What is Forgiveness? 

In this episode, I reflect on the experience I had when I was traveling. I was in a foreign country and my 3 months visa was running out in a week. I took guided steps in a certain direction. However, an outcome was unexpected; the door was closed. It seemed that places that I considered home and thought I could always go to were not accessible anymore. This forced me to have a real, honest look at the value I had given to these places and admit that I was indeed relying on the outside world for my comfort and safety, rather than relying solely on God. As Jesus teaches, we use these worldly things or places as a substitute for God’s love. So here I was truly facing myself, my beliefs, my investment in the world, my fears. In this episode, I share the practice I used and continue using through these times when my beliefs seem challenged which helps me free my mind from the ego’s chains. 

From A Course in Miracles:

1. Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. ²It does not pardon sins and make them real. ³It sees there was no sin. ⁴And in that view are all your sins forgiven. ⁵What is sin, except a false idea about God’s Son? ⁶Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. ⁷What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God.

2. An unforgiving thought is one which makes a judgment that it will not raise to doubt, although it is not true. ²The mind is closed, and will not be released. ³The thought protects projection, tightening its chains, so that distortions are more veiled and more obscure; less easily accessible to doubt, and further kept from reason. ⁴What can come between a fixed projection and the aim that it has chosen as its wanted goal?

3. An unforgiving thought does many things. ²In frantic action it pursues its goal, twisting and overturning what it sees as interfering with its chosen path. ³Distortion is its purpose, and the means by which it would accomplish it as well. ⁴It sets about its furious attempts to smash reality, without concern for anything that would appear to pose a contradiction to its point of view.

4. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. ²It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances it likes. ³It merely looks, and waits, and judges not. ⁴He who would not forgive must judge, for he must justify his failure to forgive. ⁵But he who would forgive himself must learn to welcome truth exactly as it is.

5. Do nothing, then, and let forgiveness show you what to do, through Him Who is your Guide, your Savior and Protector, strong in hope, and certain of your ultimate success. ²He has forgiven you already, for such is His function, given Him by God. ³Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God. (ACIM, W-pII.1.1:1–5:3) 

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