Opportunities for Forgiveness

A Course in Miracles teaches that the reason we are here on planet earth is to learn how to forgive. And to find as many opportunities to practice forgiveness as a daily spiritual path.  It sounds simple, yes? It is, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy, at least not while there’s any doubt about who is in charge of our thought system.

Because the course teaches that we can only be in one of two places. We can either be in the mind of the ego or the mind of the Holy Spirit. There is no other place we can be. It’s a binary choice, ego or Spirit. Unfortunately, the ego won’t let go of us easily.

In that sense we won’t have to look far for those forgiveness opportunities. We live in the one of the angriest periods in human history. Opportunities abound.

I had one myself two days ago where, before I knew it, I was extremely hurt and became instantly furious at what I saw as a complete lack of empathy /integrity by someone who is supposed to care for me. Because I seem to have a strong protective streak in me it was clear that this person’s unfair treatment of a certain loved one had crossed an important line. I felt not only outraged but completely vindicated in feeling mad. I wanted to phone and wipe the floor with the person in question.

Even as I knew on one level what the course required from me, that I had to let it go and forgive, and here was the perfect opportunity, it was too raw, too much of an affront to my sense of injustice to let it go.

At the same time, because I’m studying the course, I became aware that was getting lost in the ego’s dream of thinking that this was really happening and unable to extricate myself from the hell of the black mood and lack of peace that had befallen me.

My first mistake was to believe the ego’s dream reality and the second mistake was to think that I could do anything about this without asking for help from my inner teacher.

I had a bad night tossing and turning wondering how to resolve it, seemingly unable to hand it over, until it dawned on me that was my only option. Jesus reminds us in the course that it’s one thing to say you want the peace of God but it’s another thing to mean what you say.

Whilst were in this world of duality, the very purpose of relationships, it seems, is to present us with opportunities to fail. If we choose with the ego (our wrong minded thought system) we will fail because we will be more invested in being right than in being at peace. We will be more invested in projecting our guilt onto to someone else and making them wrong and guilty thus reinforcing the apparent separateness.  

A typical scenario from what the course would call ‘special relationships’ which can be either special love or special hate relationships, might be that we accuse someone else of being the cause of our misery and pain. The list is endless. It’s always someone else’s fault that we are miserable, or feel victimized or abandoned, by their thoughtlessness or unkindness or betrayal, ambition, indifference, lack of empathy, whatever we imagine they have done to us to disturb our peace. They are all versions of the same thing. That someone else is out to get us. This makes us -according to the wrong mind of the ego -guiltless, off the hook, it’s always whoever is out there in the world to blame and that person deserves punishment and not me.

On the other hand, the Holy Spirit, or Jesus, presents us with another choice, that of forgiveness which goes like this.

There is no justification for anger.

Please note, the course doesn’t say don’t get angry because that would be impossible in a world of duality. People will feel anger from time to time. But what the course does say is that it’s never anyone else’s fault.

The buck stops with you. People don’t make you angry.

Don’t believe your anger is attributable to anything, or anyone outside of yourself because it isn’t. But remember that all anger is just another way of saying ‘You are responsible for all of my pain.’ And that is the lie. People are not responsible for how we feel. We alone are responsible for how we feel.

Don’t attribute your feeling of anger to anything outside of yourself. People don’t make you angry. You make yourself angry by choosing the ego’s thought system of specialness and separation and differentiation.

Ask yourself what is the anger doing for you. Why are you attracted to it? Why are you projecting it out on others?

The answer is the same for all of us, it’s keeping the guilt of the imagined separation real, and scapegoating our perceived enemy, thus keeping us guilt free.

We are either coming from a place of love or fear. There’s no other choice.

Don’t Believe the Lie

Remember your source. We are not separated from God. God is perfect oneness and cannot be separated from.

God is perfect love. Only the ego judges. There is nothing to lose your peace over. Have a beautiful day.