Forgiveness Is The Healing Of The Perception Of Separation.
Forgiveness is the central plank on which rests the teachings of A Course in Miracles. It is the key to our salvation, unlocking the pent up guilt and liberating us from a deep sense of isolation and loneliness. The ego, or human consciousness is all about defence to the extent that it will, and did as in Jesus case, kill in order to be right. The ego or false self believes that to maintain its reality it needs to make others wrong and hold them accountable . Its way to innocence is to perceive others as guilty and itself as a victim. Because of this mistaken foundation in belief, it can justify attack and defence as legitimate activities.
Forgiveness is seen as a sign of weakness in a world it believes is governed by strength and force, competition and comparison. The inability to forgive and the desire to keep unforgiving is based on a false perception that we are separate individuals competing to stay alive and in the process killing each other like flies!
“Forgiveness is the healing of the perception of separation.” ACIM T-3.V.9
What is “A Course In Miracles” and how does it relate to forgiveness?
Forgiveness Is Important Because The Truth Is That We Are All One.
We are all manifestations of the one Life, coming from the One Source. When we hurt another, all we are doing is hurting ourselves and perpetuating the guilt which then needs to be driven deeper into our subconscious. We do this by using logic to defend our actions, we use politics and even God to defend our violence. This act of suppression leads to projection. We begin to see all manner of violence outside of us and being perpetrated to us and all around us. The ego, which has cleverly tired to bury our own guilt, tells us that we are victims of the world we see and that we need to double our efforts in retaliation to protect ourselves…and round and round we go in ever increasing rounds of violence!
Correct Perception
To stop this insane cycle, we need to correct our perception and this is where forgiveness comes in to play. In truth, there is nothing to forgive because we are all still safe at home, dreaming this life up! But in time and space, where we think we are, we do need forgiveness to help restore our minds from a perception of separation to one of wholeness.
Forgiveness itself also needs to be reinterpreted as this world’s idea of forgiveness means we can never truly forgive. Forgiveness as understood by most is an act of forgiving what was perceived as real. In other words, I forgive you for something that you really did do! This makes forgiveness impossible because we cannot forgive what is real. Why? Because only Love is real, nothing else is real so an act that is not love could not have happened except in this illusion/dream we call life. So, if nothing happened what do we forgive? Why is it needed? It isn’t needed in Truth but in time and space where we find ourselves, it is necessary to help us correct our perception of separation.
The act of forgiveness is a two stage process. The first being that we recognise that whatever seemed to have happened to offend us is but a projection of our unconscious guilt and mistaken sense of unworthiness. The second stage is to overlook the act completely in recognition that it was but my projection. There is only one of us here projected into several billion! We are asked to overlook completely the error because there is no ‘you’ and ‘me’, there is only me doing stuff to myself to hurt myself because of my unconscious guilt! When we grasp this concept we can see that retaliation of any kind is just self-harm.
Forgiveness – Be As One
So what we want to do is end this silliness by completely overlooking the error. By doing so, we let the other person know that there is no separation between us, that we are one and it also reminds us of our Oneness. Each time we overlook error in remembrance of our Oneness, we heal and remember a part of our divinity. And as we heal, we heal others by helping them remember who they are by our act of overlooking. This kind of forgiveness is not done alone but with the help, strength and guidance of the Universal Inspiration, the Holy Spirit.
In the humility that follows as we experience the grace of this kind of forgiveness, we realise that it was not us at all that did the forgiving. It was an almighty power from within us that does it. Our part in truth is the willingness to let go of separation and in so doing, we heal our mind of the perception of separation.
