You never forget your thoughts, impressions, tendencies. If you feel that you were wronged, you always keep the grudge. So long as you keep the grudge in your mind, you are a slave; you have to pay a high price for it. You cannot forget it; you have to forgive. Unless you have learnt to forgive, you have not entered one bit into the spiritual life.
If you do not forgive, you are gone. Don’t think of
spiritual life, not even of moral life — the first
principle of moral life is to forgive. Why? If you remember the negative
thought, if you do not know how to forgive, that will bother you. It may have happened
twenty years ago, somebody did something wrong to you, you practically don’t
remember it now. Suddenly that man walks in front of you. Just observe your
mind: ‘What this fellow has done to me!’ And you jump, you are agitated, you
lose your temper, are almost ready to do something.
Just watch your mind. The same thing happens whenever you
remember negative things that are
done to you by others — you are miserable. Somebody said: ‘What is happiness?
Good health and bad memory.’ Thank God, if you forget. But what is our condition? Bad health
and good memory. The more sickly we are the more we remember the injuries that
have been done to us by others: ‘Oh, so and so did this to me!’ We never
forget.
If you want to be peaceful in this world, do one thing:
forgive everyone who has done some wrong
to you. Say from inside: ‘O God, forgive them. I will forgive them.’ If you
don’t do that, then enjoy
the misery.
Raja yoga is not just to take you to heaven, to make some
miracle happen. No! Raja yoga helps
you to realize your own true state. There is no miracle here; you need not go
anywhere; wherever you are, you begin to feel your true state. That means you
have to remove from your mind all those attachments, all those feelings, both
negative and positive. The negative feelings are more disturbing
than the positive. That is why you have to forgive — you can’t forget them.
Many times people say: ‘Oh, forget it.’ You can’t forget it, it will be there.
If you forgive, even though you remember, they don’t disturb
you. If you want to have full freedom
and peace of mind, the only way is to forgive, not to react to negative things.