Forgiveness Offers Everything I Want

This was my reading for this morning in A Course in Miracles.  It's words on forgiveness are so beautiful that I wanted to share them with you.  From Workbook lesson 122:

What could you want forgiveness cannot give?  Do you want peace?  Forgiveness offers it.  Do you want happiness, a quiet mind, a certainty of purpose, and a sense of worth and beauty that transcends the world?  Do you want care and safety, and the warmth of sure protection always?  Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset?

All this forgiveness offers you and more.  It sparkles on your eyes as you awake, and gives you joy with which to meet the day.  It soothes your forehead while you sleep, and rests upon your eyelids so you see no dreams of fear and evil, malice and attack.  And when you wake again, it offers you another day of happiness and peace.  All this forgiveness offers you, and more.  

Forgiveness lets the veil be lifted up that hides the face of Christ from those who look with unforgiving eyes upon the world.  It lets you recognize the Son of God, and clears your memory of all dead thoughts so that remembrance of your Father can arise across the threshold of your mind.  What would you want forgiveness cannot give?  What gifts but these are worthy to be sought?  What fancied value, trivial effect or transient promise, never to be kept, can hold more hope than what forgiveness brings? 

Why would you seek an answer other than the answer that will answer everything?  Here is the perfect answer, given to imperfect questions, meaningless requests, halfhearted willingness to hear, and less than halfway diligence and partial trust.  Here is the answer!  Seek for it no more.  You will not find another one instead.  

If ever I find myself feeling less than content, I know I have forgiveness work to do.  I search my mind for the source of my unforgiveness.  Who am I feeling annoyed with?  Is there anyone or any thing that is bringing this particular form of fear into my life?

Even if it is only a vague feeling of discomfort, I know it must be forgiven.  I may not understand what it is that is making me feel uncomfortable, but I go ahead and apply one of my forgiveness processes to it anyway.

Then I think.  I look into my past and I look deep into my heart.  What is it about this situation that is unsettling me?  What false beliefs do I hold in my unconsciousness that are causing me to experience fear or anger or hurt or frustration?  How can I tie the feelings I am experiencing this day to experiences in my past?

What do I believe about the world and about myself?  Deep down in the dark recesses of my mind, do I secretly believe that I am not worthy of happiness, love and safety?  Do I believe there is not enough good for the rest of the world and me too?  Do I believe I am unloveable?  Do I believe I am guilty and deserve to be punished?  Beliefs like these and many others silently run our lives, causing us to behave eradically and often in ways that harm ourselves and others.

Looking deep at our beliefs, tracking them down to their source, remembering which events in our lives originally created these beliefs and forgiving, forgiving, forgiving is the way to happiness.  I try to forgive every aspect I can dig up.  I forgive the people and events causing me discomfort today, the people and events from its source in my past, the false belief I have embedded in my unconscious mind and any other experiences or thoughts I can discover in my consciousness that relate to this topic.

Doing this kind of mind cleaning and purifying does take commitment, but it pays off in spades.  As we forgive the world around us, slowly but steadily our trust and comfort in our world begins to build.

Forgive and be forgiven.  As you give you will receive.  --Also from Workbook Lesson 122

Peace flows into our minds and we become happy.

If you are unsure how to begin to forgive on this level, my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness" explains how you can successfully use forgiveness to create happiness in your life.

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It All Leads to Acceptance

"What if the very life you are living, and each and every experience that is coming to you now was being directly sent to you of your Father because your Father knows what is necessary to unravel within your consciousness to allow you to awaken?  What if the very things you are resisting are the very stepping stones to your homecoming?  What if you achieved a maturity along this pathway in which you were finally willing to let things be just as they are?" --The Way of Mastery p. 7

Is it possible that we could just trust the world we see around us, knowing that we don't know what anything is really for, that there is a larger plan unfurling in our lives, that everything that happens is for our higher good?

 

If we just could come to forgive our perceptions of this world, our interpretations, our labeling, our judgments.   We look at everything we see and we decide that it is good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly.  Why can't we just recognize that what we see simply just "is"?  For it is when we are finally able to accept what "is" as the way of things, that we are able to release the resistance.  And this is where the peace comes in.

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How to Release Our Stories of Worry

I just got back from visiting old friends in Los Angeles.  I met separately with four of my oldest friends and had some wonderful and joyful catching up time.

I did notice, however, that underneath the surface of everyone's busy lives, there was a story of worry.  One was worrying about illness, another finances and yet another some recent back surgeries.  It seems that few of us escape the "living hell" of fearful worrying.  And it seems to me that as we age, the worry often intensifies.

One friend was describing to me the overwhelming role worry is currently playing in her life. This friend has a grown son.  Although he experienced difficulties throughout his childhood and was given much professional help, it was only recently that he was diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrone.  He is in his early twenties and is living at home.  He has great fears of living independently and, in fact, refuses to do so. He also has refused to go to college.  He has a simple job at a local supermarket where he works a few days a week.   He comes home and plays video games.  He has two or three friends that he plays with online and that occasionally will come to the house. Beyond that he has little social life.  He rarely leaves the house for anything except work.

My friend is coming to terms with the fact that her son will probably never leave home, will never have a better job than the one he has now, will never have many friends and will probably never have a girlfriend and marry.  This is not the life she had hoped for him.  This is not the life she had hoped for herself.  She is grieving.  She is worried for him.  She is afraid.  She said to me, "I need help.  I don't know how to stop feeling so emotional about this."

Sometimes our grief and worry get lodged into our minds and bodies and it begins to cycle through in an endless repeating loop which seems inescapable.

In an effort to quell the insanely repeating thoughts, we might try "changing the subject" in our minds, but the worry thoughts just keep coming back endlessly plaguing us.  Or we may try to "stuff" the worry down deep where it won't bother us, only to then find that it shows up larger than life at 3:00 in the morning in the form of paralyzing night terrors.

So what can she do to feel better?  The process I outline in "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness" that would be very helpful for my friend is what I call "Feel the Feelings".  In this process, we set aside some deep introspective time to really allow ourselves to go deep into these feelings.  When we authentically sit with our fear, worry and grief and just watch it, allowing it to be whatever it is, allowing it to fully express itself, it dissipates.

If my friend does this process, she will find that she will be able to think about her son from a calmer place.  The terrible negative emotions that she currently feels will be transmuted and in the future, although she will still have the same son with the same challenges, she will feel acceptance about the situation.

What's your story of worry and how is it wreaking havoc in your life?

If you have a need for the "Feel the Feelings" process,  I have created a guided meditation that you can use in the quiet of your own home, Forgive Your Past Now  which can be downloaded to your computer or iphone for $2.99.  Using the download will teach you the process which you can then apply whenever you find that you have circumstances in your life that are causing your to feel fear.

The "Feel the Feelings" process is also explained in depth in my book. 

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Adyashanti on Forgiveness

I'm just loving Adyashanti's new book, Resurrecting Jesus.  To me, Adyashanti's teachings are universal. Sometimes when I read his words or hear him talk, I think, "He has to be a A Course in Miracles teacher, not a Budhist."  He is a true mystic.  In this new book, Adyshanti looks at Jesus's life and teachings from a fresh perspective and I'm finding it all very inspiring.

This morning in my reading I ran across this passage on forgiveness:

"Forgiveness comes from a deep openhearted state of compassion.  Really, it comes from our spiritual essence--which I call divine being--because from our spiritual essence there is an understanding of what suffering is all about. From the heart of divine being, what we realize is that everything that causes us pain and sorrow is ultimately born from misunderstanding.  It's a type of illusion.  When Jesus says "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do," this is what he's pointing to.  When people are in a state of spiritual clarity--an inner state of psychological, emotional, and spiritual unity--then by the very nature of that unity, they don't act out of ignorance  Ignorance is simply a misunderstanding of the fundamental reality, of what we truly are.  

When we lose consciousness of our deepest self, our deepest being as divine being itself, then in a sense we go unconscious.  Part of us goes to sleep, you might say.  Then, we are prone to illusion.  We misunderstand things.  We think if someone insults us, for example, that we need to respond with anger; we forget that they're just expressing their own inner conflict, their own inner division, which is ultimately based on misunderstanding.  The very root of sin, to use Jesus' language, is something that can be forgiven  It's forgivable because it's an unconscious act, a result of being spiritually asleep.  We can't be blamed for being unconscious, for acting out our unconsciousness, even for feeling the effects of our unconsciousness within our psychology.  

Everyone has those days when you feel like you've woken up on the good side of the universe when everything just naturally feels whole and complete, when you're happy and at peace and you don't really know why.  When this happens you're more aligned with life, and you naturally go about the day as a much more open person.  You're more compassionate and you're more loving because compassion and love are expressions of being internally united.  So forgiveness is ultimately an act that comes from that inner unification.  One doesn't have to be entirely unified inwardly to forgive.  Forgiveness can also come out of the sense of open-heartedness, of understanding that nobody is perfect.  

The open heart is compassionate because it maintains an essential connection.  But as soon as we separate ourselves from another--as soon as we say, "No there's nothing in you that corresponds with something in me," as soon as we forget that you and I essentially share the same spiritual essence--then we cut ourselves off, and we go into blame.  Forgiveness comes from that deep intuition of our sameness, of our shared humanity.  That perception starts to lower the walls of defense, and being judgmental is ultimately a defensive game, a way of saying, "I am not like you."  To forgive is really a way of saying, "I see something in you that's the same as in me."  Then, even though you may be upset, even though the other person may have caused you pain or harm, when you connect with your shared humanity, there's forgiveness."   

Who Are You Harming?

One who loves himself would never harm another. --Buddha

When we withhold forgiveness, we are harming others.

After all, if we carry grievances, they are based on judgments we make about others.   We are judging others to be "bad", or "mean", or "selfish", or "evil" or "wrong", or something similar.

Judgmental thoughts are attack thoughts.

Of course, we turn our "attacks" around in our heads.  We justify them.  We like to make ourselves out to be "right", "good" or "innocent".  We tell ourselves that we are the victim!  This is how we give ourselves permission to stay in a state of judgement.  "Go ahead and hold that grudge", we tell ourselves.  "We're the innocent victims here.  They are the evil perpetrator."

The issue is not who did what to whom.  It is, "Who are we all really, when we get deep down to the ultimate truth?"  We are all the same.  We are all Sons of God.  Each of us was created in the image of God. We are pure love.  And we are all One in our true home where we reside in the Mind of God.

When we see our very own personal truth, that we are really only love, we can begin to know our true value.  As we learn to value ourselves in our minds, we begin to love ourselves.  And it is only as we learn to love ourselves that we become capable of extending that love to others.  We can finally exchange our habit of judging, attacking and blaming others with the ability to look at everything that occurs with acceptance and love.

It's not that we condone behavior that upsets or wounds us, but we look beyond the earthly actions to the deeper truth.  Our trespasser is really only the same as us.  We are love and he is love, too.  And in this knowing comes acceptance and forgiveness.  When we forgive, we drop our attack thoughts and when we do so we are no longer harming our trespasser by holding them in a low place in our minds.

Importantly, as we release our trespasser we are also releasing ourselves from our own separation from love.  Returning to love is how we create inner peace in our lives.   

Son, Your Sins are Forgiven

I'm reading a wonderful book right now by Adyashanti called Resurrecting Jesus, Embodying the spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic.  Adiyashanti is himself a modern day mystic and his take on Jesus's life and teachings is fresh and beautiful.

This morning I was reading in Resurrecting Jesus about a healing Jesus performed in Mathew 2:5.  In it, a paralyzed man was brought to Jesus for healing.  Jesus simply said to him, "Son, your sins are forgiven." and the man was healed.

Adyshanti points out that the word sins, at that time, had simpler connotations than they have been given in the following 2,000 years.  The original Greek meaning for the word hamartia or sin, was to miss the mark. Another meaning is simply the word flaw.  Our current meaning of sin is so much darker and deeper.  We think of our sins as being evil and they are strongly attached to feelings of shame and guilt.

What if, instead of thinking of sin as the source of guilt and upset in our lives, we merely choose to see the ways we have missed the mark?  After all, we are simply trying to do what it takes to survive and find a few comforts here in our earthly reality, our space and time reality.  We all make mistakes here, we misjudge, we miss the mark.  We all have flaws.  Having a flaw is not inherently evil.

Adyashanti makes a second point; that the paralytic had to do nothing to be healed by Jesus.  He was merely brought into Jesus' presence.  "And this is really Jesus's greatest healing power, the power of his presence."

Jesus bestows his forgiveness on people as a kind of healing balm.  For a human being to receive true forgiveness is a potent thing.  When the forgiveness is authentic, it has a very deep and powerful effect.  Sometimes another forgives us, and sometimes we are called to forgive ourselves so that we can move on in a really heartful way.  When we repent (repent means to have a change of heart), our sin (missing the mark) is forgiven.  Then we are realigned with the wisdom of the unified heart.  --Adyashanti

Adyashanti goes on to say:

The healing balm is forgiveness; that's what heals the flaw.  That's what allows us to rebalance ourselves, to find our equilibrium-- psychic, emotional and spiritual.  That is really what Jesus does: he is righting the person,  helping them to quickly find internal balance.  When they find balance, when their inner state is unified, the healing takes place.

I really enjoy Adyashanti and I admire what he has to say here, but I think he misses one important point in what Jesus has to say.  The first word that Jesus says to this man is Son.  Jesus addresses him as Son, not as in "young man", after all, Jesus himself was only 30 at the time.  But rather as Son, Son of God, the Son of God, an essential member and vibrant part of the Sonship.

When Jesus uses the word Son, he is reminding the paralytic of his true identity, and Jesus is raising his own thinking.  He doesn't see a poor broken sinner in front of him.  Rather, he sees a true Son of God, one whom God created in his own image and whom is loved by God infinitely.  This man is just as God created him to be.  He is perfect, whole and complete.  He is eternal, everywhere and always, unchanging in his true state.

Let our own forgiveness be as Jesus's.  Let us know that everyone misses the mark sometimes.  We all have flaws.  Let us always be firmly anchored in the presence of the divine which resides in each of us.  And finally, let us look deep into the mind of our trespassers and know their deepest truth.  They are Sons of God.  

What Can You Give?

Forgiveness is a way we can give to others.

When we forgive others in our minds, we are offering them a chance to heal with us.  Of course, they may choose not to accept our gift.  But the important thing is that we have offered it.  And if they do choose to accept our forgiveness, we can absolutely rock their world.  And when we do that, we rock our own world, too.

"When a brother acts insanely, he is offering you an opportunity to bless him.  His need is yours.  You need the blessing you can offer him.  --A Course in Miracles, Text p. 127

You Get What You Give   This is such an inspirational talk by Pavi Meta on the subject of gifting and the joys that giving brings to our own lives.
 




What can I give to others?  What can you give?  We all have something precious that we can give away at any moment.  And when we give it away, it comes back to us tenfold.  That thing is forgiveness.


"I give you to the Holy Spirit as part of myself.  I know that you will be released, unless I want to use you to imprison myself.  In the name of my freedom, I choose your release, because I recognize that we will be released together."   --Ken Wapnick, A Course in Miracles Teacher

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