Forgiveness is the ONLY Answer

I just finished teaching a short course called "A Course in MIracles and World Peace". (You can download audios and handouts on my Web site if you're interested.) Every time I teach the Course, I am, of course, reminded that the central practice of the Course is forgiveness. This time, I devoted my entire final class to this important topic.

As you know if you're familiar with the Course, it means something different by the word "forgiveness" from what we mean when we use the word in everyday speech. To students of the Course, forgiveness has nothing to do with releasing others from guilt or responsibility for acts they have committed that have injure or offended you. In fact, the Course says such acts are never real because they are of a nature that is inimical to God's inability to conceive of what we commonly call "sin."

Rather, the Course teaches us that all of us make only one mistake. We forget who we are. We don't remember that we are divine, eternal spiritual beings having for a time a physical experience. If we remembered that about our true nature, we would not engage in any of the behavior we and others perceive as "sin."

It follows, then, that the only thing that demands our forgiveness is the act of forgetting. This is a particularly powerful concept because in order to forgive someone else for forgetting who they are, we are inevitably reminded ourselves of who we are and thus are forgiving ourselves every time we extend that forgiveness to others.

Every problem we think we have in the world of appearances can be solved by this shift in consciousness, from perceiving certain behaviors not as sins requiring guilt and punishment but as errors requiring correction and forgiveness. That's a strong statement and I'm generally wary of any sentence that begins with or includes an absolute term like "every" or "always". But in this case, I believe it is true.

I was astonished when I went to my favorite bookstores and found there were literally dozens of books written about forgiveness. Two or three at least <em>seemed</em> to be approaching the subject from a Course in Miracles' perspective. 

So how does this sit with you?