Un-forgiveness
– The Love of Fear and the Fear of love
“The first
corrective step in undoing the error is to know first that
the conflict is an expression of fear. Say to yourself that
you must somehow have chosen not to love, or the fear could
not have arisen. Then the whole process of correction becomes
nothing more than a series of pragmatic steps in the larger
process of accepting the Atonement as the remedy. These steps
may be summarized in this way:
Know first that this is fear.
Fear arises from lack of love.
The only remedy for lack of love is perfect love.
Perfect love is the Atonement.” ACIM T-2.VI.7
Forgiveness is the key to freedom. It unlocks the heavy chains
of guilt and sin that we have made real. Many of us have heard
this and yet, we experience difficulties in forgiving someone
for what we think they did? Why?
At the level of form,
in this ego based dream we are all experiencing, there are
many seeming reasons, all of them, just places where we hide
our self attack in others. Essentially we have forgotten that
we are one and that all the events this world seems to throw
at us are merely our projections of unconscious guilt coming
back to attack us.
We give each person and offense a name. Each different in
intensity in terms of the pain and suffering they caused us!
Each seeming attack
is in fact a sacred opportunity to forgive ourselves for wanting
illusion to be real; to forgive ourselves for thinking that
we are un-deserving of love, guilty and therefore, deserving
of punishment.
We have to wake up to
the realization that there is no one else in the room. We’re
it, playing all these roles, in an attempt to make separation
and specialness real!
ACIM teaches us that
we cannot forgive what we have made real!(Noukie can you find
this quote?) If the act was real then so must the so-called
perpetrator be.
A seeming hurdle to
forgiveness is the trust we place in the “I” we
believe we are. This “I” is the separated self,
the ego, the will apart from God. This I, we call our self
is incapable of forgiving. So if we (the ego “I”),
are trying to forgive someone, it will be impossible because
this ego “I” has an agenda – to perpetuate
separation and duality to make itself God. It believes that
salvation comes from seeing itself as innocent by seeing others
as guilty. It believes that attack and defense are justified.
This ego tells us that
our safety lies in our own hands. There is a fear of loss
in letting go that accompanies the thought of forgiveness.
It tells us that we need to remain in control, after all,
“Look what happened the last time we gave over control?”
What it doesn’t want us to do is question why we got
hurt last time? Enquiry would reveal that we did give over
control but to who…was it to the Teacher within or was
it to another, someone outside of us? Did we get hurt because
we set ourselves up by giving over control of your happiness
etc to someone else? Did we also then set the other up by
making up the scenario that would eventually lead to our getting
hurt? In fact, have we projected all our previous hurtful
situations in an insane attempt to prove our innocence through
our victimhood? Have we used a seeming other to attack ourselves?
Yes! We have all done this and continue to do this until we
undo the ego.
The ego will tell us
that letting go will mean loss but when we let go and give
over our hurt and suffering and fear of loss to the Universal
Inspiration, the only loss is of the ego itself… hence
its fear and unwillingness to let go.
Guilt is another hidden
weapon of the ego to keep us from forgiving. If we can’t
forgive ourselves for what we though we did in the past, how
can we ever forgive someone else? We use this guilt to separate
ourelves and to imprison another. We want the other to apologize
first before we can forgive them. Here we see projection at
work in all its glory. The ego seeks forgiveness from outside
itself in the vain attempt to prove this world’s existence
and our innocence through our victimhood within it. Always
innocence comes at the price of suffering.
In many cases, we know
at some level that we set up the scenario of hurt, that we
projected our self attack thoughts onto another to play the
role out of hurting us but we simply do not want to acknowledge
this as we would have to forgive the seeming other wouldn’t
we? So we keep it hidden from our self and direct our anger
at the seeming other in the name of un-forgivness.
When we have a hard
time forgiving, there is always a fear to look within. The
ego believes that if we did, we would be lost because we would
find all these unforgivable ‘sins’ that would
make us clearly unworthy of forgiveness. In fact, looking
within will only reveal our sinlessness. All that ever happened
is that we made an error or three but no sins. What makes
our mistakes seem so serious and sinful is our refusal to
let them go to the Universal Inspiration. We hold onto our
mistakes, trying to make them into sins so that we can fulfill
the ego’s desire for us to be unworthy.
If we could just let
go of the need to judge our mistakes and allow Him who knows
us to have our mistakes, we would experience real peace instead
of the illusory peace we keep seeking outside ourselves. All
we have to do is let the light of the Universal Inspiration
shine them away and they are gone. In truth we didn’t
even make a mistake because we are still home, safe, complete
and whole. God doesn’t need our forgiveness but here
at the level of form, we need forgiveness as our way of handing
over our misperceptions to the Source. It’s only after
we have let go and handed over our seeming sins that we experience
as true, the statement that there was nothing to forgive.
It is only after we let go and surrender our hurt and anger
to the Universal Inspiration that we discover we have always
been innocent and so has our brother.
As we forgive another,
we realize we are really forgiving ourselves for using our
brother to project our unconscious guilt. We can then truly
see our brother as sinless and great healing takes place as
we allow the miracle of healing of our perception to take
place.
Where this takes
us is to that place of grace. The place within where all our
ancient hates melt away in the realization that we have not
sinned, that our brother too is innocent and that in seeing
his innocence, we see ours. Here can Perfect Love return.
Here is our Atonement.
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