A Course
In Miracles

Authorized Online Edition
Workbook For Students

 
 

1.

What Is Forgiveness?

1. 1Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. 2It does not pardon sins and make them real. 3It sees there was no sin. 4And in that view are all your sins forgiven. 5What is sin, except a false idea about God’s Son? 6Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. 7What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God.

2. 1An unforgiving thought is one which makes a judgment that it will not raise to doubt, although it is not true. 2The mind is closed, and will not be released. 3The thought protects projection, tightening its chains, so that distortions are more veiled and more obscure; less easily accessible to doubt, and further kept from reason. 4What can come between a fixed projection and the aim that it has chosen as its wanted goal?

3. 1An unforgiving thought does many things. 2In frantic action it pursues its goal, twisting and overturning what it sees as inter­fering with its chosen path. 3Distortion is its purpose, and the means by which it would accomplish it as well. 4It sets about its furious attempts to smash reality, without concern for anything that would appear to pose a contradiction to its point of view.

4. 1Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does noth­ing. 2It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appear­ances it likes. 3It merely looks, and waits, and judges not. 4He who would not forgive must judge, for he must justify his failure to forgive. 5But he who would forgive himself must learn to welcome truth exactly as it is.

5. 1Do nothing, then, and let forgiveness show you what to do, through Him Who is your Guide, your Savior and Protector, strong in hope, and certain of your ultimate success. 2He has forgiven you already, for such is His function, given Him by God. 3Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God.