I have taken this out of the book "A Return to Love" by Marianne Williamson. It is based on the principles of A Course in Miracles ---- it helped me, I hope it helps you. Love Vicki

Forgiveness is "selective remembering" - a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go. But the ego is relentless - it is "capable of suspiciousness at best and viciousness at worst." It presents the most subtle and insidious arguments for casting other people out of our hearts.

The cornerstone of the ego's teachings is: "The Son of God is guilty." The cornerstone of the Holy Spirit's teaching is: "The Son of God is innocent." The miracle worker consciously invites the Holy Spirit to enter into every relationship and deliver us from the temptation to judge and find fault. We ask Him to save us from our tendency to condemn. We ask Him to reveal to us the innocence within others, that we may see it within ourselves. "Dear God, I surrender this relationship to you", means "Dear God, let me see this person through your eyes."

In accepting the Atonement, we are asking to see as God sees, think as God thinks, love as God loves. We are asking for help in seeing someone's innocence. "Do you prefer to be right or happy?"

A Course in Miracles tells us that whenever we are contemplating attacking someone, it is as though we are holding a sword above their head. The sword, however, doesn't fall on them but on us. Since all thought is thought about ourselves, then to condemn another is to condemn ourselves. How do we escape judgment? Largely through a reinterpretation of what we're judging. A course in Miracles describes the difference between a sin and an error. A sin would mean we did something so bad that God is angry with us. But since we can't do anything that changes our essential nature, God has nothing to be angry at. Only Love is real. Nothing else exists. The Son of God cannot sin.

We can make mistakes, to be sure, and we obviously do. But God's attitude towards error is a desire to heal us. Because we ourselves are angry and punishing, we have concocted the idea of an angry, punishing God. We are created in God's image, however, and not the other way around. As extensions of God, we are ourselves the spirit of compassion, and in our right minds, we don't seek to judge but to heal. We do this through forgiveness. When someone has behaved unlovingly - when they yell at us, or lie about us, or steal from us - they have lost touch with their essence. They have forgotten who they are.

But everything that someone does, says the Course, is either love or a call for love. If someone treats us with love, then of course love is the appropriate response. If they treat us with fear, we are to see their behavior as a call for love. The choice to love is not always easy. The ego puts up terrible resistance to giving up fear-laden responses. This is where the Holy Spirit comes in. It's not our job to change our own perceptions, but to remember to ask Him to change them for us.

Let's say your wife has left you for another man. You can't change other people, and you can't ask God to change them, either. You can, however, ask to see this situation differently. You can ask for peace. You can ask the Holy Spirit to change your perceptions.

The miracle is that, as you release judgment of your wife and the other man, the pain in your gut begins to subside. The ego might say in that situation that you'll never be at peace until your wife comes back. But peace isn't determined by circumstances outside us. Peace stems from forgiveness. Pain doesn't stem from the love we're denied by others, but rather from the love that we deny them. In a case like that, it feels as though we're hurt by what someone else did. But what really has occurred is that someone else's closed heart has tempted us to close our own, and it is our own denial of love that hurts us. That's why the miracle is a shift in our own thinking: the willingness to keep our own heart open, regardless of what's going on outside us.

Forgiveness is the choice to see people as they are NOW. When we are angry at people, we are angry because of something they said or did before this moment. But what people said or did is not who they are. Relationships are reborn as we let go perceptions of our brother's past. By bringing the past into the present, we create a future just like the past. By letting go of the past, we make room for miracles.

Forgiveness takes away what stands between your brother and yourself.