1. What Is Forgiveness?
W-pII.1.1. Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. 2 It does not pardon sins and make them real. 3 It sees there was no sin. 4 And in that view are all your sins forgiven. 5 What is sin, except a false idea about God's Son? 6 Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. 7 What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God.
W-pII.1.2. An unforgiving thought is one which makes a judgment that it will not raise to doubt, although it is not true. 2 The mind is closed, and will not be released. 3 The 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. 4 What can come between a fixed projection and the aim that it has chosen as its wanted goal?
W-pII.1.3. An unforgiving thought does many things. 2 In frantic action it pursues its goal, twisting and overturning what it sees as interfering with its chosen path. 3 Distortion is its purpose, and the means by which it would accomplish it as well. 4 It sets about its furious attempts to smash reality, without concern for anything that would appear to pose a contradiction to its point of view.
W-pII.1.4. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. 2 It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances it likes. 3 It merely looks, and waits, and judges not. 4 He who would not forgive must judge, for he must justify his failure to forgive. 5 But he who would forgive himself must learn to welcome truth exactly as it is.
W-pII.1.5. Do 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. 2 He has forgiven you already, for such is His function, given Him by God. 3 Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God.
