Forgiving Ego's Illusions

            Clients and readers who have not had mystical or nonduality experiences want to know if they can still practice forgiveness as A Course in Miracles teaches it since in the Course ultimately forgiveness is coming to recognize that nothing real is occurring. Yes, you can. You can come to see and release (forgive) ego’s illusions, which are projections of meaning and expectations.

The Course teaches the source of your pain is your own thoughts, so you don’t need to forgive others or situations but rather your unmet expectations and false projections of meaning. So, if in situations where you are in pain you look for how you contribute to your pain by looking at your expectations and projections of meaning you are practicing forgiveness. Simply acknowledging that you are the source of your upset is stepping into forgiveness.

 

Zia had an abusive mother. Sometimes the abuse was physical, but the verbal and psychological abuse was ongoing. In her teens, she came to understand that her mother was mentally ill after she and her siblings went to live with relatives. This helped her to forgive her mother, but her anger shifted to her father. He left the family and only intervened when their mother was in very bad shape, always returning them to her in the hopeful expectation that she had changed. Zia feels he should have known better and he abandoned them.

As an adult, Zia realizes the abuse and her sense of abandonment is in the past now and she is responsible for dealing with how it conditioned her and shaped her world view. She is in individual and group therapy. This is her practice of forgiveness, whether she realizes it or not, because she is looking at the source of her hurt, her own mind and how it perceives the past in the present.

 

Jake fell for an innocent girl-next-door looking woman. As he got to know her, he ignored all indications she was a narcissist, always explaining and excusing away her selfishness and manipulations. His friends told him the he saw something in her that was not there, so he cut them off and isolated himself rather than genuinely question her behavior. Eventually, in a very messy episode, she dumped him for someone else, and he had to face the truth about her. Working with a life-coach he confronted his own projections onto her and faced how he had ignored all the signs she was not who he thought. He repaired his relationship with his friends. He didn’t think of it this way, but this is how he practiced forgiveness.

 

Sara’s boyfriend, Eric, was a philanderer, but she married him anyway. Without thinking about it, she thought marriage would change him. But three years into the marriage she discovered he’d been seeing other women all along and divorced him. At first, she was angry with him, but then she realized her own expectation marriage would change him set her up to be hurt. She’s embarrassed and feels foolish but learns and grows through this. She might not think of this as forgiveness, but taking responsibility for the hurt and learning from the experience is how she forgives herself.

 

Kelvin took up A Course in Miracles while going through a difficult breakup and bankruptcy. After doing the Workbook for a year he didn’t feel much better and put it aside in disgust. Years later, however, he picked it up again in curiosity and realized he had tried to use the Course to repress his feelings rather than move through them. He thought the Course had misled him but now he realized he had misused it. Seeing this is how he forgave where it was required, himself.

 

When you are upset, ask yourself, “What was I expecting? What was I seeing that wasn’t there? What was I ignoring?” and see how your expectations and projections were illusions that set you up to be hurt. So, even if you have not yet seen truth and understand ego and its world make up a false reality, you can still gain relief by finding and forgiving the illusions of ego.

 

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