Forgiving this moment

“The light of the world brings peace to every mind through my forgiveness." - A Course in Miracles

“The light of the world brings peace to every mind through my forgiveness” says A Course in Miracles. I interpret this as: forgiveness is our vehicle to peace within ourselves and throughout our world. 

This week I’ve felt strain in my body and across my campus, in direct connection with the Israel-Palestine protests. It seems while we are searching for peaceful solutions, there is a strain of violence that sneaks it’s way in wherever it has a chance. This violence is the belief we can be at peace through war. We can find peace in our un-forgiveness for each other. We can find peace where our egos reign over other egos. 

From A Course in Miracles perspective, nothing is unforgivable, because nothing was ever really judged. The manmade judgment we posit onto nature, which is each other, becomes the source of our pain. We cannot ignore that pain and therefore we must release it. This is our choice to forgive.

Any of us who have transformed our personal lives know that this was impossible without our attempt to forgive ourselves and those who have wronged us. Until we can do this, we carry a belief that fighting, whether it’s with ourselves or other people, is going to get us what we want. As is displayed by the Israel-Hamas conflict, this has proven to be a totally ineffective thought system producing tragic losses for all. 

Martin Luther King Jr said, “you have very little morally persuasive power with those who can feel your underlying contempt.” Whether we are protesting Boeing, the Israeli government, or Hamas, we must do so from a place of love. We must switch from fighting to communicating. Communication is about establishing understanding. Understanding restores us from the fantasy of our separation to the truth of our interconnectedness.

When a mind realises it’s interconnectedness, it no longer acts solely on the behalf of itself, because it realises everybody else IS itself. When a people, a government, and a planet realise their sameness, there is no reason to act against each other, because it would means acting against oneself. This is what social change is about. This is what healing is about. 

Healing, whether personally or politically, is the process of screwing a loose screw back into a table. It is a restoration to our natural functioning, which like an individual cell, is to serve the collective body. Healing is an active choice we make to see our sameness. To see our sameness is to see peace. To see peace is a process of unlearning a thought system based on fear and separation, and choosing a thought system based on love and connection. 

Love is not an apolitical option. It is the only option we have to heal ourselves personally and politically.

I do not wish to minimise the gravity of tragedies and feelings sweeping across the planet right now. I do, however, wish to offer a perspective that is bigger than the wounding of this world so that we may be moved quicker into healing. From this perspective, may the effectiveness of our communication — whether it’s protest, writing, or debating — be anchored in the power of love and unity that contains everything and everyone in our galaxy.