someone else.
 
Again, were you ever taught to analyze your actions, define them as good or bad, and then ask for forgiveness for what you did wrong?  If not, how have you developed as an adult? Do you think or even care about what you are doing? Do you care about the consequences of your actions; spiritual, karmically, or otherwise? Or, do you simply think about yourself?
 
Mostly, do you seek forgiveness for your sins?
 
One can certainly proclaim, and I am one of those people, that asking god for forgiveness is the easy way out. You pray, you acknowledge, but how does that undo what you have done—especially if you have done that something to someone else?  How does that fix anything?
 
So often I encounter people who are unfulfilled with their life. They are living an existence that they are not happy with; they do not have the relationships or the job or the possessions or the fun they want in their life. They are unhappy and unfulfilled. Yet, they never look to themselves as the cause of this pain. It is always something in the Out There. ...That if they had that something or that someone in their life then everything would be better. This is even the case with people who may be seen as successful. Inside, they are not content.
 
One of the great things about age is that, as you get older, you get to observe lives and life patterns via the perspective of time. In my life, I have watched as several people, who at one point were on top of the world, then they fell very far due to the fact of how they treated other people and what they did to other people. In one case, this man was a proclaimed Christian. Yet, he messed with a lot of lives of a lot of people. And, he fell. He fell hard.  He was not the only one I saw this happen to. Meaning, just because someone succeeds, for however long, if they are bad to other people, if they hurt other people, they will encounter their retribution. We have recently seen this a lot in the news with the lives of those celebrities who treated people poorly.
 
So, this brings us back to the question, “Are you forgiven?” What are you doing to become forgiven? If all you are doing is praying to your god and asking that abstract ethereal being for forgiveness, how does that fix the life of anyone you hurt? How does that erase the pain you have caused?
 
The fact is, we all do wrong things, we all make mistakes. We all may hurt other people, accidentally or selfishly, but it is what we do after that fact that sets the rest of our life into motion. Don’t believe that just because you did something that hurt someone and you got away with it, that you will forever be free and clear. Time is an evil master and there is time for your karma to take hold.
 
You may not be able to repair all the hurt you caused, but if you do not try, if you do not attempt to erase and reverse what you have done, what do you think will happen to you next: next week, next year, next decade, next lifetime?
 
You can ask your god for forgiveness but if you do not get that forgiveness from the person or persons you hurt, do you believe you are truly forgiven?
 
What will you do today to actualize your forgiveness?
 
Think about it.