This is the 16th talk on A Course in Miracles,
Entitled The Three Stages of Forgiveness.
This is part two of two parts.
Although guilt is painful,
It is what we are familiar with,
And we prefer it to the increase in self-responsibility we know will come to us,
When we lose our attachment to being a victim.
We can now choose to decide that guilt no longer serves us,
And that we would like it to be undone.
As we have so identified with our false ego self,
We do not know how to undo our guilt.
As an example,
Let's imagine a couple who are having an issue around jealousy.
The wife is upset with her husband because of his jealous nature.
He denies that he is jealous,
Saying that what she sees as emotional outbursts are only his feelings of love for her.
Although his wife is often upset by his possessiveness,
She unconsciously approves of it,
And translates his need of her as love.
One day the husband realises that his own thoughts of insecurity are producing his jealous feelings,
And that his wife is not to blame for his unhappiness.
He also realises that if he forgives himself and lets his jealousy go,
His wife might become so threatened at losing his quote love,
That the relationship might end.
At this point his ego will rush in and guide him to keep his jealousy,
Or he might lose everything.
The husband is now caught in a difficult situation,
For to allow his jealousy to go appears to him as a sacrifice.
Thus this second stage of forgiveness can be more difficult to accomplish than the insight needed in the first stage.
If,
However,
He chooses to listen to the Holy Spirit,
He will realise that the healing of his jealous nature will take him further along the path of peace.
Perhaps his wife will leave him,
But he has prepared the way to be with people who do not mistake jealousy for love.
Our little willingness to change,
To shift our perception,
Opens the way for the third stage of forgiveness.
In this final stage our guilt is undone by the Holy Spirit,
As we allow his light and peace to shine away our guilt.
The following prayer from the Course contains within it the three stages of forgiveness.
The Course urges us to use it whenever we are not joyous.
The text states,
I must have decided wrongly because I am not at peace.
I made the decision myself,
But I can also decide otherwise.
I want to decide otherwise because I want to be at peace.
I do not feel guilty,
Because the Holy Spirit will undo all the consequences of my wrong decision if I will let him.
I choose to let him,
By allowing him to decide for God for me.
The first two sentences of the above prayer describe the first step of forgiveness and how we must take responsibility for the way we feel.
If our peace has gone,
It is because we have given it away and not because it has been taken from us.
The third sentence of the quotation reflects the second step of forgiveness when the decision is taken to see our sins as errors which can be corrected.
In this step we stop listening to our ego's counsel that we are guilty and deserving of punishment and choose instead to have our errors healed.
The last sentence of the quotation describes how the Holy Spirit comes to heal our mind once we have invited him in.
The first two steps of this forgiveness process are taken by us.
In the first step we take our projections back and stop judging the world.
In the second step we stop judging ourselves and ask for help.
This now makes way for the third step that is taken by the Holy Spirit.
We have invited his light into the darkness of our guilt and he shines it away by his very presence.
Just as a dark room cannot remain dark when light is brought into it.
In this analogy we can recognise that light is real and that darkness is simply the absence of light.
We cannot bring a,
Quote,
Lamp of darkness,
Unquote,
Into a lighted room and make the room dark,
But we can bring a light into a darkened room and make it light.
Whenever we agree to invite the Holy Spirit into our mind the ego's world of darkness must disappear into the nothingness that it really is.
It is often difficult to remember that there is always the Holy Spirit's love waiting to respond to any genuine call for help.
It is easy for us to fall into the trap that we have to sort out all our problems by ourselves.
Our ego firmly believes it knows how to do this.
In contrast,
The Course tells us that the ego only knows how to create problems and we must get help from outside its thought system if we are to experience peace.
The third step of forgiveness reminds us that we can only be helped by the Holy Spirit.
Our only responsibility is to understand that we have given our peace away and that the errors in our thinking can be corrected by the Holy Spirit once we invite him in.
An experience I had some time ago illustrates the above three stages of forgiveness.
I had been experiencing a pain in my chest for two days.
It was not unfamiliar to me as I had experienced this feeling many times before in my life.
It would come when I perceived myself as being unfairly treated and sometimes would last up to three days.
The pain weighed me down with an intense feeling of sadness and heaviness.
As I lay on my bed wondering why I was going through this all again I decided to look honestly at the,
Quote,
Advantages,
Unquote,
I knew I must be gaining by holding on to the pain.
My new willingness to look at myself soon revealed the sweet pleasure of self-pity and the desire to close my heart so I would not be expected to give so much to others.
I felt inside that I no longer wanted to carry this pain around and was ready to release it and accept the increase in self-responsibility which now did not seem like a sacrifice.
It was not serving me anymore and I could give it away.
I brought my awareness and acceptance to the heart error and offered the pain to the Holy Spirit.
I asked him to take it knowing that it would give him joy to receive it.
To my own astonishment the pain disappeared in under a minute.
In fact I worried that the pain would return at any moment but it didn't.
Nor have I suffered with such long periods of chest pain again.
I remember seeing advertisements on billboards saying,
Quote,
Cast your burdens on the Lord,
Unquote.
I thought this an impossible idea and knew it could not work.
It was surely up to me to sort everything out in my life.
As my perception and awareness of the Holy Spirit grew I realised what love he must have for us and that he views our activities as a mother with her child having a nightmare.
She would not condemn the content of her child's nightmare but seek gentle ways of waking the child up.
How much more then would God love to take away our self-creating nightmares if only we would let him.
To practice forgiveness we must first stop judging the world and then stop judging ourselves.
As we do this our ego defences are lowered and automatically the love and the light of the Holy Spirit will shine our guilt away.
When we allow ourselves to wake up from the ego's nightmares by practicing forgiveness we shall discover that we are still as God created us perfect and eternal and that nothing can harm us.
What then will there be to forgive?
As the Course says and that in complete forgiveness in which you recognise that there is nothing to forgive you are absolved completely.
This realisation that forgiveness is an illusion does not come until the end of the process of forgiveness.
Whilst we believe we are separated from God forgiveness is a helpful illusion that will awaken us from all illusions.
