Forgiveness means letting go of self-deceptive thoughts

Happiness is natural

Part 1 of 12: Happiness is our natural state of mind

Everyone agrees that forgiveness is good

Everyone agrees on importance of forgiveness.  A Course in Miracles even says that forgiveness is your only function. And everyone agrees that forgiveness can help you to feel better.

But there are two radically different meanings of “forgiveness” depending on whether you are in a one-power or a two-power way of thinking.

A two-power definition of forgiveness

From a two-power perspective, forgiveness means letting someone off the hook, or pardoning a sin.  Even though they actually deserve your condemnation, you magnanimously let go of your grievance against them. You are giving them a gift that they don’t really deserve. This can bring you a sense of relief relative to carrying the emotional burden of holding a grudge or bearing a grievance.

That actually reinforces the underlying cause of unhappiness

The problem is, however, that this way of forgiving actually reinforces the whole framework of judgment, anger and blaming. It may give you temporary relief from one particular problem. But it actually reinforces the whole way of thinking that makes you unhappy, that blocks the expression of your inner happiness, that blocks your deeper self-awareness.

There is another way

When forgiveness is defined in the context of a one-power way of thinking, it has a very different meaning. And more importantly, a very different effect on your life.

Happiness is your natural state of mind

From a one-power perspective, happiness is your natural state of mind. Your mind is happy when it is not interfering with itself. Every time you are upset and unhappy, it is because you yourself are somehow blocking your own awareness of your inner truth of happiness—you yourself are blocking your inner natural happiness from expressing itself.

Allowing yourself to be happy

Happiness is how you feel when you are allowing yourself to express and experience your inner nature—or to say it a little differently, when you are allowing yourself to be aware of that inner truth.  Here, “allowing” means “not actively blocking.

The source of your happiness is within you—it is the very truth and essence of you.  You and only you can allow it or block it—you and only you can control your own deep self-awareness.

Unhappiness means you are hiding your truth from yourself

Whenever you are unhappy or upset, it is because you are actively hiding your truth from yourself.  But you have to hide this fact from yourself, or otherwise your self-deception wouldn’t work (see the previous series).

Giving yourself reasons to be unhappy

Because happiness is your natural state, you always have to give yourself some reason to be unhappy—“I am unhappy because …..”

But you can’t give yourself the real reason that you are unhappy because you are actively blocking your own self-awareness, you are actively blocking your inner nature of happiness from expressing itself. If you knew that, you wouldn’t continue to be upset.

Blaming someone else

So instead, you make up a reason that something outside of your mind is making you upset. And if you’re really good at self-deception, you actually believe that someone or something outside yourself if making you upset. (To be continued …)

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