How to forgive a person and let go of resentment: why it doesn't work

AMAlexander Mashrabov / Alexander Volchek

When we approach forgiveness, what does a person forgive, and should they forgive only after someone asks? The very act of asking forgiveness means you have certain strengths within you. If you did not ask, you did not have the strength. But people are mired in an ego computer and various ego programs. Forgiveness is an enormous issue in human life. At the same time, people will keep using the word to manipulate themselves, other people, and the world. Today's topic is why some people find it so hard to forgive and others find it so hard to ask for forgiveness. What is happening here? What is this situation? Let me begin with this: when we examine forgiveness, even if you are sitting here interested in the subject, you are always guided by your own feelings about a particular situation. Perhaps you have a friend and wonder why they will not ask your forgiveness. Or there is a relative you cannot bring yourself to approach and ask for forgiveness.

Or you would like to ask, but feel that nothing will change. There is an endless web of possibilities. On one hand, asking forgiveness seems difficult, and forgiving seems difficult. There is also doubt about what will happen if you do it. Why do people approach the act of forgiveness at all? What does it mean to them? We always come back to something I often say: you want to ask forgiveness out of ego, and you forgive someone out of ego. I remember many situations like this. It was very common in business. People would attend coaching or a training program, where a speaker told them it was very important to forgive former partners so that money would start coming in, or ask certain people for forgiveness so that everything would go well. They would return and ask forgiveness. This happened to me several times. It was quite funny. Someone would come, ask forgiveness, leave, and a few days later I would tell someone about it.

I remember an acquaintance saying, “He was just at a training program. I was there too, and everyone was told to ask for forgiveness.” Once I saw it becoming a recurring pattern, I naturally began paying close attention in business. What does that mean? When someone asks forgiveness, you look at what is actually happening. It creates an expectation in you; you seem happy. What kind of happiness do you receive? You either become superior to the person asking, or at least their equal. It is as though you are being brought back from the bottom of a swamp. They knocked you down, then came to apologize, and overall you are glad. They brought you back from the bottom of the swamp. This is a widespread psychological trick, used by politicians, bosses, managers, and families. First you come down hard on someone, then ask forgiveness. If you put them down for a long time and then apologize several times, the person you attacked seems to enter a different kind of relationship with you—a different kind, the one that existed before all of this.

If you plan that whole path manipulatively from the start, those actions will usually lead to a situation where you can use the person. We will also examine what happens to people when someone asks their forgiveness: what they expect or do not expect, and what happens to their inner state. What does a person forgive? Should they forgive only when asked, or even when no one has ever asked? As for the businesspeople who came to ask my forgiveness, there were not an enormous number of cases, but there were some. As I observed it, I began looking at what a person was doing at the very moment they asked—when I knew the situation. The first thing that happens is that the recipient has a kind of habit: you feel you ought to ask the other person's forgiveness too. There is that habit.

There is even a day when everyone asks everyone else's forgiveness and is supposedly expected to do so. It is like one person asking, “How are you?” and you being expected to ask the same in return. Someone recently wrote to me, “How are you?” I replied, “Good.” Why must I ask how the other person is? Who said I must do that? Is it actually the right and necessary action? Perhaps at this moment I am not interested. Many questions in our society are asked without any meaning. Someone arrives at work and the manager asks, “How are you?” What difference does the answer make? The manager goes straight on: “Look, our revenue is below target.” They were not particularly interested in how the person was. There is also the question of the answer you give. Is the other person ready for it? If you give a specific answer rather than the standard “Good,” how will they feel and what will they do? Someone asks, “How are you?” You say, “Everything has become very difficult.”

Someone will say, “You cannot answer that way. You are pouring negativity onto them.” There is a whole range of arguments even about that, let alone something as difficult in human relationships as asking forgiveness. People often ask forgiveness when the other person does not even understand what they are apologizing for. That can produce all sorts of unusual states in the recipient, as though they themselves were guilty of something. People very often do this out of ego. What is that state? It is when you seek forgiveness for one purpose while presenting it as another. Training programs tell people to ask forgiveness so that the energy changes. Does it work that way? In a certain sense it could, but it does not work linearly. Asking your partner for forgiveness does not mean money will come to you. You did not have it before; you may never have it, or everything may get much worse. It does not work that way. This is a very important point.

People clearly do not grasp it. On the other hand, are they asking forgiveness because a training program told them to do it to get money, or because they were told this is the true meaning of life and there is no other way to live? To build normal, good relationships, you need a genuine way of relating to people. But notice: businesspeople do not need that. People who want to make money do not need it. Most people who attend such programs—or even those who do not—want to make money. They want to make money. That is very important. They are not seeking a state of living, genuine communication and a true, genuine relationship with people. Truly relating to people is not a matter of apologizing for something you did once. How will you behave from now on? What will you do? How will you relate to every person, not just your business partners, employees, bosses, or some other group? How will you relate to people in general, every day? What genuine daily actions will you take? Genuine daily actions.

The simplest actions with the most ordinary people—with absolutely all kinds of people, from your children and relatives to complete strangers. Will you treat them all equally, absolutely equally, completely equally, rather than apologizing only to people of a special class or with particular characteristics or qualities? We can see that an apology has a purpose, and you need to understand that purpose. Olya, when I answered your question, I said the most important thing is at least to formulate for yourself exactly why you are asking forgiveness. Then look at whether it can work that way. Suppose you are asking a former partner to forgive your mistakes or improper actions so that you can remove emotional blocks and avoid problems in the future. You need to know for certain. Sit down and ask yourself honestly, “Wait. If I do this, does the right chain of energy actually work?”

The answer will always be: it definitely does not work. That chain, even according to your logic or the logic of the person you heard it from—you can ask them again—works if you do it consciously, if you consciously and genuinely want change from the other person. You have discovered your real purpose. There it is. With that purpose, this is clearly a different matter. Of course, you can come to the person and say, “Listen, I have been given an assignment.”

AVAlexander Volchek

You can say, “Listen, I have been assigned to ask your forgiveness. But I do not really feel guilty. Even if I do, I simply want to use you in this situation. I want to use you, but I do not know how and cannot do it. I do not have the strength. Yet I want to resolve this. What should I do?” Saying that to the person will give you ten thousand times more energy than any other action in this situation. Of course, there is another possibility: you have truly felt your guilt, you know it completely, and from a pure heart and pure energy you ask forgiveness, ready to lose everything for that forgiveness, for that person. Ready to lose everything. Neither your money nor your emotional state matters to you. You are prepared to suffer for the rest of your life because you harmed that person. You are prepared to suffer because you harmed them. Before asking forgiveness, ask yourself whether you are really ready to live through that. If you are not, why get into the situation?

Why go toward it? Why approach it at all? But there can be an intermediate step if you cannot do that—and most modern people cannot. It is very hard. People are mired in an ego computer, ego programs and states, and a very broad spectrum of negative energies. They simply lack the strength. Strength. You need incredible power within you to take such an action. Someone in society might call you a loser for doing it. But it is power. It requires extraordinary strength. You have to sacrifice yourself for another person, truly sacrifice yourself, not because it will bring money. Those considerations are not there. Not there at all. Forget them. They do not exist in this. If you examine karma or cause and effect, you will see there is no rule that asking forgiveness normalizes some particular course of your life. What course? You do not even understand the causes and effects that have already occurred. If you understood them, you would not have taken those actions.

At least you would have observed them consciously from the start and related to them differently. But suppose you go to someone and discuss this honestly: you cannot do it, something is raging inside, you are in a strange state, and you try to examine that state together, recognizing that they may have a different opinion. I had already developed a very clear perception, including perception of people's thoughts. When someone came to ask forgiveness solely because it was an assignment or a technique, I usually listened and said, “Okay.” When you respond that way, it is interesting to see what happens. If someone is asking sincerely, they do not expect a response from you. How you react makes no difference to them. You could say, “You are a complete asshole,” and they would all the more say, “That is true.” Genuinely. But people often wait for a particular response because they did not come to ask forgiveness sincerely.

Of course, some people do ask forgiveness sincerely. We are examining an area worth noticing in yourself. It is present in modern people's lives. It is there; it stays there. You respond by simply listening: someone has come and conveyed information. A person came to you. A couple of years ago, someone returned after eight months and said they wanted to call me. We spoke, and they said, “I wanted to ask your forgiveness.” I said, “Go ahead.” They did. I said, “What shall we discuss next?” It is interesting: after that, the person disappears forever. Disappears forever. If they ask forgiveness—even manipulatively—they should want to hear your response. I have the right to say, for example, “That was not enough of an apology. To properly ask my forgiveness, you need to pay me ten million dollars.”

They say, “Ten million dollars? Why?” Wait: you believe you did something bad, and you describe those actions. You harmed my life. In that particular case, the person acted very manipulatively and caused some harm. They did not manage to inflict substantial damage. They simply could not; they lacked the strength. But they wanted to harm me. They wanted to harm me. You intended to cause me damage. Who said that, having come here, you have the right simply to leave? You need to see it through. You owe me ten million dollars. “Can I do something other than pay money?” “Yes. Come and work in my garden for six months, twelve hours every day.” “Could I do something else?” “Probably. Let's think.” It is my choice. If you harmed me, I have the right to choose what it takes. Olya, notice the paradox, the whole problem. If you are asking forgiveness in a situation like this, you need to calmly understand and accept that the other person has the right—the full right—to disagree or to make demands of you in return.

We live in a very interesting world. People think they have the right simply to ask forgiveness and everything disappears, dissolves. Everything dissolves. What does that mean? Can you kill ten people and simply ask forgiveness? Someone says, “No, you cannot kill ten people and just apologize. You need to spend forty years in prison, for example.” Because someone decided it should be forty years. In another country, they decided it should be fifteen hundred years. Recently, Turkey imposed fifteen-hundred-year prison sentences on a world leader and another thirty or forty people. They decided that was the punishment for murder, for a particular genocide. This was discussed in relation to the Israel–Palestine conflict. That is their view of a particular punishment. If the person asks forgiveness, does it go away? It does not go away at all. Society generally holds that in some courts, if someone repents or asks forgiveness, their sentence will be reduced.

Is that right? The courts then examine whether the repentance is real or merely something done within the court proceedings. Some rulings say, “This person has not truly repented. They are probably manipulating the court, so we will not reduce the sentence.” In other cases, they say the person has fully repented and therefore will not do it again. But someone established those rules. Someone simply established them. They concern violations of laws established partly by society and by the state, in its own way in each country. We can see the same person accused in one country and not in another. Each state determines it differently. But when we move into personal matters—forgiveness between business partners, for example—no one has defined the rules. Someone ripped someone off, lied, set someone up, was unfaithful, betrayed someone, spoke badly behind their back, and so on.

No one has defined what forgiveness is. No one. That is why I often say: if you learned what you had truly done and became aware of your actions even in this life—let alone previous lives—you would fall to your knees and not get up for the rest of your life. You would be unable to. Why? If the right energetic process took place, with causes and effects distributed and the weights of energies set in their proper balance, you would not have the strength. How much strength would it take to live through that? Within a person's present life and spiritual structure, an enormous amount of time would have to pass to live through it. You would need to remain with it constantly, constantly live it, truly, not virtually. You asked whether it is necessary to do this at all. If someone takes this action, they must understand what they are measuring, what quantity of energy they are measuring. We live in a society where people have long lost any sense of how to measure debt and energy.

Suppose someone gives advice that turns out badly, and because of it another person loses twenty years of their life, their children, or their health. Someone recommends a particular trip, but they should not have gone because it brought suffering. I remember one time—

Someone suggested a trip to a volcano. I read about it and discovered that it had certain fumes that seriously harmed human health. Someone gave advice, a recommendation. Are they responsible or not? The point is that people today do not understand what they are responsible for. That is exactly why karma exists. Look, karma would not exist if people understood responsibility and wanted to act on it. What does understanding mean? They would understand and want to keep balancing those scales, if they knew how. That is the point. It is automatically connected within the spiritual world—“automatically” in a qualified sense—within your spiritual consciousness, your system of soul and spirit. You perceive some of these things, but not the whole. Imagine you did ten bad things to someone and they did five hundred bad things to you. What is a bad action? Do those ten outweigh the five hundred, or are they less? Is it enough for each person to ask forgiveness? People usually meet and say, “Shall we make peace?” “Let's make peace. I ask your forgiveness.”

One asks forgiveness, then the other. What is the point? It is a game. It does not balance the scales or put anything in its proper place. If you do it purely as a social act, it is nothing. It may even create new karma through ignorance, failure to act, or manipulation. Why are you doing it? So someone gives you money? So you advance in your career, get a nice dinner tonight, receive praise, or have someone tell others about you? Why? What kind of action is this? Notice how seriously people regard sacred actions: when they come to repent, ask forgiveness, or go to confession. What does that mean to them? What are they really doing, and who has the right to absolve their sins? Does the person sitting there have that right? If they had the full right to absolve sins, they would transform the person's entire karma.

They would absolve everything and transform everything. But first, if this person is God's representative or the representative of certain energies, then in absolving sins they should see other sins in the person too. The person confessing lacks understanding; they do not perceive or see the whole space. The representative should tell them about their other sins, rather than simply listening to what they report and saying, “I absolve your sins,” or, “Not this time. Pray some more, or recite a particular meditation eight hundred times.” I could recite it fifty thousand times. What would that do? Not a meditation—a prayer or mantra, or something. What would that do, especially if I do it only so that this person will absolve my sins? It is like godparents having to come and memorize a prayer for a child's baptism. What kind of test is that? What kind of test? If we look at it as a whole, let us truly perceive what it means. I am not dismissing these aspects. They are all good aspects of perceiving people, the world, and the Universe, of truly understanding prayers and these energies. But truly—not virtually, not as a game.

Easter. It was just Easter, and at different times I was present when people exchanged greetings. You see how stylized the occasion is. Just a holiday; everyone congratulates one another. Ask two or three questions and the mood will change completely. It will sour. You can spoil it with just a couple of questions: what do you understand about this? How do you understand it? Then people drink alcohol and celebrate. Celebrate what? What? They show whose Easter bread looks a certain way, how the eggs are decorated, who is wearing what, or what someone posted. Do you know what this event is, this advent, this world event that happened two thousand years ago? What poured out over the Earth? What energy is it? What happened, and what truth is in it? Or must you perform a particular rite, go to church or somewhere else, and then have a drink or tap eggs together? It is a game. If it is a game, let us calmly acknowledge that.

Otherwise, you would all need to ask forgiveness. Of course, not everyone does this. Some people go with an inner sense of the Christ impulse. They feel it pouring out onto the Earth, onto all people. They perceive it fully within themselves as a real event happening now. There was a time when people felt it fully, and a time will come when they know it from within again. I am talking about particular layers. Everywhere, there are people for whom this is a profound event they live through. But we live in a society where those same people have to participate in a certain area of the game. They encounter others and are present with them. People send Easter bread pictures, messages, and words on WhatsApp, and they have to respond. They cannot simply not respond. It is the same with forgiveness. If someone sends, “I ask your forgiveness,” you are supposedly expected to respond. “But I am not asking yours.” Then let us sit down and examine it for real, look at it for real, and go deeply into it.

Let us look deeply. When someone comes to ask forgiveness, they bring something into your space. Olya, you asked whether this action is necessary. First, you must know that you are bringing something into another person's space and be ready for different responses. At a minimum, be ready for them to set conditions for forgiveness. Be ready. If you are asking, are you prepared to accept or consider those conditions? Are you ready to pay for it or not? I mean “pay” figuratively, in quotation marks. Or are you not willing to deal with it at all? Are you ready to do it? Again, people do not understand the weights of energies, where they owe what. They think that if they treated an employee badly by firing them unfairly, they can make up for it by going to church, donating a hundred thousand dollars to charity, or hiring other employees. Notice all these fashionable ideas about karmic management. I had a good video about that on the channel.

That is what they say: you once fired an employee badly, so hire five employees and pay them properly, or fire someone correctly, or treat someone honestly. They want to make it all balance out. But you affected that particular life. You are measuring lives against one another as though “a life” were just a word. You cannot do that. You cannot harm one person and help another and thereby balance karma. No way. It does not work like that. You might have turned someone down for a job when you should not have, changing their life and affecting three or four hundred people down the line. You turn someone else down, and nothing happens. Nothing at all. It is even good that you turned them down. You think it was bad, but it was good. Good that you did it. Look: you are not doing this for the other person. That is the point. That is your illusion. Where did you get the idea that you are doing it for them? First, let us consider a situation where the other person has not asked you to do anything, but you go and ask forgiveness.

You think you are doing it for the other person. If you think that, it is pure ego. You are in darkness. In darkness. If you think you are doing it for that particular person, you are in darkness. The only way to do it consciously and genuinely is for the sake of truth and a healthy relationship with people, not for a particular individual. “This is the truth, so I will do it. Truth is why I will do it,” rather than, “I am doing it for someone else.” What are you doing for them? You might bring them nothing but trauma, an entirely false perception, or inflame their ego. It can go different ways. Of course, you might bring them a good state, make peace, and have everything work out. In this video, I am absolutely not arguing that you should not ask forgiveness. Absolutely not. That is not my point; I am discussing its essence. What you certainly should not do is make it false. That is meaningless.

If it is false, not genuine, it is meaningless. It is like forcing someone to ask your forgiveness. Telling a child, “Until you apologize, such and such will happen. Until you apologize, such and such—

“Until you apologize,” and so on and on. You expect particular things from the child. I have four children, and there is a situation with one of them right now. Sometimes children categorically refuse to apologize. Categorically. They do not apologize later either, or after more time has passed. What do you do? Nothing. Live. I immediately ask myself why I want to hear an apology from my children. Do I simply want to appear stronger, to show that I am in charge and make the decisions? Or do I want to show them a genuine way of perceiving people? I recently liked something Sadhguru said in a video: do not forbid children to spend time on their phones and social media. If they are on social media, it means you personally do not interest them. Of course, that embellishes things somewhat. There is another side: social media pulls people in; it is not only about whether you attract their interest. But there is a great deal of good sense in that idea. A great deal.

Connecting this with forgiveness, what does the child feel with you at that moment? With you personally? How do they experience being with you, and what state do they live through? What matters more: that they apologize, or that they say nothing and things remain as they are because they do not understand what it means? Or they do not think this is a situation in which they should say those words. The words mean something else to them. They are not a little dog trained to repeat whatever they are told. They have their own opinion and impulses. Must you insist and train them to use those impulses? That is a big question. A very big question. Is it more important simply to instill a habit of apologizing in every situation, whether they are right or wrong, and of thinking that an apology resolves everything? First they get a piece of candy, then a thousand dollars, then a million. They are rewarded just for saying a word. I know an enormous number of people who apologize very easily because they have developed a system for making it an easy action.

They do it not because they truly mean it, but because they know how to manipulate socially. Olya, that is why I gave you the example of sometimes telling yourself honestly, “I want to do this to manipulate the situation.” We live in society, and in this company there is no other way to deal with the boss. The boss is set on firing me unless I apologize once a week, and I need to live and earn money. Then apologize once a week. What difference does it make to you? But understand it properly. Do not turn it into a psychotherapy issue. Understand that it is an ordinary social game, a social game. If someone says I am introducing manipulation, I am not. We live in a world of endless social games, and first of all you must not deceive yourself. If doing it makes you sick, do not work at that company. But perhaps you have no choice. There are situations with nothing else available: one job within a hundred thousand kilometers, no other possibilities at all.

You are bound to it hand and foot, and they will take your kidney if you quit. Well then, say the word and calmly collect your salary. Why argue? Why defend your interests? Play by the rules. Identify your main purpose in business, at work. If it is to earn money, apologizing is no problem. If your main purpose is the truth of existence, that is a different question. A different question, completely different. Then you must not take those actions under any circumstances. Look at what your purpose is. Will you be punished for such an apology? Will you? Someone might ask, “Will I be punished for this kind of apology?” If it is a completely neutral social game, it is simply an automatic process. You prepare a report and are told, “This report is shit.” You know it was done as requested. The boss calls it shit because they habitually say that to every second person. You say, “Oh, I'm sorry. I will certainly prepare a new one.” You will bear no responsibility for that. On the contrary, you are not deceiving anyone.

It is simply a social convention, a social convention. You need to be able to see that calmly, normally, and truly. Truly see it, truly understand it. Some people really do find it difficult to ask forgiveness. I know them; I have seen people unable to do it. I have said to someone, “Ask my forgiveness,” and they could not. You say, “Try, for your own sake, to ask from time to time.” Or, “Try asking your husband's forgiveness sometimes,” or your wife's or your children's. They cannot do it. “What for?” “You just said yourself that you did certain bad things. Ask forgiveness for those things. You did them.” “How long must I keep doing it?” Keep doing it; it is never-ending, an endless matter. Understand that you can no longer make up for it, and this would be a good thing for the other person. “Why do it?” Try to recognize that you did something bad and would like to work through it.

In that situation, go to the person and say, “I was discussing this and was told I should ask your forgiveness. I cannot bring myself to do it. I do acknowledge that I probably made a mistake somewhere. But a voice inside tells me I made no mistake because you are not a good person either. Still, I will try. May I keep trying to ask your forgiveness for this from time to time?” That is a high level of conversation. A high level, honest and very honest. Imagine conversations like that between children and parents, husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, partners, and so on. But there are social environments where it is impossible, where all the foundations break down, the family ceases to function, the partnership's rules cease to work as soon as people do this. They can no longer be together because the myths have dissolved. In many places, people work together and remain partners because there is conflict. Without conflict, there would be no partnership. Conflict holds them together. They do not know how to remain connected through anything else; otherwise they sit in silence.

People often cannot sit with themselves in silence, simply be and do nothing. Nothing at all. Not silence as an exercise, but simply being in that state. They cannot be together outside conflict. Yet the modern world tells everyone to go to psychotherapists and work through things, work on themselves. Why? To repair relationships, restore their state, feel better, and so on. But there is no guarantee it will help them feel better. I always say you can work through things and work on yourself because it is the truth, not because you will feel better. In many situations, relationships will get worse rather than better. Worse, because you will no longer have shared interests or any other reason to be there. Sometimes I attend gatherings where the only reason you talk with people is that a particular holiday brought you there. Or people are drinking alcohol, and you find yourself in that space with them. It happens. You have no particular interest, and the conversation exists only because you are in the same room. There is no other conversation.

Alcohol often holds people together, and that is a major problem. Then meet without alcohol. Make the effort. If you are going to meet often, continually, in different places, try doing it without alcohol. It is very useful to begin feeling and hearing the other person, being with them, taking an interest in them, and finding something within that. But you have to want to be interested in another person rather than yourself. You have to want it: to live through another person's experience, try to hear and understand them. Here is an interesting paradox. Someone says, “I listened and understood, and realized I am not interested in them. I heard and saw them, and I am not interested. Do I have to keep trying to understand them? Not necessarily.” This can happen with your children or parents too. Someone is told to repair their relationship with their mother or father. In the process, they realize they are not interested in that person. What should they do? Society is divided. One side says you must spend time together because this is your mother or father.

On the other hand, society says—

The other side says you should not spend time together at all. We live in a social world; why spoil the relationship? Do not meet. Which is right? Look, the question does not arise when you begin treating people equally. It does not arise. But it is not easy: treating your own children and others' children, your own parents and other people's parents, equally as human beings. You also understand that many people are much closer to you than your relatives because karmically you may have spent decades, centuries, or many lives with them, while with this person it is your first ten or twenty years. This is very difficult. Moreover, suppose someone is constantly manipulative or drinks every time you meet. Why must I meet them? Olya, here is where it starts: “Well, if your parent is constantly killing children in front of you, hitting someone, or drinking, do not meet them. But under other circumstances you should.” That is a strange position. A strange one.

Wait: if they constantly lie in front of me or manipulate me, should I still meet them? “Put up with it.” Why put up with it? Why? We live in a very interesting time. People licensed at a bank can recommend stocks and get it wrong constantly, while someone without a license cannot give stock recommendations and can be punished for doing so. A doctor can treat a person because they have a license; if they make a mistake and the person dies, they have no trouble. Someone without a license does something, and they are in trouble. We live in a time when people lie. Look at politics and the economy: people lie every day. The media lie, the mass media lie. People read this information and make decisions based on it, only to find that the information was interpreted incorrectly. Yet nothing happens to those responsible. No one sends them to prison. I do not see reporters, journalists, or newspapers being sent to prison. Someone sues them. Politicians constantly change laws, but they state different positions and views from the outset.

From the outset—especially political parties. They start by presenting different views, which means someone is always deceiving people or heading in the wrong direction. That is the time we live in. We need to understand that some areas go unpunished, while elsewhere people are punished for things that should not warrant it. There will be a counterweight in any case. It will happen in any case. So when we approach forgiveness—of other people, the world around us, ourselves, people close to us or distant from us, particular situations—the first step is to learn to truly live. Feel what is happening, understand these causes and effects, your next steps and actions. See what you do, why and how you do it, and where it will lead. Know and be aware of it. It is not a matter of a single isolated act. An isolated act is an illusion. What does “too late” mean? That your forgiveness will not work? If you understand that any act of forgiveness is directed toward the truth of the world, it is never too late.

Olya, “too late” does not exist in that sense. The action has already been done. Bingo! It has already happened. Karmically, everything will be arranged ahead of you in any case. Your apology will not remove the karma of that event. It may create a new impulse that leads to other events. But within the chain of causes and effects and the mistake you made, these are like events that do not intersect. They may have a resonance, but there is no 2D or 3D linearity. They intersect only in a qualified sense. When you say it is too late, you again want to manipulate something. You want the other person to understand, hear, or say something to you. What do you want to happen? You expect an action. Ask yourself how you will judge whether it is too late. If the person is alive, is it too late? Is it too late to ask your mother or father for forgiveness? If they are alive, is it too late or not? What does that have to do with being alive? All right: it is connected because you can ask them personally.

If we stay within this life, can it be too late? Of course. Olya, imagine you did something awful fifteen years ago. Does that carry weight? Fifteen years of life have already passed, an enormous number of things have happened, and now you arrive and ask forgiveness. A whole different life has already unfolded. That is it. Your action can indeed change a particular set of future events. Go ahead. But it is already too late in that sense. Essentially, any apology is too late relative to what you are discussing, Olya. Take a linear explanation, although this is not really how it works: you did something bad, and a bad course of events began. It came to life and started moving. The moment the bad action happened, it was already too late. You should not have done it. So this social notion of forgiveness being “too late” does not apply here. It does exist in the social world. Social forgiveness so that you receive a higher salary, can have a beer together again, get back together as husband and wife—

or do something else. It exists in the social world, but in real energies, in the real world as perceived from that perspective, of course it does not. Of course it does not. How would you do it? An entire course of events has already formed. The event itself created everything that followed. Asking forgiveness is simply living through karma. Sometimes you think you are apologizing or doing a good deed because your brain came up with it. You do it because the time has come to carry out that event and normalize a particular flow of time. The very act of asking forgiveness shows that you have certain strengths. When you did not ask, you lacked the strength. So this question of whether you can ask or cannot, do it or not—you do not always control it. If you have the strength for all of this right now, you can leave these actions undone. They are not needed at all. At all, Olya. If you live in a state of perceiving the world and the laws of the Universe and are ready to follow them, you do not need to ask anyone for forgiveness.

You understand that it is meaningless. That is the point: you would fall to your knees and never get up. The paradox is that you would not have enough time to do it. You have lives ahead in which you will live through it, and you accept that calmly. But you want to ask forgiveness to improve your future life. People often do it to avoid hell, improve the time between death and birth, or, in a broader frame, improve later incarnations. To improve things. Not to mention improving this life so they do not suffer before death, so someone has a better life, or so they feel better. They invent ways for everything to be better. They create all these possibilities for themselves. In reality, the only thing you can do is understand that the actions have happened. Yes, you will live through their consequences ahead, as the spiritual world and spiritual beings of a high hierarchy determine—not you. You will not choose. As though you could sit down and say, “Offer me options for resolving this event in which I fired a hundred people when I should not have—

“or ripped people off, deceived them, or killed them. Tell me how to deal with it.” They offer options, and you say, “I do not really like that one. I am not ready to go to prison now, but I could in my next incarnation. What else?” “You might not be born in the next incarnation.” “That is excellent. I like that. Let's take that one.” Notice that people want a choice. But this material is very difficult to perceive, very difficult to understand in terms of reality and what is happening. A person needs a fairly high level of awareness and a desire to work on themselves. Not a high level of knowledge, education, or books, or the idea that they are a highly developed spiritual being because someone read that somewhere—

a spiritual being, because someone read it in astrology, you saw it on some kind of trip or elsewhere, or someone told you. You need a very high level of consciousness in observing how your states and thoughts arise, the flow of causes and effects, your decisions and actions. You need to understand that. Here is an interesting example of an action. Yesterday I was having breakfast with the children. It was a bit of a circus; they were arguing. At one point, I said something to my son in a very neutral way, and it sent him reeling two meters backward. Tears began to appear. He said, “Why are you looking at me like that?” It was interesting because I was in a very neutral state of perception. Neutral. I was very aware at that moment, very aware of perceiving these little beings. A child is a substantial spiritual being in human form. He is small now in terms of human mentality and consciousness, but his spiritual being is substantial. I was perceiving him with awareness beyond just this little human being.

His psychological and physical system could not bear my gaze. It simply could not bear it. Then the big question is what happens next. How does everyone else react? What impulses are set off in them, and who says what? If other adults are at the table, how do they react? What happens next? How do people experience it, what do they feel, and how does the child interpret it? The child has an interpretation, just as anyone does. People think they are no longer children in the way they interpret things. They have simply learned to say certain phrases and not say others. Forgiveness is an enormous issue in human life. At the same time, people will keep using the word to manipulate themselves, others, and the world until, at some point, in some situation, they truly understand what asking forgiveness really means.