True Forgiveness Is…

As If It Never Happened, No Less

And I have less than 400 words to convince you of this powerful insight into true forgiveness. One I can’t claim as my own – Sydney Banks, the one that discovered The Three Principles (Inside-Out Understanding), first described forgiveness thus. I wonder, will you agree with him…

About Forgiveness

To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.
– Robert Muller

I don’t seem to have written much about forgiveness. How interesting. I’ve read lots and lots of articles on the subject – most well-meaning, but missing the point. And I certainly understand the importance of forgiveness in my own life – absolutely.

So it’s interesting how I don’t seem to think about sharing on this theme, vital as it is.

Let me start with paraphrasing one Sydney Banks – he who discovered The Three Principles (the Inside-Out understanding of the human experience, pointed at by religions, non-religions and teachers and prophets throughout time) – when he talked about forgiveness:

True forgiveness is acting
and behaving as if the
event never took place.

Hmm, powerful stuff indeed.

• Gone are the forgive but never forget self-help mantras.

• Gone is the desire to want to punish in some way.

• Gone is every thought about that moment (or moments), whatever happened – or at least any need to hold onto such thoughts, should they arise…

This. Is. Forgiveness.

Truly.

Anything else is a fascimile thereof, so to speak.

How does this Sydney Banks fellah expect us to forgive like this, exactly?

Well I can’t speak for him (obviously) and he died several years ago, but I can speak to his understanding of how life works, of how we create our experience of it (from the Inside- Out) moment by moment by moment…

Forgiveness: An Inside Out Understanding

Fact is, something happens. It doesn’t mean anything. But, via the gift of Thought, we gave what happened meaning. We do this every second of our lives.

And if the meaning we give the event offends us – if it harms us, physically, emotionally (or both) – then we now require some kind of forgivness to make things ‘better’.

As Byron Katie so eloquently puts it,

Forgiveness is the discovery that what you thought happened, didn’t.

In short, we make up conditions (laws, morals, behavioural norms) for how life should unfold and when those made up conditions are broken somehow we demand forgiveness.

Madness. Insanity. And pretty much all-pervasive in the Outside In paradigm we live our lives by.

So, do I live with this kind of active forgiveness in my life, then? Do I live in this present moment only, with no thought of the past. No I don’t. No I don’t. But then neither do I love unconditionally all the time, but I still recognise the truth of unconditional love as I recognise the truth of the forgiveness I write about.

I guess you could call this forgiveness unconditonal love.

It is not a doing, or a pretending, or a wishing for, it simply IS.

 3 Minute Heroes Video

Here’s what came to me as I shared my thoughts on this topic during a 3 Minute Heroes video I recorded in December, 2014: