---Does forgiveness mean forgetting?

Forgiveness and its benefits have largely been argued and discussed in the human psychology literature and holy books of different religions and religious dissimilar classifications. The authors posit if you forgive others, you actually provide yourself relief by forgetting their deeds, conducts, names and identifications. While religious books encouraged forgiveness because it will be useful and constructive for a person internal growth of peace and harmony and there are rewards for those who pardon others. By this information, it is easily observable that forgiveness has been associated with forgetting the deeds of the guilty or in other words, both forgiveness and forgetting are understood in interchangeable sense by the reader. Therefore, both the words could foster interpretation errors at the outset.

Should we think that forgiveness and forgetting are both similar concepts in the context of pardoning others?

Let’s explore if it really holds true.

Suppose there are two persons, A and C. Their personality attributes are unknown and it’s not confirm whether they are inflexible, angry, calm or tranquil but A’s present life productions show that he has some tangible achievements and received full credits for all his works whereas C is not working or studying. There is one similarity among their past life which reveals that both of them have gone through the most traumatic situations, encounter massive criticism, people even damaged their work and repeatedly tried to tarnish their image plus put them in financial crises, insulted them publicly and played politics against them at every step so precisely they all have been unfortunate who were not blessed with that much of a successful life because of peak of failures and falls in their lives previously.

If we also go through the same situations they have been into; should we think of forgiving people who ruined our lives or forgetting what they did to us?

Let’s see what both of them have to say about forgiving their enemies--

A’s response: I have heard from my surroundings so many times that forgiveness give oneself relief and makes oneself forget the pains attached with the past relationship. I personally appreciate whatever I listen and those people ideology as well who reassure forgiveness but I was completely unsuccessful when I myself tried to do this. I mean I really thought to forgive my enemies and forget about them. Forgetting was hell of a difficult task. They used to pop up on my mind whenever I see similar situations in a movie, or when I was reading a book and watching news. One day I went on a party and I saw one of the individuals with whom I had abandoned all my connections. I thought I might have forgiven this guy but no! The time I saw him, his wrongdoings literally started revolving around my head. The way he used to see and talk made me realize he is dangerous. I started ignoring his presence also. Now I think I could not even forget him neither forgive him otherwise I at least had shaken hands with him.

C’s response: I disagree completely with whatever I have heard about forgiveness. There is just no point of forgiving people who make your life absolutely miserable. But since I am quiet religious so I thought to go ahead with that. I started overlooking the deeds of the people but with the heavy heart and so I tried to reestablish my connections with my enemies. I just couldn't forget all the damages they caused me but I approached them and offered my friendship all-over again. But since they are in my memory so it still hurts me somewhere inside and I further feel it’s not safe to get closer to them too much.

Analysis of A and C's responses:

• A was opened to forgiveness ideologies and tried to practically perform them.
• A tried to forgive but failed.
• A could not forget because all the functions he performed to forget; reminded him more of his past life and the people who were involved in ruining it.
• C did not decide to forgive at the first place because of his reluctance to believe the entire concept. But he did because he was religious.
• By doing so, he was still unsuccessful in making himself forgetting the heart-wrenching people and the events.

We can draw following inferences from the responses made:

• Forgiveness has nothing to do with forgetting your enemies.
• We take into account the way human brain functions. The hardware system fitted on top of our heads does not allow the deletion of memory at all.  We still remember the people whom we met in the past or when we were a child or a teenager. Brain keeps the data of the people either good or bad.
• Things which cause us damages and break us into pieces have higher tendency to remain in our brains.
• Forgiveness which means to reestablish your connections does not have any impact on forgetting the same individuals. Hence, ‘’forgetting enemies’ wrongdoings lowers down the stress level’’ is a big question because in either cases of being friends with them or not, will never make you forget the injuries to your heart and well-being.
• In many cases, having an encounter with your enemies again will rejuvenate everything and you would feel more insecure being with them. This type of decision can increase the chances of having emotional stress.

Note: Both A and C nowhere mentioned they will take revenge therefore decision of not forgiving does not necessarily leads one to take revenge. However, silent retaliation is observed here. Further, human brain amazing quality of keeping long and short memories influenced A and C's decision of forgiving or not forgiving; therefore the concept of fear of enemies cannot be implemented here.

The Success and Surrender of an Intellectual Need

Humans on the face of earth from the beginning changing and improving their life styles; making better clothing to wear, better shelter to live and better food to eat etc. Human’s inherited nature is to explore and discover things, to find an answer to the solution and to think on a certain phenomenon and drive out a meaning from the developed perception. Just like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, Warner Brothers, Bill Gates, Steve Job made inventions from their ideas and King of England James VI in year 1606 had first established an organization out of his idea. Apple Inc. which is one of the largest Hitec companies in the world had its first product made by Steve Wozniak who single handedly invented the Apple I computer which lead to microcomputers revolution.  Similarly, Bill Gates made windows through his idea and creativity. Therefore, human beings keep satisfying their need for innovation and founders of these Hitec companies followed the same intellectual self-leadership patters. The marketing literature suggests that product-makers first satisfy their intellectual need for innovation and resultantly produce a brand new thing which might never have been the need of a human being and that performs the role of ‘’Need-Creation’’.

Contradictory to the concept given above, one may say that price and income level needs of a customer are taken into consideration while an organization starts the ‘’New Product Development’’ venture. But in this case as well, the point of concern is to invent a product which ultimately increases the market share is for organization own survival needs. Organizations actually do not sell their products below the cost which has been incurred in making that product. By prospect theory, those organizations which enter into the market and sell their products below the product’s cost, gain to receive bigger market share if the product goes successful; further they aim to increase the price if they will be able to position the product perfectly.

Should we believe that inventors transforming into big businesses perform a negative function by creating the need in longer runs to profit themselves or is it something natural that happens to intellectual human beings when they follow their goals and make their dreams accomplish and their devotion ultimately return them with bigger inventions?

Let’s dig into the concept further by considering an inventor named as Jim.

He is an engineer and recently made the cable bridge and was hired by the Government for that matter. He along with his other staff members completed the project effectively and efficiently. Jim has worked hard on making achieve his target within the time limit; he has been rated high for his pragmatism at the end of the project and now the bridge is beneficial for 1000s of travellers.

Analyzing Jim’s gaining foothold will give clarity of the success model followed by him. This emphasizes on the aspect of discovering the process by which Government recognized Jim’s talents and hired him at the earlier stage. By doing so, it has been found out that Government initially when had tested 60 engineers for this project and reviewed their past performances for their approval, two other engineers scored higher than Jim. The hiring panel decided to give this job to Jim for following reasons:

• One of the member from the evaluation panel thought Jim won’t be an irritation for them in terms of too many demands regarding pay scale issues.
• Jim would benefit the government hiding the secrets which citizens have right to know e.g. unsound working environment for the whole crew.

Studying the case of Jim gives us following insights:

• An inventor, author or a scientist can be brilliant minds which can contribute to the world.
• Their brilliance of mind largely dependent upon the system in which they exist. For example, other two candidates who scored higher than Jim might have shown a personality attribute which lead to the hiring panel eliminating them. That could be anything related to their reactive natures to the environment rather than accepting the reality and adapting it. In the same way, businesses which achieve sustainable competitive advantage/ competitive advantage must be the ones who are adaptive to change and followers of the right strategy change as well but other equally competent businesses if loose the battle; that actually shows they did not accept the system which has a need-creating nature.
• An inventor can be extremely honest regarding his goals and making it a bigger success. However, the cause and effect rules of the system can be a hindrance for them. Like other two candidates did not win the project because of the system (the hiring panel); whereas the same system was beneficial for Jim. All three of them were capable in terms of their performances but their own intellectual needs have made them choosing the right or wrong paths to make their goals accomplish. And deciding for the right system ultimately.
• It further indicates, product innovation is the need of the organization first, creating the need, integrate the product into marketing communications and once the product’s need is recognized; the organization is be able to become whether market-driven or market driving. For example, it starts creating the change by competing and all the organizations while compete, keep on impacting on customer’s need recognition at every step.
• In answer to competition, organizations further should have capabilities to handle the change and if can survive in highly changing environments, be able to produce more resources which will further enable them to make more innovative products. Such innovative products will keep creating the need or might serve as ground-breaking inventions as well but such inventions in general do not have power to change the inhuman-system or bring any improvements to human welfare. Therefore, ones capabilities in a certain field really do not have any impact on alteration of other errors in one’s personality.

Insights into happiness of a common citizen of the world 

For centuries there is an unstoppable inquisitiveness in exploring the sources of human’s gratification and felicity. This is evident from the philosophy, sociology, psychology, biology, economics, business, literature, culture and all other subjective fields where authors and scientists have put their best efforts in finding treasures of knowledge either to prove their own occult desire for doing so or to provide benefit to the humanity at large where provision of benefits are correlated with attainment of complacency. For instance, Harvard Business Review’s famous article ‘’How will you measure your life’’ has been read the most after its publication which had its focus on how can final graduate students would make sure they find happiness in their careers. Further, right from the ancient history BCE; where author Ebers Papyrus addressed the issue of clinical depression till twenty-first century where American Psychiatric Association (APA) is still exploring ‘’mental disorders’’ prove the fact that quest for happy survival is foremost and momentous interest and need for the mankind.

Human tears and smile provides biological reasoning behind different emotional states. It’s an apparent observation that human’s happiness is dependent on positive life events; it’s abundantly clear from this that if one goes through the most traumatic stages of life will definitely shed tears. However, how can an emotional state be controlled and turned into one’s favor where internal responsive system is programmed in such a way that comes in terms with the one’s psychodynamics further translating into a smile in nature-contradicting events.

The answer to this lies in how human does the self-evaluation which functions as his responsive system to different set of circumstances. Self-evaluation in terms of one’s action could either be naturally/randomly or rationally performed.

Let’s consider human self-evaluation patterns. We all evaluate our current identities with respect to our self-perception knowledge, societal-perception knowledge, jurisprudence knowledge, religious knowledge or psychological knowledge. The self-perception knowledge is all composed of a variety system where its influenced by all other knowledges time to time and which existence is inevitable.

How a common citizen from any status class performs the self-evaluation to achieve complacency where the environment and world system is largely ‘’corruptionally composed’’ as quoted by various journalists in talk shows and newspapers and common people in college/ university café-terias, hotels, huts, family gatherings, offices etc.

Lets consider different human roles on the planet:

An M.Phill student who has to produce researches in order to prove his credibility as a researcher in a particular field suppose is a highest CGPA scorer in his previous degree and now carry a study to publish it in an impact-factor journal. He completes the empirical study after following paid data-collection methods with full dedication but is unhappy with the results which neither prove the hypothesis made nor goes with the theoretical framework of the study. The student with high levels of frustration goes to his supervisor and asks for a help. The supervisor is in a permanent faculty of a renowned university advises him – ‘’I understand you have put hardwork and theoretical framework is absolutely a new-knowledge creation but my experience tells me that you need to manipulate the results a bit to support the theory because it will get published without any criticisms from the reviewer of the highly impact-factor journal’’ A student listens carefully to the supervisor and acts accordingly.

The student perceives himself as a contributive being to the body of knowledge. The society further has influenced him while he acted upon supervisor’s advice and changed the original results of the study; which will make his study published and would increase his worth as a researcher. Therefore, self-perception knowledge after being influenced by societal-perception knowledge is bringing a positive evaluation of his own self further bringing a smile on his face which is a sign of complacency. This self-evaluation of this student would be criticized by those people who evaluate the environment with respect to either religious or psychological knowledge. They might say that student’s gratification is an achievement but attained by wrong means; further falsely interpreted by student himself as a right decision; which is known as ignorance in other words.

In another instance, a lady who runs a beauty parlor put second-beat quality products. In her self-evaluation; she perceives she is doing good work by fulfilling people demand. Somewhere her past-life experiences made her learn the society is more fashion and beauty conscious that it becomes vulnerable without cognitive evaluations of the beauty- services. People evaluating with respect to jurisprudence knowledge might question the mission and practice of such services. However, same like the previous case; the owner of the parlor is satisfied with what she is doing.

Happiness and having that smile on your face makes you beautiful, achieving something in life is beautiful but the pragmatism of a peaceful life describes a different story. Many Africans live their lives without clothes and in hot environments with unhappy faces. Prisoners who were victims of genocide wrote great books and showed the world many dimensions towards understanding of life. They were apparently not happy because of the many ruined precious years in confinement. Happiness may not be the aim of a large population on the face of earth. In fact, aim's reality is to creat something with truth and honesty. When you are truthful; it’s confirmed you would have to work extreme harder, encounter violent opposition, getting into controversies and massive criticisms. The presence of all of them in life-processes might teach and make you learn excessively; the learning which will serve as a great resource for a change in the world tomorrow. By then your life would become revolution and your aims would become the collective reality on which the universe is based upon which might bring storm of failures and disappointments and very little happiness in the end.