July 17th 2014 Lesson 121
Forgiveness is the key to happiness.
- Intention: To practice learning how to give and receive forgiveness.
- Practice: Ten-minutes in the morning and Ten-minutes at night we devote to practicing giving and receiving forgiveness from one we consider an enemy and one we consider a friend. As we begin to see them both as one, we will also extend forgiveness to our self and learn that giving and receiving are the same. In addition, we will remind ourselves every waking hour of today's thought in the form highlighted below.
- Application: -- Begin the longer practice periods by thinking of someone you do not like, who seems to irritate you, or to cause regret in you if you should meet him; one you actively despise, or merely try to overlook. It does not matter what the form your anger takes. Now close your eyes and see him in your mind, and look at him a while. Try to perceive some light in him somewhere; a little gleam which you had never noticed. Try to find some little spark of brightness shining through the ugly picture that you hold of him. Look at this picture till you see a light somewhere within it, then try to let this light extend until it covers him, and makes the picture beautiful and good.
Look a this changed perception for a while, and turn your mind to one you call a friend. Try to transfer the light you learned to see around your former "enemy" to him. Perceive him now as more than friend to you, for in that light his holiness shows you your savior, saved and saving, healed and whole.
Now let him offer you the light you see in him, and let your "enemy" and friend unite in blessing you with what you gave. Now you are one with them, and they with you. Now have you been forgiven by yourself. Every hour throughout the day, tell yourself:
Forgiveness is the key to happiness.
I will awaken from the dream that I am mortal, fallible and full of sin,
and know I am the perfect Son of God.
Insights/comments:
- To
give and to receive are one in truth. This is easily verified by our
experience for it means that whatever we receive is what we have given.
If we wish to know what we gave, we have only to look at what we are
currently receiving. This will sometimes not be a pleasant revelation,
and one that we may wish to deny, for it places the ability and
responsibility for our current experience squarely in our own lap. To
understand the truth of this principle is to understand the key to
making our experience more to our liking. To deny the truth of this
statement is to believe in random chance, and victimization.
- Neither sin nor forgiveness is natural to us. God created us perfect, and sinless, but we learned to think of our selves as sinful, so the correction is to learn, through our Higher Self, to forgive our ego self and thus return to the perfect state we only thought we left. Each time we forgive someone, we learn how to forgive ourselves, and in our learning, through the Holy Spirit in us, we teach others how to forgive themselves. Thus do we fulfill our function as the light of the world.
- We
know from our own experience that we receive joy when our gift to
someone brings them joy, even a simple smile gives us joy when we see it
light up the face of another, or at least lessen their pain in some
small way, in the same way we feel when another offers us a smile or the
gift of their presence. To think kindly of someone is to offer them a
gift of joy, and far more so when we offer forgiveness. The gift of
forgiveness is our function, it brings us happiness and offers happiness
to the world.
I and my Creator are One. 
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