Can forgiveness be a negative attribute?
Can forgiveness be a negative aptitude? I would say if forgiveness is misunderstood or misapplied, then it can be negative.
So yesterday I did a retreat in Leicester, so I was talking to one devotee. He was consulting, he was close to me, he was consulting a psychotherapist. And the psychotherapist told him and then the devotee told me that your bhakti wisdom, whatever you are learning, it's all psychologically dangerous for you.
It is psychologically damaging. If you want to become psychologically healthy, stop practicing all this. Now maybe 10 years ago, I would have told him, stop going to that psychotherapist.
He is a demon. But then I decided, let me talk with him. And when I talked with the psychotherapist, I understood that this devotee had terrible misunderstandings about bhakti itself.
He had the idea, humility means that we should always feel bad about ourselves. Humility essentially means we should focus on Krishna. Tolerance means that when people do bad things to us, we should just be accepting it all.
That is one aspect. But it is not that, so he was thinking, feeling bad about ourselves and letting others do bad things to us, that is humility and tolerance. That is actually a psychologically damaging understanding.
And that is not what humility and tolerance actually are. So sometimes, if forgiveness is misunderstood or misapplied, then it can be damaging. So, if we don't consider the other person's disposition at all, if we don't consider that other person's nature and we keep forgiving and trusting them indiscriminately and they again and again keep hurting us, then that forgiveness basically, by that forgiveness, we end up becoming like a cloth rag.
It is like, they just give us like a wet towel and throw us away. So, we become used and abused by them. So, if we understand forgiveness, ultimately all these virtues, they have to be seen in the light of the supreme virtue of devotion to Krishna.
And to the extent this assists us in our devotion, to that extent, we can move forward towards Krishna. And to that extent, if we start making them into the supreme virtue and then we lose track of a higher purpose, then forgiveness can become a weakness. You know, in Indian history, there have been, there are some Indian kings, some Muslims, not Muslims in the sense of, not among Muslims, but some Arabic invaders, they invaded them.
And then that invader would come with a big army and say, please forgive me. The king would defeat him and say, please forgive me. And then that invader came first, second, third, fourth, eighteen times he came.
Eighteen times he was defeated. And then, nineteen times he came and he defeated the Hindu king. And then, immediately he killed him.
So, now if you see, this person, whatever the reason, we don't know. Now, Krishna did that to Jarasandh. But Krishna had a purpose.
What was Krishna's purpose? Krishna wanted Jarasandh to get all the demons from everywhere at one place. So, he would get one batch of demons, Krishna would free the world from them and he would let Jarasandh go. Jarasandh would get the other batch of demons.
And Krishna would free the world of those batch of demons and then he would get third batch. So, Krishna was efficiently freeing the world from demons. And Krishna had the power to do that.
Eventually, he took care of Jarasandh also. So, if we artificially do something like that, where we bear somebody who is malevolent and we indiscriminately forgive, then that can have counterproductive consequences.