Each article in this series is a stone laid on the one before it. If you are new, begin with [Part I], [Part II], [Part III], [Part IV], [Part V], and [Part VI]. Today’s teaching assumes all of them.
“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”
— Lewis B. Smedes
Consider the person who hurt you most, the one whose actions fundamentally changed the course of your life. It may be the parent who should have protected you, the partner who violated your trust at the deepest level, or the person who took something that was never theirs to take.
The event is over and the perpetrator has moved on. Yet something in your mind and body remains organized around the original wound, keeping the body in a state of low-grade preparation for a threat that ended years ago. These manifest as intrusive thoughts, as beliefs about yourself, as the way you see others. Memories arise and you feel shame, anger, and fear. For many, the unresolved wound is the root cause of a chronic illness that the medical system manages with symptom-suppressant drugs.
There is a way out, and it carries a name that makes some of you flinch.
Forgiveness.
And I already know that the word, for some of you, produces resistance rather than relief. Because forgiveness is loaded with moral righteousness and religious undertones. In the depths of our pain it can feel like an invalidation of how deeply a person harmed us, and can feel like we are letting the person “off the hook”.
You were wronged, they were wrong, and in your grace you release them from the debt. It is offered as virtue, as taking the higher ground, as being the bigger person. And notice what that version quietly requires: it keeps the forgiver above and the forgiven below, the wound remains in its original form, the wrongdoer still guilty, and your own pain standing as the price of your decency.
But that is not what forgiveness is.
I do not intend to diminish the sacredness of life by referring to it as a game, so forgive me ahead of time for this analogy. It’s quite the opposite. I believe our life journey is sacred and beautiful, and the lessons drawn from the game are the necessary learning for our transcendence into wisdom and love.
I care very much that you learn the rules of this game, so you can create heaven on earth rather than hell. Both are inner states, and both reflect the frequency you are living from.
In that respect, I will ask you to consider forgiveness from a higher perspective, “As Above, So Below,” where you can alter the physical reality you experience.
This is literal and not meant to be a metaphor.
You are influencing the physical reality you experience, whether you are conscious of it or not. Today’s lesson can be understood as a cheat code toward heaven on earth. It can be received as profound wisdom. Or it can simply be a skill to master, one with powerful consequences.
Regardless, I ask that you temporarily suspend any previous definition of forgiveness. Start fresh, as a blank slate, because there is a powerful way to perceive man’s inhumanity to man from a higher perspective. A way of perception that I have witnessed alter the lives of those who learned to master it, transmuting energy they had carried for decades in a matter of moments.
It reaches a depth that no therapy, no medication, no amount of talking about the wound has ever been able to touch. I have witnessed chronic health conditions remit, almost immediately.
I believe in this so strongly that I have come to see it as one of the unspoken keys to understanding the development and maintenance of chronic disease. The symptoms, the ones we have hundreds, if not thousands, of classifications for, are the body sending messages.
We rarely address the root.
Today’s lesson is the one I would ask you to master above all the others, if you truly desire the power to manifest a reality of love, joy, awe, peace, and health.
And I believe what I am about to share is exactly what Jesus was teaching. He was not the only one who knew. The same instruction runs through the Hermetic texts, through the Buddha, through the Sufi mystics, through every tradition that ever produced a teacher who spoke of the kingdom being within rather than above. This series is to look deeper. Go further.
“This is why I speak to them in parables: Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.”
— Matthew 13:13