• Since the pain of separation is an emotional experience, we need a body to be able to feel it.
• The human experience is meant to be an emotional one, so the extent to which we deny our feelings is the extent to which we deny our purpose for being here.
• We are spiritual beings having a spiritual experience in human bodies.
• Vibrationally, we live in two worlds simultaneously:
1. The World of Divine Truth (Spirit)2. The World of HumanityOnce we awaken, we can live comfortably in both.
• The World of Humanity is a spiritual classroom, and life is the curriculum. Our lessons are the events that happen in life. The objective is to awaken to the truth of who we are and return home.
• When we decided to incarnate into the World of Humanity, God gave us total free will to live the experiment in any way we choose and to find for ourselves the way back home.
• We have three forms of intelligence: mental, emotional, and spiritual. Our spiritual intelligence knows the truth of who we are and connects us directly to universal intelligence.
• Life is not random. It provides for the purposeful unfoldment of our own divine plan, with opportunities to make choices and decisions in every moment guided by our Higher Self and ego.
• There are two definitions of the ego. The first sees it as our friend and loving guide, while the second casts it as our enemy. They are as follows:
1. A part of our soul whose job it is, in cahoots with our Higher Self and our spiritual intelligence, to lovingly find all sorts of ways for us to experience the pain of separation, that being the purpose for our being on the earth plane. 2. An insidious, deep-seated subconscious guilt complex based on our belief that we committed the original sin of separating from God, who will eventually punish us for doing so. The ego seeks every way possible to reinforce itself and blocks any attempt to reveal the truth that we never separated from God at all. It cleverly ensures its survival by “protecting” us from our overwhelming guilt, as well as the fear of God’s wrath, through the mechanisms of repression and projection. (See Chapter 7.) • We create our reality through the Law of Cause and Effect. Thoughts are causes that show up in our world as physical effects. Reality is an outplaying of our consciousness. Our world offers a mirror of our beliefs. (See Chapter 9.)
• At the soul level, we get precisely what we need in our lives for our spiritual growth. How we judge what we get determines whether we experience life as painful or joyful.
• Through relationship we grow and learn. Through relationship we heal and are returned to wholeness and truth. We need others to mirror our misperceptions and our projections and to help us bring repressed material to consciousness for healing.
• Through the Law of Resonance, we attract people who resonate with our issues so that we can heal them. For example, if abandonment is our issue, we will tend to attract people who abandon us. In that sense, these people serve as our teachers. (See Chapter 8.)
• We come into the physical life experience with a mission: to fully experience a particular energy pattern so we can feel the feelings associated with that pattern and then transform that energy through love. (See Chapter 10.)
• Physical reality is an illusion created by our five senses. Matter consists of interrelating energy fields vibrating at different frequencies. (See Chapter 13.)
Note: If you find yourself unable to accept any of these assumptions, simply disregard them. It will make no difference to the effectiveness of the Radical Forgiveness experience.
3
Worlds Apart
What we might learn from Jill’s story is that things are not always what they seem. What appears to be cruel and nasty behavior on somebody’s part might be exactly what we need and have indeed called forth. Situations that appear to be the worst that could possibly befall us may hold the key to our healing something deep within us that keeps us from being happy and prevents our growth. The people who seem to us to be the most troublesome and the least likable may therefore be our greatest teachers. What we think they do to us, they actually do for us.
If I am right about this, then it follows that whatever appears to be happening is seldom what is truly occurring. Beneath the apparent circumstances of every situation exists a wholly different reality—a different world altogether; a world that we are not privy to except for the occasional glimpse.
Jill’s story demonstrates this fact beautifully. On the surface, there was the drama of what was happening between her, Jeff, and his daughter Lorraine. It was not pretty. It looked as though Jeff was being cruel and insensitive. It was easy to identify Jill as a victim in the situation and Jeff as the villain. Yet there were enough clues to lead us to the possibility that something else of a more loving nature was happening, and that it was being orchestrated at the spiritual level.
As the story unfolded, it became obvious that Jill’s soul was doing a dance with the souls of Jeff and Lorraine and that the situation being played out was purely for her soul’s benefit. Moreover, far from being a villain, Jeff was actually a hero and, from that spiritual perspective, had done nothing wrong. He had simply played his part in the drama, as dictated by his soul, acting in support of Jill’s growth at the soul level.
When we shift our perspective to this possibility, we become open to the idea that nothing wrong took place and that in fact there was nothing to forgive. This is precisely the notion that defines Radical Forgiveness. It is also what makes it radical.
If we had asked Jill to apply traditional forgiveness to this situation, we would not have investigated this “other world” possibility. We would have taken the evidence of our five senses and used our intellect to come to the conclusion that Jeff had wronged and badly treated her and that if she were to forgive him, she would have to accept what he did and try her best to let it go, or “let bygones be bygones.”
From this we notice that traditional forgiveness takes it as a given that something wrong happened. Radical Forgiveness, on the other hand, takes the position that nothing wrong happened and that, consequently, there is nothing to forgive. We can put it like this:
With traditional forgiveness, the willingness to forgive is present but so is the residual need to condemn. Therefore victim consciousness is maintained and nothing changes.
With Radical Forgiveness, the willingness to forgive is present but not the need to condemn. Therefore, the victim consciousness is dropped, and everything changes.
(“Victim consciousness” is defined as the conviction that someone else has done something bad to you, and, as a direct result, they are responsible for the lack of peace and happiness in your life.)
DIFFERENT WORLDS—DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES
Traditional forgiveness should not be seen as inferior to Radical Forgiveness. It is simply different. When used in the context of a certain set of beliefs—beliefs that are firmly rooted in the physical world and in everyday human reality—traditional forgiveness is the only form of forgiveness possible and has great value in its own right. It calls upon the finest of human qualities and characteristics, such as compassion, mercy, tolerance, humility, and kindness. Joan Borysenko calls forgiveness “the exercise of compassion.”[1] (FIGURE 2)
FIGURE 2: The Existential Chain of Being
Radical Forgiveness is different from traditional forgiveness because it is rooted in the metaphysical reality of the world of Spirit—that which I call the World of Divine Truth.
This makes the distinction between radical and traditional forgiveness very clear, because we can see now that in each case we look through a completely different lens. The lens we are using to view a situation will determine whether we are using traditional forgiveness or Radical Forgiveness. Each provides us with a completely different point of view.
But we should not fall into the trap of thinking of it in terms of either/or. It is a both/and situation. This is because we live with one foot in each world (since we are spiritual beings having a human experience
) and can therefore reference situations through either lens or both lenses at the same time. While being fully grounded in the World of Humanity, we remain connected to the World of Divine Truth through our soul.
Since the importance of the distinction between these two worlds cannot be overemphasized, some further explanation will be helpful here.
The World of Humanity and the World of Divine Truth represent two ends of a vibrational scale. When we vibrate at a low frequency, our bodies become dense and we exist only in the World of Humanity. When we vibrate at a high level, which makes our bodies become lighter, we exist also in the World of Divine Truth. Depending upon our vibration at any moment, we move up and down the scale toward one world or the other.
The World of Humanity represents the world of objective reality we see as “outside ourselves.” As world of form, it provides the setting in which we live our everyday human lives, as well as the reality we experience through our five senses. It holds the energy patterns of death, change, fear, limitation, and duality. This world provides us with the environment in which we, as spiritual beings, can experience being human. This means having a physical body and working with (and possibly transcending) a particular energy pattern associated with the World of Humanity that we may have specifically “come in” to work with. The World of Divine Truth, on the other hand, has no physical form and already carries the energy pattern of eternal life, immutability, infinite abundance, love, and oneness with God. Even though we cannot perceive this world with our senses, and we scarcely possess the mental capacity to comprehend it, we can get enough of a sense of it to know that it is real. Such activities as prayer, meditation, and Radical Forgiveness, all of which raise our vibration, allow us to access the World of Divine Truth. (FIGURE 3)
FIGURE 3: Perspectives on Two Worlds
These existential realms differ not in terms of place or time but solely in their vibrational level. The study of quantum physics has proven that all reality consists of energy patterns and that consciousness sustains these energy patterns. Thus, the world of form exists as dense concentrations of energy vibrating at frequencies we can experience through our physical senses. On the other hand, we experience the World of Divine Truth as an inner knowing and an extrasensory awareness.
Because these two worlds exist on the same continuum, we do not live sometimes in one and sometimes in the other. We live in both worlds at the same time. However, which world we experience at any given moment depends upon our awareness of them and how awake we are. Obviously, as human beings our consciousness resonates easily with the World of Humanity. Our senses naturally pull us into that world and convince us that it is real. Though some people are less grounded in the world of objective reality than others, human beings, on the whole, are firmly entrenched at this end of the continuum—which is as it should be.
Our awareness of the World of Divine Truth is limited, and this, too, appears to be by design. Our soul enters into this world to experience being human—thus our memory and awareness of the World of Divine Truth must be limited in order to allow us the full experience. We would not be able to take on fully the energies of separation, change, fear, death, limitation, and duality that characterize this world if we knew they were illusory. If we incarnated with this memory, we would deny ourselves the opportunity to transcend these states and to discover that they are, indeed, simply illusions. By forgetting who we are when we take on a physical body, we give ourselves the chance to experience fully the pain of separation—that is, until we begin to awaken and remember once more the truth of who we are.
During a gathering in Atlanta in 1990, I heard Gerald Jampolsky, a well-known author, tell a true story about a couple returning home from the hospital after giving birth to their second child. It is a story that illustrates the fact that we have a true knowing of our connection with God and our own soul, but that we forget it fairly quickly after taking on a body. The couple were conscious of the need to include their three-year-old daughter in the celebration of the new baby’s homecoming. But they felt perturbed by her insistence that she be allowed to go alone into the room with the baby. To honor her request yet oversee the situation, they switched on the baby monitor so they could at least hear what was going on, if not see it. What they heard astounded them. The little girl went straight to the crib, looked through the bars at the newborn child, and said, “Baby, tell me about God. I’m beginning to forget.”
In spite of the veil we lower over the memory of our oneness with God, which the above story suggests might become fully drawn around the age of three, as humans we are not denied a connection to the World of Divine Truth. Our soul carries a vibration that resonates with the World of Divine Truth and connects us to that world. We can aid this connection through practices like meditation, prayer, yoga, breathwork, dancing, and chanting. Through such practices, we raise our vibration enough to resonate with that of the World of Divine Truth.
There is evidence to suggest that even this is changing rapidly. Everywhere I go, I ask the same question of my workshop participants: “How many of you are aware of a quickening or a speed-up in our spiritual evolution—and that we are being asked by Spirit to move more quickly through our lessons in preparation for a profound shift of some kind?” There is almost unanimous concurrence. More and more people now talk openly and freely about always being in touch with their “guidance” and are willing to trust it more each day. The veil between the two worlds is definitely becoming thinner. Radical Forgiveness contributes to this process both at the individual level and at the level of collective awareness.
Yet the two types of forgiveness remain literally worlds apart. Each demands a different way of looking at the world and at life. Clearly, traditional forgiveness offers itself as a way of living in the world, while Radical Forgiveness is nothing less than a spiritual path.
In terms of our capacity to evolve spiritually, Radical Forgiveness offers extraordinary potential to transform consciousness, and this potential far exceeds what is possible with traditional forgiveness. Yet we must recognize that we all still live in the World of Humanity, and at certain times we will fall short of what we might think of as the spiritual ideal. When we find ourselves immersed in pain, for example, it becomes virtually impossible for us to move into Radical Forgiveness. When we have recently experienced harm at the hand of another, such as being raped, we cannot be expected to accept, in that moment, that the experience was something we wanted and that it represents the unfolding of a divine plan. We will not have the receptivity necessary to entertain that idea. It can only come later, in moments of quiet reflection, not in the heat of anger or in the immediate aftermath of trauma. (FIGURE 4)
FIGURE 4: Distinctions Between Traditional and Radical Forgiveness. For more explanation of these distinctions, see Chapter 15: Articles of Faith.
Then again, we must continually remind ourselves that what we have created is the spiritual ideal; that we have created circumstances in our lives that help us to grow and learn; that the lessons we need to learn are contained in the situation; and that the only way to obtain the growth from the experience is to go through it.
Our choice in this is not so much whether or not to have the experience (Spirit decides this for us), but how long we are going to hang out in victim consciousness because of it. Should we choose to quickly let go of victimhood, it is comforting to know that we have a technology that will make that happen. Traditional forgiveness, by contrast, has little to offer in this regard.
Summary
• Traditional forgiveness is firmly rooted in the World of Humanity. In the same way that the World of Humanity holds the energy of duality, so traditional forgiveness polarizes and judges everything as either good or bad, right or wrong.
Radical Forgiveness takes the view that there is no right/wrong or good/bad. Only our thinking makes it so.
• Traditional forgiveness always begins with the assumption that something wrong took place and someone “did something” to s
omeone else. The victim archetype remains operative.
Radical Forgiveness begins with the belief that nothing wrong happened and there are no victims in any situation.
• Traditional forgiveness is effective to the extent that it calls upon the highest human virtues, such as compassion, tolerance, kindness, mercy, and humility. These qualities point toward forgiveness and have healing potential. However, in and of themselves, they are not forgiveness.
Radical Forgiveness is no different in this regard, since it also calls for these same virtues to be present in the process.
• Traditional forgiveness depends entirely upon our own capacity to feel compassion, so it is limited in this regard. No matter how much compassion or tolerance we muster for someone like Hitler, and no matter how much we empathize with the pain of his upbringing, nothing enables us to forgive him (using traditional forgiveness) for the mass murder of over 13 million people.
Radical Forgiveness has no limits whatsoever and is completely unconditional. If Radical Forgiveness cannot forgive Hitler, it can forgive nobody. Like unconditional love, it’s all or nothing.
• With traditional forgiveness, the ego and our personality-self call the shots. Hence, the problem always appears “out there” with someone else.
With Radical Forgiveness, the finger points the other way. The problem lies “in here,” with me.
• Traditional forgiveness believes in the reality of the physical world, in the complete integrity of “what happens”; it always tries to “figure it all out” and thus control the situation.
Radical Forgiveness recognizes the illusion, sees that what happened was just a story, and responds by surrendering to the perfection of the situation.
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