There’s a phrase everyone loves to throw around: forgive and forget. Forgive a person’s wrongdoing, and forget it ever happened. Clean slate, no residue. It sounds so simple when you say it out loud. It’s also one of the most idealistic phrases we’ve ever agreed to pretend is realistic.
Because that’s not the world we live in. The world we live in holds grudges. It remembers. It looks at someone who made a mistake, the regular, everyday human mess-ups that come from someone just being a person, and quietly decides that’s who they are now. It’s easy to hold onto something small longer than it deserved to be held onto. It’s easy to let one bad moment quietly rewrite how someone is seen from then on.
So maybe the phrase itself needs rewriting. In Satsang, we say something that asks for more, because forgive and forget was never going to cut it. We say to have divyabhav. To see divinity in others.
Sit with that phrase for a second and it feels almost impossible. Seeing divinity in those who have wronged you? That feels like a big ask. But divyabhav isn’t really asking anyone to see divinity the way divinity usually gets imagined, glowing, perfect, and entirely untouchable. It’s asking for an appreciation of the association that person has with Bhagwan. That association alone is supposed to be reason enough to forgive. Not because the wrong didn’t happen. But because the association is bigger than the wrong.
None of this means becoming blind to what’s wrong. Divyabhav doesn’t erase the ability to recognize when something was hurtful or disappointing, it just refuses to let that one action become the whole picture of a person. Forgiveness was never the same thing as having no boundaries. A boundary can exist and the heart still doesn’t have to go bitter. What needs to be corrected still gets corrected. Respect for the person, and for whose they are, doesn’t have to leave the room.
Santo, our scriptures, and Bapa have said this in a hundred different ways: the way to progress within satsang is to see the good in others. Bapa has said that when he looks at someone, he sees Sadhu Keshavjivandas. He sees the other person as himself. And just like that, the playing field is leveled.
Bapa doesn’t only teach divyabhav, he models it. Maybe that’s why the way he sees others feels so different. He doesn’t wait for someone to become perfect before seeing something divine in them. He sees what they can become because he sees whose they are first.
It’s worth actually picturing what that would look like in practice. Looking at someone who’s caused frustration and, instead of replaying what they did, asking what it would mean to see them as an extension of oneself. The irritation would have nowhere left to stand. It’s a lot harder to stay upset at someone once the separation between “me” and “them” starts to dissolve.
Divyabhav is rarely the hardest with strangers. It’s hardest with the people closest to us, the person whose words actually landed, the person whose action keeps replaying, the person who was expected to know better. The closer the relationship, the bigger the mistake tends to feel, because the person matters more. That’s exactly where seeing divyabhav matters most. Not when it’s easy to see someone as good, but when the hurt gives every reason to see only what they did wrong.
Appreciating a person purely for their association with Maharaj and Swami, nothing else added on top, is the heart of divyabhav. And it holds up under scrutiny. If both people belong to Maharaj and Swami, if both have been given Maharaj’s drashti, if both have been chosen to walk beside Maharaj and Swami in this lifetime, then what else is left to weigh? That attainment outweighs whatever wrong was done. Not a little. By a lot.
Maharaj talks about exactly this in Vachanamrut Gadhada 1-28. He says a person who is regressing in satsang starts to notice flaws in every satsangi, day after day. But a person who is progressing has pure desires that keep growing, and day by day, that person sees only virtues in others. They see every devotee as greater than themselves and consider themselves insignificant by comparison.
That’s a pretty clear picture Maharaj is painting. One person spirals into criticism, the other keeps expanding into humility. Somewhere in there is an honest question about which one feels more true day to day. Some days, the first thing happens without even meaning for it to. Cataloguing what someone did wrong instead of looking past it. And Maharaj is pretty direct about it. The only way forward is seeing only virtues in others. Bapa has told us exactly how.
The word he comes back to again and again is samp. Unity with one another. He’s talked about the samp he has with the Sadguru Santos, and how strong it is, strong enough that no one could ever break it apart. That’s the real invitation here. Not some far off spiritual ideal, but something practical to actually work on. Seeing the good in someone. Or at the very least, appreciating that they’ve attained Maharaj and Swami in this lifetime, the same as anyone else, and letting that be enough to see divyabhav in them.
When someone’s name comes up, what’s the first thing that gets remembered about them? Their mistakes, or their virtues? Has that person been reduced to the worst thing they’ve ever done? And if Maharaj and Swami see that person as theirs, isn’t that reason enough to learn to see them that way too?
Maybe the practice starts small. The next time someone is frustrating, remember one virtue before replaying what they did. Remember their association before criticizing them. Before letting one mistake define someone, a single reminder: this person belongs to Maharaj and Swami too. The feeling might not change right away, but what gets remembered first can be chosen. And maybe with enough of those choices, divyabhav stops being something to understand and starts being something to live by.
Forgive and forget asks for amnesia. Divyabhav asks for something harder and better: to remember exactly what someone is, underneath what they did. None of this is about pretending the wrong didn’t happen. It’s about remembering who someone belongs to before remembering what they did. That’s samp. That’s divyabhav. Bapa’s samp with the Sadguru Santos wasn’t built by forgetting mistakes. It was built by choosing, every day, to see something bigger than the mistake. The real question isn’t whether the hurt gets forgotten. It’s whether the association gets remembered first, even on the days that feels impossible.
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