Jesus’s disciple asked him, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he 
sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (MT 18:21-23) No matter how many times someone does you wrong, you are meant to forgive without a thought. Every time.
I was reminded to talk about forgiveness by an article in the current Atlantic which cites the psychological and even the physical health benefits to be expected from forgiving. What struck me when I read what was an excellent article on a topic essential to human wellbeing was that it still did not go far enough. So let’s summarize what the dead tell us is the reason why we are born at all. Again, I think Jesus says it best:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (MT 22:37-40)
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven…. Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (MT 5:43-48)
Human life is a school in which we are meant to learn to love the way God 
loves: universally and completely. That’s it! And that’s all. Learning to love is why we live in families, why we are crowded enough to have to deal with others, why some of those we deal with do us wrong, and why bad things happen to good people. Every occurrence in your life is either love or a call for love. So no matter the question, love is always the answer.
Forgiving the big and little bruises that come from human interactions is an essential precursor to our learning to love perfectly. Holding grudges against family or friends gets in the way of our loving them, so even in happy family situations the need to forgive keeps coming up. This is “intimate forgiveness,” the simple overlooking of negative interactions with the people we love. And it is basic stuff! It’s kindergarten. The kind of forgiveness that learning to love perfectly requires of us is quite a bit harder.
Both Jesus and the dead who communicate with us urge us to focus on what we might call “radical forgiveness,” which means forgiving every wrong ever done by anyone, no matter how life-changing it might be, as if it never happened at all.
Think about that!
We are meant to learn automatic, reflexive, universal, and complete forgiveness.
Here are some important facts about the process of radical forgiveness:
- Forgiveness is not approval. If someone harms you or harms someone you love, immediate forgiveness is essential. You needn’t (and you likely shouldn’t) try to approve of whatever wrong was done.
- You don’t have to voice your forgiveness to the offender. In family situations it may be important that you tell your sister or your dad that you forgive, but in most other situations it is fine (and much easier) to forgive privately and move on.
- Forgiveness is for you alone. Except within families, the wrongdoer likely doesn’t care whether or not you forgive, so forgiveness is the gift that you give to yourself. And what a gift it is! As you learn to do it better, you will find that radical forgiveness makes you feel free and glorious.
- Forgiveness becomes ever easier. When I first came to understand the importance of forgiving every wrong, I was an Olympics-level holder of grudges. To be alive was to keep score! At last, three decades later, I have mastered automatic forgiveness. The difference is like setting down a hundred pounds of unnecessary garbage so you can dance your way through life.
- There is no wrong that cannot be forgiven. When you treat forgiveness as an exercise that is essential to your spiritual health, you will find that there is not much difference between a stubbed toe and a murder from the perspective of forgiving every wrong.
Human minds are eternal! When measured against forever, these unpleasant interactions with others on earth really amount to precisely nothing.
So, how do we manage radical forgiveness? The easiest way feels like a physical process. What I did in the beginning was to package the wrong in my mind, gather it all up and wrap it together. Then I would think, “I forgive and release!” and let it go. I let it go physically: I pushed it away. Sometimes the darned thing would come back so I would have to go through the process again, but now my forgiveness is so automatic that I seldom give it a thought. Outrage turns out to be a lot like anger. If you court it and really let yourself feel it, you are going to feel a lot more of it; but if you refuse to give it mind-space, soon it doesn’t even get started. You still notice the wrong, and you recall how that sort of thing used to really wreck your day, but now it doesn’t bother you at all.
Learning automatic forgiveness is the foundation of our spiritual growth. It is essential to our learning all the wonders of perfect love. And it makes your life easier. And so much happier!
holy writ, certain helpful folks have suggested that the Koran may need editing. Well, a certain other book could use a bit of editing as well.
This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Mt 22:37-40)
pioneering work in studying aspects of consciousness, I’m going to offer you another great TED talk that was delivered by Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers in 2014. Chalmers shares with us here some extraordinary insights about consciousness. And surprisingly, his TED talk has not yet been banned!
brain’s faulty wiring. But entirely beyond the ken of mainstream scientists. An endless bounty of such peculiarities will be more readily understood once the faulty dogma of atheistic materialism is shown to be a train to nowhere, and scientists return after more than a century to trying to figure out what is true.
spring from the fact that reality is based in consciousness has greatly enhanced our understanding of oddities ranging from the sense of being stared at and the fact that dogs can anticipate their owners’ arrival to the astonishing way in which for one laboratory animal anywhere on earth to learn something new makes it easier for all other members of the same species to master the same trick.
a spurious dispute. The fact that the Apostle Paul and not Jesus was the founder of Christianity seems incontrovertible to me. Jesus died before the religion began. Yes, he sent out his disciples to spread his teachings after his death, but those teachings on love and forgiveness had nothing to do with the doctrine of sacrificial redemption upon which Paul’s Christianity is based.
confirmed by any means until at least the twentieth century.
and we start the process of moving our bodies before we make the decision to move, which troubling fact has led many researchers to conclude that our apparent free will is an illusion. To quote a recent article in 
should know better!
a version of the scientific dogma of atheistic materialism that is softened by lofty and optimistic ideas. Human beings are alone in a clockwork universe, just the random products of evolution, but nevertheless we are unique random products. Wilson’s latest book is apparently entitled The Meaning of Human Existence, which seems to sums up his philosophy: we are random dust, true, but we are what you might call a higher class of random dust.
purpose,” since from the materialistic science point of view, human existence is an altogether random and inevitably terminal condition.
insane achievement, like the time when I was terrified of heights but still I climbed on an open staircase to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral dome. I really loved St. Paul’s Cathedral! And who knew when I might make it back to London?
updated appendices and a wonderful Foreword by Victor Zammit, the great afterlife researcher who is one of my heroes. We have nearly 200 years of abundant and consistent communications from people we used to think were dead, and when combined with insights from quantum physics and from cutting-edge consciousness research, these communications give us a breathtaking picture of the glorious reality that we enter at death. But even beyond coming to understand death, we are learning so much more! What afterlife researchers have discovered is a whole new branch of science, a third wave of physics that is consciousness-based. We are learning things about human nature, the nature of God, and the nature of reality that are surprising and beyond-belief wonderful.
and also the many methods we have for contacting the dead proactively, including some just being developed that are going to make it impossible for anyone to still insist the dead do not survive. This book’s Foreword is by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., of the University of Arizona at Tucson, who has done more than anyone else alive to prove that the dead are in communication with us.
re-recreation of Martha Jefferson’s journal. Conveniently, Thomas Jefferson’s marriage spanned the Revolutionary War, so My Thomas gives us a close perspective on the formative years of the United States from the perspective of a participant who was married to the author of the Declaration of Independence. This is one of history’s great true love stories! After Martha’s death, the evidence is strong that Thomas never married nor even loved again. He went on to become the first Secretary of State, the second Vice President, and the third President of the United States, but all of that was by his own account a consolation life. Forty years after his cherished wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson still referred to that decade of Revolutionary chaos and war as “ten years of unchequered happiness.”
core is the success of a woman from disadvantaged circumstances who by dint of pure determination builds such a successful business that she is a multimillionaire before the age of thirty. And this was back before the high-tech boom: her business delivers gourmet meals! Kim’s love story is a complicated one. There is a lot more going on than moonlight and roses. But like all my novels, this is a love story. People have been asking me to write a sequel because they want to see more of Kim Bonner’s happily ever after!
evolved to perfection. This trilogy spans almost forty years of the life of a man named by Time magazine the richest American under the age of forty when he was twenty-six. He owns Atlantica, but it is his star-crossed lover who becomes obsessed with the island, and then their son who helps us understand it. Although this trilogy tells a single story, all the Letter novels are independent of one another. They can be read in any order. 
loving, then how can so much evil exist?
stable. The process was fascinating to watch.
that other things can activate. Oddly, this seems to be true even of nonphysical fears, like social embarrassment or the loss of a job.
