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Lesson 141
Review 4: My mind holds only what I think with God.
Practice Instructions
See Practice Instructions Review 4
Commentary
Forgiveness really does offer us everything we want, and without true forgiveness, happiness just isn’t possible. We may not consciously and completely believe this as yet, but our right mind believes it, and always has. Forgiveness operates not just on what I think the world did to me (in reality it did nothing to me), but also on what it did not do that I wanted it to. The older one gets, the more disillusioned one becomes about the world. We speak of people becoming “world-weary” and cynical as they age, because despite the high hopes we had when younger, despite the brilliant promises the world seemed to make to us, it disappointed us. It did not make us happy. We discover that the world isn’t fair, that good people don’t always succeed, that we don’t always get what we want. And even when we do, it isn’t as good as we had hoped.
Forgiveness involves recognizing that we are the ones who laid these expectations on the world, and we are the ones who made it to disappoint us. We asked the impossible; nothing in this world will ever satisfy us or make us happy. Happiness is to be found in our native state and there alone, that is, in union with God and with the Sonship. To forgive the world means to stop begrudging its imperfections. We cannot blame the world for our pain, nor can we blame it for its failure to make us happy. We cannot blame it at all. When at last our teeth unclench, our fists relax, and our breath eases as we release these deep-seated grievances, what we discover is our own inherent happiness, there all along, but masked by our unforgiveness.