A Course in Miracles perspective.
By Ozodi Osuji Ph.D
In our world, we do see other people do what we interpret as not good for us. Other people may physically attack you and inflict pain on your body; they may discriminate against you and cause you psychological pain. People do all sorts of harmful things to each other. Since we do feel pain from other people’s toxic behaviors toward us, we feel an urge to do to them as they do to us. People are naturally defensive and defend against attacks and sometimes attack those who attacked them; they say offense is the best defense.
In this light, forgiving the person who just harmed you seems absurd; you believe that they inflicted pain on you and probably would do it again unless you protect yourself. A Course in Miracles posits a basis for forgiving the person you see doing terrible things to you.
It says that no one can do terrible things to you unless you say so. Your response to other people is always based on your interpretation of their actions as hurtful or loving, and your understanding of who their true self is.
Your interpretations are mediated by your ego’s separated self’s perception of the truth, which is not the truth. Therefore, you ought to stop interpreting the meaning of what other people did to you, keep quiet, and ask the Holy Spirit to tell you how you should respond to them. What your ego considers an attack by another person may be interpreted to mean a call for love, when love is missing, by the Holy Spirit, and he asks you to love the person your ego’s eyes see as attacking you.
The book says that our world is an illusion and does not exist; space, time, matter, and our bodies do not exist; they are all illusions that seem real but are not.
What is real is God; God has a son; both of them are in a unified spirit state. There is no space between the father and the son, no time and matter between them; they are in each other.
What is the truth? The truth is the unified spirit self, the formless union of God and his son as oneself. In truth, the son cannot separate from the father, hence cannot attack him, and as such has not sinned, and as such the father has nothing to forgive him for. The one Son of God is symbolic of infinite us. We are in each other and in God. We cannot separate from each other or from God. Therefore, we cannot attack or harm each other. The truth, our unified self, has nothing to forgive; you cannot forgive the truth.
But in our present awareness, we seem to have separated from each other and do attack each other; though this perception is an illusion, to our separated minds, we seem to attack each other.
You can only forgive that which is not true, illusions that seem true, and when you forgive an illusion, you experience the truth. Your brother has not attacked you, but you do see him seem to attack you and feel angry at him. His attack is illusory. You have to forgive that illusory attack of your brother on your illusory separated self.
All the events in this world are illusions, and you have to forgive them to experience the truth they are hiding.
Slavery and discrimination are illusions whereby two seeming separated people harm each other and defend against each other but when you realize that separation is an illusion that there is only one self, one son of God that seems to be in the two or more people harming each other, then you realize that they have harmed no one; they are dreaming whereby oneself now seems many selves harming each other.
You forgive the person who harmed you and, in doing so, forgive yourself for the harm you did to other people. The world you see is not there; it is an illusion, overlook it, forgive it, see the same world reinterpreted by the Holy Spirit, and it is now in light form (the people that were in dense forms, in matter in a separated world are reinvented into beings in light forms, space, time, and matter are remade into light forms).
You forgive illusions, not the truth. The entire world is an illusion and does not exist, but it seems to exist, so you overlook what is done in it, forgive it; when you forgive the world, you see the purified forms of it, the world in light forms.
ATTACK IS A CALL FOR FORGIVENESS AND RETURN TO LOVE
The person who did to your ego what seemed a terrible thing offered you an opportunity to reciprocate with attack or forgiveness. If you choose to forgive him, he has become your savior because if you forgive him and thus forgive yourself, you and he are saved. That person is an illusion of the son of God (as you are), and by forgiving him, you overlook illusions and see the real self in the real world, and from the forgiven world proceed to the formless world of God.
When you forgive all people, hence yourself, you are now at the gate of heaven, and God himself opens the door to his heaven, to the state of oneness, and lets you enter; that is, you experience oneness with God while still in the world of illusions, separated things.
Clearly, A Course in Miracles’ perspective on forgiveness is not the way we live our lives. In our ego-separated world, we see other people as separate from us and believe that they do not necessarily look after our interests and defend ourselves and our interests when they do what we consider noxious.
SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS AND HOLY RELATIONSHIPS
A Course in Miracles says that in eternity, God and his creations are one formless spirit self. Thereafter, the idea of separation from God and each other entered our minds. The idea came from nowhere and nothing (just as the Big Bang came from nowhere and nothing).
Instead of dismissing it as impossible to realize, we chose to seem to realize it.
To do so, we cast a magical spell, what Hinduism calls Maya, on our minds and went to sleep, and in our sleep, we dream of our current universe of space, time, and matter, and house our now seemingly separate minds in bodies and see ourselves walking around in space and time.
In heaven, God, we were whole and did not feel lonely, but on earth, where we seem separated from each other, we feel terribly lonely.
Unable to bear the sense of loneliness, we form what the book calls special love relationships. Here, we retain our desired separate selves but use them to form pseudo unions (such as marriages and groups), and these false unions reduce our sense of loneliness.
But because we still retain the desire for a separate self, and readily leave our temporary special love relationships, we feel fear, anxiety, sadness, depression, mania, anger, and other mental disorders in the special relationships we formed on earth.
God saw what we are doing and does not destroy them but remakes them to give us relative joy. God created the Holy Spirit and placed him in each of our now seemingly separated minds. His function is to reinterpret the world and the events of our world and ask us to forgive when we are wronged.
We separated ourselves into bodies. The Holy Spirit asks us to use our separate selves to love one another and to forgive each other for our attacks.
If we forgive those who attacked us, we transform our hitherto special relationships into Holy Relationships.
In Holy Relationships, people forgive each other, overlook their separated selves in bodies, and as such see each other no longer in dense forms but in light forms; they now live in the world of light forms, what traditional Christianity calls New Jerusalem and its New Man, and are the new men and women. They are the bridge between heaven (unified state) and our world (separated state).
If we remember that we are in God, always live in the now of God, not in the linear world of past, present, and future of our world, and thus overlook what other people did to us in the past, and not seek a future based on the parameters of the ego, we remember that we always live in the now of God. That is, we overlook the past and future and purify the present with forgiveness and know the love of God and his heaven.
The son of God, while on earth, approximates his true self, formless unified self, in holy relationships where he forgives all sons of God and himself and knows attenuated peace and happiness.
Heaven is perfect unified spirit state, hence perfect peace and joy.
In sum, our universe does not exist or could be considered a mere dream. As such, what we see done in our world has not been done. Your brothers have not attacked you and have not harmed you, and you have not attacked and harmed them. It is all an interesting dream by the sons of God dreaming through this and other universes and killing time through these simulation dreams. They remain in heaven, in oneness, and see themselves in our world and think that it is real.
Mystics are folks who have learned that our world is not real and forgive it, laugh at it. As we talk, Americans and Iranians are bombing themselves and killing themselves; it all seems real, but they are merely playing in a dream state. Therefore, we must love Americans and Iranians and all of us for the Son of God, who does the dreaming, is always innocent and has not done what we do in the dream state.
So, should we adopt the Course in Miracles’ perspective on forgiveness or dismiss it as absurd? I am just asking!
Ozodi Osuji
A Course in Miracles is a Gnostic perspective on what Jesus Christ taught. It is in alignment with the Gospel of Thomas, the Apostle. Catholicism stamped out Gnosticism, which was actually what most of the early Christians believed in until Emperor Constantine of the Roman Empire took over the Church in 325 AD and had the bishops who supported him select from Christian texts those that support the empire of the ego and reject the mystical aspects of early Christianity, such as the Gospel of Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and the other Apostles.
A Course in Miracles has a workbook where each day a lesson is done. The workbook is meant to put the abstract information in the text part of the book into daily practice.
The Book is divided into three parts: text, workbook, and manual for teachers. Altogether, it is 1333 pages long.
See below for A Course in Miracles’ lesson for today, Thursday, May 14, 2026
LESSON 134
Let Me Perceive Forgiveness as It Is.
Let us review the meaning of “forgive,” for it is apt to be distorted and to be perceived as something that entails an unfair sacrifice of righteous wrath, a gift unjustified and undeserved, and a complete denial of the truth. In such a view, forgiveness must be seen as mere eccentric folly, and this course appears to rest salvation on a whim.
This twisted view of what forgiveness means is easily corrected, when you can accept the fact that pardon is not asked for what is true. It must be limited to what is false. It is irrelevant to everything except illusions. Truth is God’s creation, and to pardon that is meaningless. All truth belongs to Him, reflects His laws and radiates His Love. Does this need pardon? How can you forgive the sinless and eternally benign?
The major difficulty that you find in genuine forgiveness on your part is that you still believe you must forgive the truth, and not illusions. You conceive pardon as a vain attempt to look past what is there; to overlook the truth, in an unfounded effort to deceive yourself by making an illusion true. This twisted viewpoint but reflects the hold that the idea of sin retains as yet upon your mind, as you regard yourself.
Because you think your sins are real, you look on pardon as deception. For it is impossible to think of sin as true and not believing forgiveness is a lie. Thus, is forgiveness really but a sin, like all the rest. It says the truth is false, and smiles on the corrupt as if they were as blameless as the grass, as white as snow. It is delusional in what it thinks it can accomplish. It would see as right the plainly wrong; the loathsome as the good.
Pardon is no escape in such a view. It merely is a further sign that sin is unforgivable, at best to be concealed, denied or called another name, for pardon is a treachery to truth. Guilt cannot be forgiven. If you sin, your guilt is everlasting. Those who are forgiven from the view that their sins are real are pitifully mocked and twice condemned; first, by themselves for what they think they did, and once again by those who pardon them.
It is sin’s unreality that makes forgiveness natural and wholly sane, a deep relief to those who offer it; a quiet blessing where it is received. It does not countenance illusions, but collects them lightly, with a little laugh, and gently lays them at the feet of truth. And there they disappear entirely.
Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness and looks straight through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies, but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, “My brother, what you think is not the truth.”
The strength of pardon is its honesty, which is so uncorrupted that it sees illusions as illusions, not as truth. It is because of this that it becomes the undeceiver in the face of lies, the great restorer of the simple truth. By its ability to overlook what is not there, it opens up the way to truth, which has been blocked by dreams of guilt. Now are you free to follow in the way your true forgiveness opens up to you. For if one brother has received this gift of you, the door is open to yourself.
There is a very simple way to find the door to true forgiveness and perceive it open wide in welcome. When you feel that you are tempted to accuse someone of sin in any form, do not allow your mind to dwell on what you think he did, for that is self-deception. Ask instead, “Would I accuse myself of doing this?”
Thus, will you see alternatives for choice in terms that render choosing meaningful, and keep your mind as free of guilt and pain as God Himself intended it to be, and as it is in truth. It is but lies that would condemn. In truth, is innocence the only thing there is. Forgiveness stands between illusions and the truth; between the world you see and that which lies beyond; between the hell of guilt and Heaven’s gate.
Across this bridge, as powerful as Love which laid its blessing on it, are all dreams of evil and of hatred and attack brought silently to truth. They are not kept to swell and bluster, and to terrify the foolish dreamer who believes in them. He has been gently awakened from his dream by understanding what he thought he saw was never there. And now he cannot feel that all escape has been denied to him.
He does not have to fight to save himself. He does not have to kill the dragons which he thought pursued him. Nor need he erect the heavy walls of stone and iron doors he thought would make him safe. He can remove the ponderous and useless armor made to chain his mind to fear and misery. His step is light, and as he lifts his foot to stride ahead a star is left behind, to point the way to those who follow him.
Forgiveness must be practiced, for the world cannot perceive its meaning, nor provide a guide to teach you, its beneficence. There is no thought in all the world that leads to any understanding of the laws it follows, nor the Thought that it reflects. It is as alien to the world as is your own reality. And yet it joins your mind with the reality in you.
Today we practice true forgiveness, that the time of joining be no more delayed. For we would meet with our reality in freedom and in peace. Our practicing becomes the footsteps lighting up the way for all our brothers, who will follow us to the reality we share with them. That this may be accomplished, let us give a quarter of an hour twice today, and spend it with the Guide Who understands the meaning of forgiveness, and was sent to us to teach it. Let us ask of Him:
Let me perceive forgiveness as it is.
Then choose one brother as He will direct, and catalogue his “sins,” as one by one they cross your mind. Be certain not to dwell on any one of them, but realize that you are using his “offenses” but to save the world from all ideas of sin. Briefly consider all the evil things you thought of him, and each time ask yourself, “Would I condemn myself for doing this?”
Let him be freed from all the thoughts you had of sin in him. And now you are prepared for freedom. If you have been practicing thus far in willingness and honesty, you will begin to sense a lifting up, a lightening of weight across your chest, a deep and certain feeling of relief. The time remaining should be given to experiencing the escape from all the heavy chains you sought to lay upon your brother, but were laid upon yourself.
Forgiveness should be practiced through the day, for there will still be many times when you forget its meaning and attack yourself. When this occurs, allow your mind to see through this illusion as you tell yourself:
Let me perceive forgiveness as it is.
Would I accuse myself of doing this?
I will not lay this chain upon myself.
In everything you do remember this:
No one is crucified alone, and yet no one can enter Heaven by himself.
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