Forgiveness is the key to happiness.
1. This is the answer to your search for peace. I
²This is the key to finding meaning in a world that seems to have none.
³This is the way to safety amid the seeming dangers that appear to threaten you at every turn, and bring uncertainty to all your hopes of ever finding peace and rest.
⁴It answers every question.
⁵Forgiveness guarantees the end of all uncertainty. II
2. The unforgiving mind is filled with fear, and gives no room for Love to be Itself—no place where It can spread Its wings in peace and rise above the turmoil of the world. III
²The unforgiving mind is sad, with no hope of relief or release from pain.
³It suffers and dwells in misery, groping about in darkness, blind, yet convinced that danger lurks nearby.
3. The unforgiving mind is torn by doubt, confused about itself and everything it sees—afraid and angry.
²It is weak and boastful, as fearful of moving forward as it is of staying still, as terrified of waking as of going to sleep.
³Every sound alarms it, yet it dreads the silence even more.
⁴It is afraid of the dark, but it fears the approach of light even more.
⁵What can the unforgiving mind perceive but its own damnation?
⁶And what can it behold except the proof that all its sins are real?
4. The unforgiving mind sees no errors, only sins.
²It looks upon the world with blind eyes, and shrieks in terror as it sees its own projections rising to attack the wretched parody it calls its life.
³It wants to live, yet it longs for death.
⁴It wants forgiveness, yet sees no hope.
⁵It wants escape, but does not know how, for it sees sin everywhere.
5. The unforgiving mind is in despair, with no prospects for a future that can offer anything but more despair.
²Yet it believes its judgment on the world is final, and does not realize it has condemned itself to this hopeless state.
³It thinks it cannot change, for what it sees bears witness that its judgment is correct. IV
⁴It does not ask, because it thinks it knows. V
⁵It does not question, because it is certain it is right. VI
6. Forgiveness is learned.
²It is not inherent in the mind, which cannot sin.
³As sin was an idea you taught yourself, so must you learn forgiveness—but from the Teacher Who represents the other Self in you. VII
⁴Through Him, you learn to forgive the self you made, and let it disappear.
⁵Thus you return your whole mind to the One Who is your Self, Who cannot sin.
7. Every unforgiving mind offers you the chance to teach your own how to forgive itself.
²Each one of these condemning minds is asking you to set it free from hell, and is turning to you for Heaven here and now.
³It has no hope, but you become its hope.
⁴And by becoming its hope, you also become your own.
⁵The unforgiving mind must learn, through your forgiveness, that it has been saved from hell.
⁶And by teaching salvation, you will learn it.
⁷But all that you teach and learn will not come from you, but from the Teacher Who was given you to show the way.
8. Our practice today will be to learn forgiveness.
²If you are willing, today you can learn to use the key to happiness for your own benefit.
³We will devote ten minutes in the morning and another ten at night to learning how to give and to receive forgiveness.
9. The unforgiving mind does not believe that giving and receiving are the same.
²But today we will try to learn they are by practicing forgiveness with someone you think of as your enemy, and someone you consider a friend.
³And when you learn to see them both as one, we will extend the lesson to ourselves, and recognize that their release brings ours with it. VIII
10. Begin the longer practice periods by thinking of someone you dislike, who irritates you, or whom you would rather not meet; someone you despise openly or would prefer to ignore.
²It does not matter in what form your hostility appears.
³You probably already know whom you are thinking of.
⁴That one will do.
11. Now close your eyes and see him in your mind for a while.
²Try to find some light in him somewhere—a little gleam you never noticed.
³Try to find some small spark of brightness shining through the ugly image you hold of him.
⁴Look at this image until you see a light somewhere within it, and then let that light expand until it covers him, and makes the image beautiful and good.
12. Look at this transformed perception for a while, and then turn your mind to someone you call a friend.
²Try to transfer the light you saw around your “enemy” to him.
³See him now as more than just a friend to you, for in that light his holiness shows you your Savior—saved and saving, healed and whole.
13. Then let him offer you the light you see in him, and let your “enemy” and your friend unite in blessing you with what you gave to them.
²Now you are one with them, and they with you.
³Now you have forgiven yourself.
⁴And throughout the day, do not forget the role forgiveness plays in bringing happiness to every unforgiving mind—including your own.
14. On the hour, say to yourself:
²Forgiveness is the key to happiness.
³I will awaken from the dream that I am mortal, fallible, and full of sin.⁴And I will know I am the perfect Son of God.
I “Forgiveness is the key to happiness” is an idea you must never forget. Do not allow it to slip from your mind. Keep it present, and always forgive everything and everyone—including yourself, of course. If you simply do that, you will never again have a single worry, a single doubt, nor will you ever know anger. You will be happy all your life on earth until you exhale, joyfully, your last breath.
You need nothing else. Forgiveness is the answer that responds to all your questions and resolves all your apparent problems. When you forgive everything, you become invulnerable to the world’s vicissitudes. You no longer crawl upon the earth but move weightlessly above all that you once perceived as burden and threat. You have nothing to fear, for you no longer attack or accuse anyone of anything—not even yourself, of course.
To forgive is to take no account of evil—that is, not to condemn the absence of good. Why do you focus so much on what is lacking and so little on what is present? To forgive is to realize that it is not up to you to decide how a given situation should be. To forgive is to stop playing God.
Open your eyes and learn that you have not come here to judge anything or anyone—not even yourself, of course. You have come to be happy, and to fulfill that function perfectly you need do nothing, absolutely nothing. In fact, you should not even have the need to forgive. What happened is that you conceived the strange idea that it was up to you to decide how everything should be. Then you began to interpret what you perceive absurdly and finally concluded that things are wrong. Has it never occurred to you that perhaps the only thing that is wrong and inappropriate is that strange idea of yours?
To be happy you have to do nothing. The state of being is fully satisfying. If you are not happy, it is because you have been doing a lot of things you should not have done—things that do not concern you. Now you, Son of God, face the painful task of cleansing your mind again and undoing all that mess. Forgiveness is for that. Only those who have erred need to forgive.
II To forgive is to undo a mistaken interpretation. There are two ways of doing this, and which one you choose will depend greatly on the disposition of your mind. Either one will serve, for both will bring you to the same end: not to condemn.
You may wish to straighten out your interpretation of that situation and adjust it to how the Holy Spirit sees it. It may also be helpful to think how Jesus would interpret it in your place. And if you have any doubt about it, ask Him. In any case, the right answer will come to you, and you will know it because your heart will rejoice and your mind will be at peace.
It is possible, however, that you do not need further explanations and may find it enough simply to let the whole matter pass and take no account of it. Realize that none of it is real. Nothing you perceive is real. If you find any love in it, celebrate it; if not, why take it into account? What could there be there for you that might be of interest?
It is also quite possible that what confronts you is a brother asking for help—and very likely he is doing so in the confused way that his fear and madness impose on him. In that case, ask Jesus what you should do. Be assured that He will tell you. He is there with you precisely for that—well, also to keep you company.
When you find yourself in a specific situation in which you have to forgive a brother whom you think is attacking you, rejoice. And rejoice greatly. Heaven has granted you an invaluable gift. You will have noticed how easily you fall asleep when everything “goes well.” It is wonderful when the winds blow in your favor, but haven’t you realized that on such occasions you have never “grown”? At best, when all goes well, you have stayed as you were—but more often you have ended up shrinking and losing yourself in trivialities.
A brother—or a demanding situation—is offering you the opportunity to expand your heart, to grow, to mature, and to strengthen yourself. The apparent conflict has come to rescue you from limbo. So get to work, lift your spirit, and forgive with all your soul. The fire of your will to forgive burns away every difficulty and opens the gates of Heaven to you. That is why you must rejoice when life requires your forgiveness. Remember that you are the savior of the world.
III In this Lesson, each paragraph begins with the phrase “the mind that does not forgive.” Yet it is much more illuminating to read it as “the mind that does not want to forgive.” This small nuance significantly changes the perception of the entire content.
It is not simply a mind that does not forgive out of inability, but a mind that has decided not to forgive. This distinction is essential. Many times we think of ourselves as not forgiving, or not forgiving enough. However, the description Jesus gives here does not refer to that feeling. It is not describing someone who sincerely wishes to forgive more and feels unable to reach it, but a truly pathological, deeply disturbed mind.
It is important to recognize that we do not identify with this description, because it is not speaking of us in our desire to heal, but of those specific moments when we decide not to forgive. And that attitude we do know: we have all experienced moments when, consciously, we did not want to forgive. In those moments, we do see ourselves reflected in what Jesus describes.
Therefore, when reading these Lessons, we must remember that Jesus is not speaking of our sincere struggle to forgive, nor of our sense of inadequacy. He refers to the state of mind in which we actively refuse to forgive—and that is where the true state of madness manifests.
IV John 1:7–8 “This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.”
John 18:37 “Pilate therefore said to Him, ‘Are You a king then?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.’”
V As has been said before, this is one of the most insidious cognitive biases of the human mind. It is a mental illness so widespread that it has not been identified as such. It is the cognitive bias of double ignorance: not knowing, and not knowing that one does not know. Deep down, it is nothing but arrogance—attributing to oneself a quality or capacity one does not possess; in this case, knowledge. By thinking one already knows, one does nothing to learn or to change, and that gives extraordinary stability to that condition of ignorance.
The true suffering of Jesus on the cross had nothing to do with physical pain. Jesus was a consummate master of the mind, and He knew perfectly well that pain is an illusion and did not affect Him at all. His true sorrow He proclaimed in His next-to-last words: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” His accusers and executioners, in their arrogance, certainly thought they did—but they were unaware that they were crucifying their brother, the Son of God. Had they known, they would not have done it; they would have remembered God at that very instant and awakened themselves to their true identity. Socrates was one of the very few men who became aware of that universal affliction, and for denouncing it he was condemned to death in the first fully democratic decision ever recorded in history. There is no quality more intrinsically human than arrogance; in fact, “human” and “arrogant” are equivalent terms denoting the same concept.
VI T-29.VII.1:9 “Would you rather be right or be happy?”
VII Another fundamental idea in this Lesson is the following: just as sin was a lesson we taught ourselves, forgiveness, on the other hand, must be learned—but not from ourselves, rather from the Teacher who represents the true Self that dwells within us.
This is essential to understand. Many times, when we try to forgive, we act as though we had to teach ourselves how to do it. We say to ourselves: “So-and-so has done such a thing to me, and I must forgive him.” We look within for our own resources to achieve it, but we usually discover that we are not very convincing to ourselves. It is difficult for us to forgive what we judge as unforgivable, because within us the condemnation seems fully justified.
How, then, can one who has condemned teach his own mind to forgive? The answer is: he cannot. And yet we forget this fundamental truth time and again. We force ourselves to forgive, as though sheer personal effort were enough. But it is not.
The key is to acknowledge humbly: “I have to forgive this, but I do not know how.” We cannot be the teachers of our own forgiveness, because the one who condemns cannot at the same time be the one who releases. This is the great imposture that creates resistance in our mind.
This is where the Holy Spirit truly comes into play. When, instead of trying to forgive on our own, we ask the Holy Spirit, “Show me another way of seeing this, for I do not see it,” then the miracle of forgiveness occurs. And not because we have succeeded in doing it, but because we have relinquished the desire to do it alone.
Genuine forgiveness is a transpersonal act: it comes from the Holy Spirit when we ask from the heart. It is important to understand that Jesus is not asking the impossible or anything excessive of us. He reminds us that forgiveness is easy—but it is easy only when we do not attempt to do it with our ego.
Forgiveness is not a doing. It is not an effort. It is a miraculous change in perception that happens when we let go—when we cease assuming the responsibility of teaching ourselves how to forgive. Our ego cannot teach us forgiveness, because it only knows how to condemn.
True forgiveness occurs when we yield control to the Holy Spirit, when we allow Him to transform our mind. In that instant, forgiveness ceases to be a burden and becomes something natural and simple, precisely because it does not depend on us.
The Lesson expresses it clearly: “Just as sin was a thought you taught yourself, so must forgiveness be learned—but not from you, rather from the Teacher who represents the other Self within you.”
VIII Here Jesus offers us a spectacular mental technique based on visualization and transference. The exercise is very well explained. If you do it well, you will obtain a magnificent result that will surprise you.
If you encounter any difficulty in carrying it out, ask sincerely for help, and it will be granted. Make an effort today to do this exercise well, for it will allow you to glimpse the extreme flexibility and power of your mind.
Realize that it is a technique that serves to correct many other perceptions that cause you pain, anguish, or fear. Notice that, instead of an “enemy,” you can beautify a job you dislike, or any other matter your mind rejects. The possibilities are limitless.