SIX

Forgiveness

Without forgiveness, there is no love; and without love, there are no miracles. It is written in A Course in Miracles that we can have a grievance or we can have a miracle, but we cannot have both. Forgiveness, therefore, is the most essential key to happiness. Sometimes the challenge is to forgive others, and sometimes the challenge is to forgive ourselves. But suffering remains until we forgive.

Ego views forgiveness very differently from the way spirit does. The ego posits that someone is guilty and then deigns to forgive that person as an act of spiritual superiority. Obviously, this is not really forgiveness as much as judgment posing as something else. True forgiveness is the recognition that because only love is real, whatever needs forgiving exists only within the realm of illusion. We release our focus on someone’s guilt and instead embrace the knowledge of his or her eternal innocence. In doing so—by the power of this one mental shift in perception—we unleash the power of the miraculous universe.

Forgiveness resets the trajectory of probabilities that otherwise unfold wherever guilt and blame prevail. Where love is expressed, miracles occur naturally; where love is denied, miracles are deflected. Forgiveness frees miracles to intercede on behalf of our holiness and restore harmony where it had been blocked.

We seek to forgive not as a way of denying what has been done to us, but as a way of transforming our experience of what was done to us. As we shift our focus from the realm of the body to the realm of spirit, we move beyond our attachment to the thought of someone’s guilt. No longer according reality to that person’s transgression, the mind stops according reality to the pain it caused. This is not denial, but transcendence. It activates the self-correcting mechanism of the universe, altering the effects of any transgression against us. No one has the power to permanently defeat us as long as we are willing to forgive.

Forgiveness is a selective remembering of what someone did right, at a time when the ego mind is shrieking about what someone did wrong. We always have a choice about where to focus—whether to blame someone or to bless someone. I can concentrate my attention on what you did wrong, or I can seek to remember a moment when you tried to do right. Although the ego insists that you don’t deserve it, the spirit absolutely knows that you do. And my ego has an ulterior motive: in seeking to attack you, it is seeking secretly to attack me. Only when I remember who you really are (an innocent child of God, regardless of your mistakes) can I remember who I really am (an innocent child of God regardless of mine).

A Course in Miracles says that whenever we’re tempted to have an attack thought about another person, we should imagine a sword about to fall on their head—and then remember that because there’s only one of us here, the sword is falling on our own head. An idea doesn’t leave its source; therefore, whatever I think about you, I am thinking about myself. In attacking you, I am attacking myself. And in forgiving you, I am forgiving myself.

Condemning another person, then, while it might give us a few minutes of temporary relief, will always boomerang and make us feel worse. If I attack you, you will attack me back—or at least I’ll think you did. In terms of how consciousness operates, it doesn’t matter who attacked first: whoever attacks, feels attacked.

Forgiveness takes us off the wheel of suffering. It delivers us to quantum realms beyond time and space, where thoughts of guilt have marred neither your innocence nor mine. This is summed up in a line from the Persian poet Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” There, in that space of no-thing, the universe miraculously self-corrects. In the presence of love, things automatically return to divine right order. That which the ego has made imperfect is returned to the track of divine perfection, releasing possibilities for healing that would not otherwise exist.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.”

Simple words, and how much better those words are than the ego’s alternative. How often we have said things very different than that, which then for years we regret having said.

Few things are more emotionally painful than unwarranted distance between ourselves and others. The ego creates the distance through judgment and attack. Forgiveness is when we then stand up to the ego, commanding it to go back to the nothingness from whence it came. We choose instead to think as God thinks, and God does not condemn. God does not condemn because He sees us only as He created us. We will be at peace, and the world will be at peace, when we learn to see each other as God does. Learning to do this is the only reason we’re here.

THE HOLY INSTANT

The ego’s perception of time is linear, but linear time is an illusion. The only real time is God’s time, or eternity. The only place where eternity intersects linear time is in the present moment, called in A Course in Miracles the “Holy Instant.” That is where miracles happen.

One of the daily lessons in the Workbook of A Course in Miracles is, “The past is over. It can touch me not.” Since only love is real, only the love you were given and that which you gave others, was real in your past. Nothing else need be brought with you into the shining present. Leave behind what wasn’t real to begin with, and every moment can be a new beginning.

The future is programmed in the present. If we enter the present carrying thoughts of the past, we program the future to be just like the past. But when we enter the present without the past, we free the future to be unlike it. Miracles occur in the present, interrupting the linear sequence of time. Forgiveness is what happens when we choose to see someone not as they were before this moment, but as who they are right now. Entering into the Holy Instant, free of our focus on what happened in the past, we free a relationship to begin again. I give you a break, increasing the probability that you’ll give me one too.

God sees only our innocence because that is how He created us, and therefore only that is true. In training our minds to see people as He does, we allow miracles to heal our relationships and free us from our suffering over them. Only when we release someone from our condemnation of what they did do we free ourselves of the effects of what they did. By giving the gift of forgiveness, we receive the gift of forgiveness. It is not an act of sacrifice, but an act of self-interest.

Entering the Holy Instant, consciously focusing on the spiritual innocence that is the truth of someone’s being now, in this moment, I re-mind that person of their innocence and thus re-mind myself of mine. In that one miraculous instant, the veil of illusion is removed and an entire universe of otherwise unmanifest possibilities flows forth.

The ego, of course, sees all of this as nonsense. Given that separation is its goal, it deems all efforts to forgive as offensive. It specializes in comments like, “But you should be angry!”; “You’ll just be a doormat if you forgive this”; and “I’m really worried about you; you seem to have no boundaries.”

But the ego is a liar. That which restores us to our right minds does not guide us incorrectly. The fact that I forgive you doesn’t mean that I’ve lost my mind. It doesn’t mean that I can’t say no. It doesn’t mean that I can’t set healthy boundaries or leave unhealthy situations. If anything, it means that I can do so more quickly and effectively. Having been lifted above the emotional turmoil created by hurtful events, my ability to wisely navigate the material world is only improved. If it’s wise to leave a situation, to say no, to turn away from someone—it will only increase my effectiveness if I can do so kindly.

Being able to nonreactively and simply leave a situation is far more powerful than stomping my feet and screaming, “No one is going to treat me this way!” For with the latter comes the inevitability of the fact that, yes, someone will treat you that way. For when we are angry, there is still a gap between our present personality and our enlightened self. The situation will reappear, with another person in another town perhaps, until we learn to close that gap. Who we have not forgiven remains in our head. As A Course in Miracles reminds us, the warden can’t leave the prison any more than the prisoner can.

Forgiveness is a process, and it doesn’t mean the person we forgive will necessarily be our friend—for a while, or ever. If you’ve done something awful to me or to someone I love, I don’t see myself hanging out and having lunch with you anytime soon. If a woman lives with an abuser, she needs to leave the relationship. Forgiveness does not mean there are no boundaries, accountability, laws, or healthy standards of behavior. It means merely that there’s a way for us to find peace in our hearts, regardless of someone else’s behavior. And that itself is a miracle.

A young man I knew with AIDS once said to me, “You mean, I have to forgive everybody?” I remember laughing and saying to him, “Well, I don’t know. What do you have, the flu, or AIDS? Because if you only have the flu, just forgive a few people! Otherwise, you might want to consider taking all of the medicine.”

If we think about all the people we have known, and the people we know now, it’s usually amazing how many judgments we hold. Tremendous weight is lifted from our shoulders when we forgive and let them go.

Dear God,

I am willing to see my brother differently,

Despite what he might have done to me.

Release him from the sword of my condemnation

That I too might be released.

Show me his innocence

That we might both be free.

Fill my mind with the spirit of forgiveness.

Open my eyes that I might see

That only love is real.

May I see through this veil

To the light beyond,

That Your love might heal my heart.

Amen

FREEDOM FROM THE PAST

Clearly, there is evil in the world. Forgiveness is not a topic that underestimates the reality of evil, glibly advising us to pour pink paint over something terrible and pretend that it didn’t happen. Love doesn’t destroy our brain cells or lower our IQs. We can recognize that something bad happened but still see the futility of fury and the self-indulgence of outsized anger.

God does not need us to police the universe. Our anger, our bitterness, only deflects His miracles. The spiritual universe is self-correcting. Despite what anyone might have done to you in the past, God has a mysterious plan by which your future is programmed to be better. Nothing anyone did to you, but only your anger at them for having done so, can stop the miraculous flow of love to your door.

A Course in Miracles asks if we prefer to be right or to be happy. Forgiveness does not mean we’re condoning something we think should not be condoned. It means only that we’re freeing ourselves from the agony of its effects. We forgive the past in order to be free of it.

My friend Naomi Warren spent two years of her life, from ages twenty-one to twenty-three, in Auschwitz. She told me that upon her liberation, her thought was this: “Hitler got two years of my life. He will not get another day.” The fact that someone who has experienced the horror of a Nazi concentration camp can not only survive but thrive proves the psyche’s profound ability to heal itself. I have known others like Naomi—people who have experienced things that would make most of us buckle under the pain, from the murder of a child to heinous abuse during their own childhoods. All of them are beacons of possibility and an honor to know, embodying the miracle of God’s specialty at bringing forth light from total darkness. They are demonstrations of a holy consciousness at work, inspirations to those of us whose own struggles to survive seem so small in comparison. If people who have suffered at the hands of genuine evil are able to move on in their lives, then surely those of us who suffer things far less onerous can find the strength to get on with ours.

FORGIVING OURSELVES

There are times in life when our greatest challenge is to forgive ourselves. A Course in Miracles says that we pay a very high price for refusing to take responsibility for our experience: the price of not being able to change it. The fact that it makes us feel bad to realize that we might have done wrong is simply the sign of a healthy personality. When people tell us, “You can’t make a mistake,” but we know we did, their advice, however well-intentioned, isn’t helpful. It is important to own our mistakes in order to learn from them.

Perhaps we did screw up. Perhaps we did behave irresponsibly and recklessly. Perhaps we did do something egregious. We might realize that what went wrong in a situation was at least partly due to our own mistakes, and now we’re suffering paroxysms of self-hatred. The ego is fine with that, because it doesn’t really care who we’re attacking as long as we’re attacking someone. Its first response to our past errors is to refuse to own them, but if that doesn’t work, it turns to self-flagellation. The ego is that which both leads us to do the wrong thing and then punishes us savagely for having done so.

The important thing to do when we know in our hearts that we’ve been wrong is to look open-eyed, even if teary-eyed, at exactly what we did and why we did it. It’s very important to own our mistakes if indeed we made them. We may end up with a painful conscience, but that’s appropriate, for only a sociopath has no remorse. Minimizing our regret, numbing the pain of conscience, dulling our own lamentation is not the way to enlightenment. This is one of the areas in life where only burning through the pain will get us to the gain. Grown-ups own up to our mistakes, and grow from them.

And when we do take an honest look at the darkness in our hearts, we might be surprised at what we see there. We find that our mistakes, our character defects, are simply the coping mechanisms of the frightened child who still lives within us. We had to have been very hurt in life to have concocted such a dysfunctional way of dealing with things. Behind the blackened heart is a fragile heart—in all of us.

God would have us look on ourselves, and on each other, as He does. God is love, and He created us in his image. An angry God is the ego’s fiction, created in its image. This does not, however, change who God really is or how He really works. Our mistakes are met not by His wrath, but by His mercy.

God would have us show to ourselves, and to each other, the mercy He shows to us. It is as blasphemous to attack ourselves as it is to attack others. In any moment when we made a mistake, when we downloaded into the world a version of ourselves that is at odds with who we really are, then we did not uncreate who we really are; we simply chose not to express it. And we would have done differently had some wires not gotten crossed in our brains, had we felt that we could show our love in that moment and still get our needs met. When I have made my worst mistakes, I didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “I think I’ll be a jerk today!” Rather, in my mistaken moments, I got deeply, insanely, terrifyingly confused, as did anyone else who ever acted out of fear.

Having made a mistake, we should feel appropriate remorse, yes—but not gorge on feelings of guilt and self-condemnation. God calls us not to punish ourselves, but to atone for our errors and go forward on higher ground. Only the ego would have us tarry in the fields of self-hatred. The only antidote to self-hatred is self-respect, and self-respect can come only when we know we’re doing everything possible to be better people now.

All of us have done things we regret and lived through situations that make us cringe when we remember them. The ego’s response to past error is psychological imprisonment through emotional self-punishment. God’s response is psychological liberation through the power of the Atonement.

The Atonement is the correction of our perceptions. It is one of God’s greatest gifts. Expressed in the Catholic practice of confession, the Jewish Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur, and Alcoholics Anonymous through the taking of a fearless moral inventory and the making of amends, the Atonement principle is the cosmic reset button through which we are released from the otherwise negative consequences of wrong-minded action. Once we have atoned for a mistake, it no longer creates karmic consequences.

God sees our deviations from love not as sins to be punished but as errors to be corrected. As it says in A Course in Miracles, “All our sins are washed away by realizing they were but mistakes.”

Dear God,

I know that I did wrong.

I place this situation in your hands

And look clearly at the things I did,

Or the things I did not do,

By which I deviated from love.

Having made a wrong decision,

I make a different decision now.

Dear God, please correct my path.

Remove from me my feelings of guilt,

And make me a better person.

May I be ever more devoted

To doing what is right.

Release others from the consequences of

Any mistakes that I have made,

And please release me too.

Amen

MERCY, MERCY

Imagine your life as a computer. A permanent, undeletable file is available called “God’s Will,” literally meaning “Love’s Thought.” The file is always there, available for download. The only question is whether or not we choose to download it.

Obviously, ours is a world where the file of infinite, unconditional love is not downloaded nearly enough. Too often we download the energy of our broken, tortured, frightened selves, manifesting the subtle and not-so-subtle violence in our hearts—hence the consciousness of the human race and the state of the world in which we live.

But even though love can be unchosen, it cannot be uncreated. When any of us expresses fear instead of love, the love we could have expressed remains safely ensconced in the Mind of God. According to A Course in Miracles, whatever miracle we’ve deflected is held in trust for us until we are ready to receive it. The Atonement allows us to reclaim whatever good we might have denied ourselves. Situations will come around again, returning to us “the years that the locusts have eaten.”

What the ego steals, God gives back.

Seeing how opportunities reemerge after we have genuinely atoned, we glimpse God’s mercy. “Mercy” is a word that means very little until we have actually felt it. And once we do, we are changed forever. We are in awe of the way the universe rearranges itself to give us yet another chance.

The concept of religious sanctuary is an old one: no matter what crime someone had committed, if that person made it into a church, or other sanctuary zone, and claimed “Mercy,” then they could not be arrested for a crime. It was believed that in that moment, they aligned themselves with God’s power such that all judgment upon them was nullified. While few today would see this as a reasonable practice for law enforcement, the spiritual principle involved has profound relevance to personal relationships.

God is not under the impression that we never make mistakes. Given the fact that the thinking of the world is so deeply insane, it’s almost surprising that we don’t make bigger mistakes more often! And it is only the ego’s arrogance that might have ever tempted us to believe we were incapable of error. All of us are growing, and all of us stumble at times. Anything can become a platform for a miracle, and sometimes the fact that we do stumble makes us better people afterward. Among other things, feeling God’s mercy on us increases our mercifulness toward others. Having experienced mercy, we become better at mercy. For instance, I’ve caught myself about to judge a young woman for irresponsibly throwing around her sexual energy, and then reminded myself, “Uh, Marianne, she’s nothing compared with what you were like!”

God’s love for us does not waver. He loves each of us as He loves all of us: not because of what we’ve done or not done, but because of who we are. He knows who you are because He created you, and God’s creation cannot be changed. He knows that your mistakes occurred only within the realm of illusion. He is ready to begin again whenever you are.

Earlier in my life, I would atone for mistakes easily enough but then too often stray back into the same mistaken behavior. And then I’d start the process all over again. After repeated cycles of mess-up-your-life-then-fall-to-your-knees, mess-up-your-life-then-fall-to-your-knees, one day I finally said to myself, “Next time you’re down on your knees, Marianne, just stay there!”

Sometimes, it’s having made enough mistakes that then inspires us to live differently. The Atonement becomes more than just something that helped to ease our pain; once our hearts are acquainted with its power, trying to live it becomes a consistent way of life.

Forgiveness is ultimately not just an act, but an attitude; not a relationship tool, but a state of mind. And it is not just an attitude toward people, but toward life itself. Forgiveness is the ultimate correction of perception that dissolves all the darkness of the world. It is a tincture of pure, unadulterated light.

FORGIVENESS AS THE WAY

The veil that separates this world from the celestial order is like gossamer silk with the strength of titanium. On one hand, it is simply a thought; but on the other hand, every thought is powerful. Thoughts of guilt and fear are a living hell from which forgiveness and love deliver us.

From losing a job unfairly to losing a relationship, from being betrayed to being victimized, from feeling abandoned to feeling oppressed—events are transformed, and the suffering they cause us is assuaged, as we learn to forgive them. Forgiveness isn’t always easy—sometimes it’s a process—but it is never without its rewards.

Some might argue that reinterpreting life through the eyes of love is simply looking at it through rose-colored glasses. Yet the “observer effect” in science posits that when the perceiver changes, so does that which is perceived. If someone tells you that you’re being an overly optimistic Pollyanna, just thank them for the compliment. For Pollyanna is the story of a miracle-worker. She did not just see the love in people despite their loveless behavior; through her seeing she invoked their love, and their behavior ultimately changed.

The ego keeps us bound to the illusion that we exist entirely subject to the material world, when in fact the world is nothing but the projection of our thoughts. Beyond this world there is a truer one; as we extend our perceptions beyond what our physical senses perceive to what we know to be true in our hearts, we are delivered to the world that lies beyond. As we extend our perceptions beyond the veil of physicality, we experience the miracle of deliverance from all the suffering of the world.

Within the three dimensions of our worldly experience, this or that circumstance did or does exist. But how we choose to look at the circumstance will determine how it ultimately affects us. To forgive is to remember that only love is real and nothing else exists, and what does not exist cannot defeat you. In every moment we forgive, we remember this. In every moment we forgive, we awaken from our suffering. In every moment we forgive, another tear begins to dry.

Dear God,

I give to you my pain and despair.

I know that I suffer

Because I see what is not there.

I know that I cry

Because my faith in You is weak.

Please open my mind

That I might know,

And open my eyes

That I might see.

Bring comfort to my soul, dear God,

And forgiveness to my heart.

Amen