A common understanding of forgiveness is you forgive people for what they did or for what they didn't do that
they should have done, that you believe that they should have done. It can go two ways.
Right, like "sins of omission", like "you should have been there for me", you should have done this, you should have done that."
And what A Course in Miracles is saying
You forgive your brother, or you forgive your sister for what he did not do.
So you see it's really different from traditional forgiveness.
Traditional forgiveness forgives them for what they did do,
Course in Miracles' forgiveness forgives them for what they didn't do.
Now, what does that even mean? How do you, that sounds good...
You know like well... You know I thought that they had an affair,
I caught them in the middle of the affair or whatever it was you know.
What the course is teaching us is that we have a misperception of the whole world.
You could say the ego has sponsored a belief in linear time,
so we believe that the human being is a creature of
linear time.
And the course is saying, well actually
you know God did not create you that way. God did not create you as flesh-and-blood with all kinds of mistakes and sins;
God created you perfect, God created you love, God created you innocence, God created you spirit,
but you've fallen asleep.
And now you're dreaming a dream in which you forgot all about all that love, you know now
it's nirvana, it's heaven it's absolute oneness. There's words for it, but it's not an awareness,
You know it's not in the dream. You're dreaming a dream of separation,
that has sickness, and fear, and guilt, and death and all kinds of things that are part of it.
And so
Just like there's a lot of spiritualities that emphasize the present moment and living in the present, that's what the course is doing.
And coming
back to the present moment and
realizing that the grievance that you had, the hurt that you believe was caused to you by
another person with what they did or what they didn't do that they should have done, was actually a misperception.
Personal forgiveness in the sense that it's an experience
but once you start to realize that the person that we believe we are, the persona or the mask that we wear isn't
the whole picture.
It's just a small thread of the whole picture. And so,
true forgiveness would be about clearing away all the thoughts and grievances and judgments, even
the positive judgments as well as the negative judgments. You see how that's a lot different. Usually forgiveness is
seen as release all the negative,
like accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. This is not even where The Course is going.
It's saying that your positive judgments and your negative judgments are both
obscuring your awareness of what is.
You might have heard of Byron Katie
Love what is. Well you have to let go of what isn't before you can love what is, that's forgiveness.
Being so present and
so still in mind that you have a total escape from the past and a total lack of interest in the future.
That's being fully present. That's forgiveness.
It's a practice that takes,
it seems to take time,
not in reality, but because the mind is addicted to these judgments and grievances
and it seems to take time to detox from these judgments. And so it's a very deep journey,
it's almost like you you jump down the rabbit hole and
say, I want to know myself as I truly am or I want peace of mind or
lasting happiness and freedom and bliss and then you drop down in this rabbit hole of
really emptying the contents of consciousness and coming to that stillness that's already there,
that's really what forgiveness is. So it's very different from the
idea of forgiving people because most of us have had the experience where we forgive people
and then there's more grievances that come or sometimes we forgive a person for one thing and then
they do something else, and then something else, and then something else
where they don't do these things that we think they should and then we're left
trying to do this process of forgiveness that seems to be endless, it just seems like an endless number of
lessons that keep coming,
but this is a teaching that's taking you to the point where you can reach
beyond these
multiple lessons into a
final lesson of pure innocence.
Some of you have heard of Ho'oponopono, of course it's from Hawaii, but Dr.
Hugh Lynn and how when he does a workshop or a retreat you know he'll get the list of all the retreatants
and as soon as he gets the list of everyone who's coming he starts practicing Ho'oponopono
on the list before anybody even shows up;
he's going through, he's practicing, practicing. That's a mind clearing process.
Maybe he's reading through the list and a name brings an association to his mind,
it's something from the past or somebody that he knew,
or there's a feeling or experience or a judgement. As he's just looking at the list of the ones that are coming
he's practicing before they even arrive.
He's also quite famous for having a clinic in which he did this practice with all of the clients
in this
clinic where he lived and worked, and basically he did the practice in his office
so well, so thoroughly that
they closed the clinic and all
patients were set free.
And he didn't really interact with them;
physically, he didn't interact with them.
That's a good example of all he's doing is at the level of the mind because of that practice.
He literally practiced it so well that the whole whole clinic was dismantled. Talk about
practicing teaching yourself out of a job or healing yourself out of a profession.
That's a great example. Really do it so thoroughly that
the clients disappear. I've always said that; I said if you become a good teacher you will teach yourself out of a job.
You'll just end up being, there won't be any teaching anymore, just pure beingness.