The Art Of Being Present.......

There is an awakeness that comes from a clear mind, unobscured by wandering thoughts and preoccupations, and there is an awakeness that comes from a clear heart, willing to engage with life as gift and as an everunfolding revelation of the purpose of creation.
Such an awakened heart can’t respond indifferently to life because it sees the outstretched hand of the creator at every turn and in every particle of experience.
It cannot turn away from feeling, no matter what feelings may occur, because it perceives emotional depth as the great gift of individualized consciousness. This gift stirs the response of individualized life to the source of life as it displays itself in all living things.
To be awake and present is to take responsibility for noticing — for maintaining an intimate connection between the self that is, and the rest of the world that is. It is to know that within the domain of this relationship lies a profound revelation of the source of all within every gesture, every interaction, and every experience that takes place. It is to perceive the sacred in every moment.
In today’s overscheduled world, being continuously busy is sometimes a necessity but often a choice based on the drive for outer success, wealth, and the symbols of what is often taken to be a ‘life worth living’.
Being busy, as opposed to having time ‘on one’s hands’, is perceived by many as a testimony to a life that has merit, purpose, and meaning.
By contrast, idle hands — hands that remain receptive rather than active in relation to time, suggest that time is being wasted — that one could do more, achieve more, accomplish more. No matter if these hands are connected with one’s heart and with the heart of the world. For many, it is only the visible ‘doing’ of things that creates a sense of security and lets us know that time has meaning. The existence of a space of silence in which awareness can broaden is often not considered a gain. Nor is simply being here, responsive to the very air we breathe, considered a virtue.
Is it any wonder, then, that we, as a collective humanity, have forgotten the sacred art of being present, that we have placed ‘noticing’ on the back burner of experiential values. And what would we notice if we took the time to do so?
In order to answer this question, it is helpful to sit in one place, breathing quietly, eyes somewhat unfocused, listening, seeing, sensing. Though one can do this profitably in a bare room, it is easier, at first, to sit in an environment where there is just a little movement present. Now, close the eyes and pay attention to the other senses. Feel the comforting fabric of surrounding life as if it were an envelope or cocoon, gently cradling one’s essential self. Notice everything without discrimination, without opinion. Try to feel the intimacy of connection with what is.
Spending time for a few minutes each day being awake and noticing is a good way to begin the practice of being present. It is a good way to begin to expand one’s idea of what constitutes a meaningful life. And yet more than this is needed if one is to truly embrace what is, and to be ‘present in the present’. What is needed is the greater opening of the heart to the one self that exists within all.
This perception of unity and oneness has an opportunity to grow at any moment in which we interact with another soul. It is nourished by an absence of judgement and by a willingness to be open to the deeper levels of who that other might be. Such openness comes from a state of innocence and of childlike grace. It comes from knowing that the ‘other’ is part of the same ‘all that is’ as oneself, therefore of one heart, one breath, one life.
The gift of being present as it applies to relationships is that it brings love to every interaction, no matter how small or insignificant. It brings the divine into every perception, no matter how ordinary. And it brings gratitude into each moment as it unfolds.
As a sense of being present deepens and one’s capacity to notice flowers, the deep richness of life and of love can be found everywhere and separation nowhere. In this state, one senses only the one who lives within all. One feels the essence within every other. Here, consciousness can only affirm the greater life of which it is a part:
I am and you are. We are both of the stars and of the dust of the earth. We are both of the rocks and of the sandy shores. We are water and we are sky; we are earth, and we are air. We are the breath that life breathes through itself, in a single and continuous song of creation.
(Julie Redstone is a writer, teacher and founder of a spiritual centre for healing and transformation)

To Whom Do You Pray....

Joshua Eric Bryel

This question is more important than most think. The answer will colour all your experience. Those who answer that they do not pray are mistaken, for they do not realize what prayer is and the extent and power of it has in their lives.
Classically, prayer is, in essence, an act of communication. One communicates one’s desires to, presumably, some source deity who has power over his life or pow er to help him. Prayer is also an act of com munion with the source for expression of gratitude and reverence, deemed neces sary or recommended by the source, and for the reception of guidance or other sorts of upliftment and inspiration.
Continuing to define prayer by asso ciated meanings, the word “communi cate” means to connect, to join, in effect to become one. In prayer, there is always a desire to be aligned with the source to which we pray. To align with one’s deity is deemed ultimately desirable, if not im mediately beneficial. In this age of spir itual renewal, we are constantly work ing to align and attune ourselves with an ideal or an energy or some sort of great spirit that will bless our lives, and which many consider to be our true self.
Yet without realizing the real nature and extent of the act of prayer, many of us are sabotaging just that goal.
In the many books and workshops available on spiritual practices and tech niques, prayer is often highly recom mended. There are many related prac tices that are defined as forms of prayer such as dancing, drumming, singing artworks, rituals, even writing a prayer on a piece of paper or cloth and hanging it in the breeze. There is also a practice described involving what is called “con stant prayer”, which sounds like quite challenge considering the requirements of everyday life. Yet it is precisely this form of prayer that is the subject of this article. Whether you realize it or not, you are in constant prayer.
As I said above, prayer is essentially communication, and in this soup of con sciousness we live in, our every thought
communicates to everyone and everything around us. It communicates our beliefs and desires and fears and loves and hates Nothing is private and nothing is hidden It is widely accepted in our age of renewal that the state of consciousness affects every element of life. Yet more to my point is the fact that just whom we are trying to communicate our desires to, con sciously or unconsciously, moment by mo ment, is not fully realized.
What I am getting at is the fact that whenever you try to please someone, and are for some ego-based reason not being true to yourself, you are literally pray ing to them, attuning to them, and try ing to become like them in order to please them and get their blessing – or at least be left in relative peace. The moment to moment content of our minds and hearts and the acts that result, are this prayer It never ends. What we are is a constant song of prayer, alignment and attune ment to someone, and usually it is to someone who can neither hear nor help
Why do people neglect this true source within? Because of the persisting idea of there being powers outside of them One has to decide that false is false and that there is no separation: that all pow er is united within, and all that appears around one is an extension of one’s be ing. We have held back out of fear. The idea of guilt and self-denial is founded on this fear, and the source of fear is the idea of separation, of some other power being able to affect us in a way we don’ prefer. Yet if you decide your conscious ness is the source and generator of your existence, and that your aligned con sciousness is the divine source, you will know you have all the power that can ever affect your experience.
Involved in the confusion are the il logic and conflicts of our egos, all based on the idea of separation. If attunement means oneness with the source, we can say that prayer is an act of becoming one Then why do we pray to those we stead fastly hold separate from us?
We pray for approval, for validation for permission, for forgiveness — all from outside “sources” that have no real pow er over us or to help.
Prayer must recognize oneness as fact, for to perceive separation is to cre ate it, and power to create is always pro jected in the idea of separation. Teach ings such as “Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven within” speak to us of the source being the divine light of our own true self Attunement to our limitless inner truth cannot but bring us all the happiness for which we have been praying.
“To thine own self be true, for it must follow as the night the day that thou can’st not then be false to any man.” The ulti mate of prayer is, therefore, the recogni tion of our oneness with divine will and with all love and power, and via this route with all those we perceived as separate.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’ be a victim and a master – and you can’ be a victim at all. This is the key to free dom through constant aligned prayer.

Morality is Natural....

There are enough scientific studies to show that moral law is inborn in humans, not God-given, writes David E Comings

The idea that man needs God to tell us how to behave morally, to be kind and thoughtful towards our fellow man, to aid others without any promise of benefit to ourselves, is a central tenet of most religions. To emphasize the point, we are told that if we do not obey God’s moral law, we will spend an eternity in hell while if we do obey the moral code, we will spend an eternity of bliss in heaven.
Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health is the head of the Human Genome Project responsible for sequencing the three billion base pairs of the human genome. In 2007, this eminent scientist wrote a book titled ‘The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief ’. He recounts that in his early years as a scientist, he was an atheist but one day, he had an epiphany and came to believe that man could not be a moral animal without the aid of a god given moral law. As a result of this realization, he became of person of faith.
This epiphany blew me away because although he was a geneticist, he found the extensive genetic evidence that altruism was an inborn genetic trait unconvincing. He also believed that while the development of all other living organisms on earth was the result of Darwinian evolution, the evolution of man was special and was guided by the hand of God.
Surveys have shown that most scientists, especially those in the field of the biological and genetic sciences, are non-theists, partly because they so strongly believe that Darwinian evolution was responsible for the origin of the species, including man. As a fellow geneticist, I was surprised that this eminent scientist was both disavowing the decades of research into the genetics of altruism and proposing that humans were so unique that God was required to guide the evolution of humans. This was uncomfortably close to the tenants of the Intelligent Design creationists.
I wish to just address the issue of altruism as an inborn genetic trait. Altruism is defined as aiding another individual while incurring personal costs to oneself. For example, if I jump into a raging river to save my son from drowning, I place myself at risk of drowning. This behaviour of being kind and helpful to others is a central tenet to of Christian thought, the golden rule, con sisting of treating others, as you would like to be treated.
One of the best examples of al truism in the animal kingdom is the behaviour of sterile worker honey bees who sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the queen bee. Darwin was quite concerned about altruism, fear ing that it seemed to directly con tradict his theory of survival of the fittest, thus allowing better genes to be passed on to the next generation. Worker bees are sterile and thus, derive no direct benefit for their altruistic acts and cannot pass on their genes. Dar win’s solution to this apparent con tradiction of this theory was to sug gest that the survival benefit did not always have to apply to the individ ual — it could also apply to the rela tives of the individual. Thus, a ster ile worker bee helping the queen to survive would help guarantee the preservation of the genes of the whole family. This became known as the ‘kin selection’ theory. As if his general theory of the evolution of the species were not enough of a problem for religions to swallow, Darwin was now suggesting that selfsacrificial behaviour, generally considered only to be within the purview of religion, was also biologically controlled and could occur in animals was well as humans.
The controversial issues of the genetics and evolution of altruism were addressed by some of the most brilliant and famous mathematical geneticists of the 20th century, including JBS Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewell Wright. Wright provided the field of population genetics with the term r, referring to the degree of genetic relatedness between relatives. For example, fathers and sons and brothers and sisters share half of their genes in common producing an r = 1/2. Grandfathers and grandchildren share 1/4 of their genes in common producing an r = 1/4.
However, it was a naturalist and student of economics, William Hamilton, who in 1963 published the equation that provided a framework for understanding the genetics and evolution of altruism. Hamilton was both a naturalist and a student of economics. The latter provided him with an appreciation of cost-benefit analysis. Hamilton’s famous equa tion was r x b > c, where b is the ben efit accrued by the relatives for an altruistic act and c is the cost of the altruistic act. Thus, if a father saved his son from drowning, the odds that his son would be saved (benefit) must be twice the odds that the father would drown (cost) for the altruistic act to genetically benefit the family The rearranged equation would be b > 2c (the benefit must be greater than twice the cost).
Inherent in the equation is the fact that the closer the relationship be tween the individuals involved in the altruistic act, the higher the r, and thus the greater the benefit to the family. This process that Hamilton defined mathematically was termed “kin selection” for its implications for evolution and natural selection Examples of altruistic behaviour ad hering to Hamilton’s equation have been described in a wide range of an imals including mammals.
Subsequent work involving the concepts of reputation and punish ment in societies has expanded the role of altruism in humans to include unrelated individuals in both small and large groups. These studies sug gest a selective advantage for altru ism involving not only small kin ships, but also larger societal groups Brain imaging studies indicate that cooperative behaviours that benefit the group, can activate pleasurable reward pathways, thus making al truism a pleasurable act.
Combined, the aggregate of these studies suggests that man is a moral and mutually cooperating animal not because God dictated the laws of moral behaviour, but because the genes for such behaviour were se lected for and evolved over time These behaviours were advantageous to early societal groups and indi viduals and groups displaying such behaviours were more likely to sur vive than those who did not. Moral law is inborn, not God given.
(David E Comings, author of Did Man Create God?, is a physician, hu man geneticist and neuroscientist)

How Happy Are You?

Being happy depends not so much on external circumstances as on your inner life, says Tony Wilkinson

Are you the happiest person you know? Not necessarily the luckiest, richest, or most successful, just the happiest?
If not, why not? Most people will reel off their current worries — the job, the kids, the car, the price of fish. I don’t mean to sweep these aside: problems need to be solved, if you can, or waited out until they disappear. But as far as living happily is concerned you have to face a crucial fact. If you can only live happily after all your problems are solved, you are never going to live happily, because when today’s problems are gone and forgotten, others will take their place. So either living happily is just impossible, or you have to do it in spite of your problems.
Being happy depends not so much on external circumstances as on your inner life. This means all your thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, emotions, desires, dreams — your entire mental and emotional scene. Happiness is about how you react inwardly to events, what you think and believe, how you feel, how problems affect you. It may sound obvious, but like many obvious things it’s something that is often forgotten when it matters most. We focus almost exclusively on our external lives, on getting and spending and having fun, and then wonder why we are not happy. But it’s when our inner lives are tranquil that we are happiest and we call this inner peace.
So how is inner peace to be achieved? Is it a question of religion, perhaps, or yoga? These can certainly help but only if they have a positive effect on your inner life. The difficulty is that inner life is based on patterns and habits — some you were born with, most you have acquired. You don’t choose, occasion by occasion, how you respond inside when something happens. This happens and you feel angry; that happens you feel sad; you pass the patisserie and you feel hungry; you hear a tune or smell a certain scent and it reminds you of a particular time or person? Things produce a response without you thinking about it or choosing how you feel, and they don’t necessarily leave you with inner peace. So the trick is to break the pattern. You can’t completely avoid problems, but you can change how you react to them by acquiring new habits that provoke peaceful inner responses. Training your inner life into different habits requires learning skills of thinking, feeling, and managing your beliefs and desires. These are very like the virtues many religions and philosophies advocate, but if you think of them as skills rather than virtues, you benefit from an important and liberating shift. Instead of “I must become a better person” you can think “I would live more happily if i worked on my skills”, so the change in attitude becomes a choice, not a duty. And to these remedial skills i’ve added an extra set of enjoyment skills, otherwise getting happier could turn out a very depressing affair.
This process is not something you can do overnight, it’s a whole new way of life, but the reward is what we all want most — happiness. There are five main skills you need to cultivate.
Mindfulness: Borrowed from Buddhism, this involves developing your ability to focus your thoughts in the present. The problem most of us have with thought is having too much of it — the worrying and nonstop mental chattering our minds are prone to. Mindfulness is a key inner skill because, as it gets stronger, it lets you focus on your own inner life and catch your habits in the act. Once you can see how you are ruled by them, the change you are seeking often happens of its own accord.
Compassion: Most religions rightly stress compassion. As well as being a virtue in its own right it is a practical skill that counteracts negative emotions like anger and hatred, which are terrible wreckers of happiness. Try it the next time someone annoys you: put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might they be thinking or feeling to behave like that. Even bad people, let alone people who just mildly annoy you, often have a warped or mistaken view of the world which makes them do what they do. Wars are started and atrocities committed, for example, because someone decides that this is what their God wants. It doesn’t mean they should get away with their actions, in fact it may be necessary to take strong action to defend yourself.
Story skills: These are very useful for problems with your inner belief system, as they let you stand back and explore alternative versions of reality. Beliefs have great power over your life because a belief is something you take as fact. Start to think of your beliefs as stories, and it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead. Even true stories only select the little bit of reality we are focusing on at the moment: no one story is the whole truth about any situation. From a different point of view we would see a different story, sometimes a whole different world. This is not about make believe, it’s about reframing situations to look at them from a different perspective.
Letting-go techniques: These are particularly helpful when we are unhappy not getting what we want. Generally, we are encouraged to keep wanting and to think that more will make us happier, whether it’s clothes or cars or even love. But wanting is a treadmill: as long as you have unsatisfied wants and desires you won’t be at peace, so to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires, or let go of some of them. Letting-go skills also include forgiveness, which helps hugely if one of the things you think you want is revenge.
Enjoyment skills: This last group includes skills such as patience, humour and, especially, gratitude. You don’t have to be grateful to someone, it’s enough to cultivate gratitude for things. Our minds naturally scan the environment for dangers and resources, a useful mechanism when we were hunter-gatherers. But it can make us unnecessarily pessimistic — focusing on the 10% we lack rather than the 90% we have. Cultivating enjoyment skills will help redress the balance.
Acquiring all these skills takes time and effort. The important thing is to practise them until they operate without you thinking about them. Your practice routine will be very individual, because everyone needs to prioritise different skills depending on the specific issues that are holding them back from being happy, but keep the skills in mind and you will constantly find new ways to try them out.

Doorway to a new Life......

E Raymond Rock


When everything is taken away from us, we become grounded in reality very quickly. A sage was once asked why he was so happy, he responded, “I have nothing left to lose!” Being grounded in reality happens in that split second when we know all is lost; a moment before the car crash, a moment after the diagnosis.
The reality we then face is quite different from the daydreams of our everyday illusions. The fanciful images that we had previously projected into our idyllic lives melt away when we come face-to-face with certain disaster. There is something we can learn here, because many times, the result of a traumatic experience is that we come out of it a changed person, and the changes are usually for the better. New vistas open up for us, and we find ourselves and our interests somehow strangely altered. We actually become happier. There are times in our lives when we do things and don’t know why, and although these things may appear foolish to our friends, we feel compelled to do them nonetheless. Sometimes these things involve letting go of something very dear to us, and we can hardly believe what we are doing. This can be a crushing experience, yet we do it. Just when things are going swimmingly, there is sometimes an underlying urge to cancel everything out.
In the East, a tradition exists where people pile all of their belongings into a boat, sail out to sea, and dump them every seven years. If one followed this tradition, think of how careful one might be in what one purchased!
In addition, how aggressive would we be in making money? Maybe we would forget about money and do what we love for a change. That would certainly produce some happiness. If our karma is good, however, so good that we are protected from disasters, we might need to become proactive in causing our own disasters—to help things along. Great men in the past have done just that; Christ lived as a homeless beggar; the Buddha left royalty behind to live in rags in the forest for six years, seeking
and finding enlightenment. Foolishness? Perhaps, but who has affected the history of the world more than these two men have?
In essence, what the Buddha and Christ were saying is that until the bottom drops out of your life, you will continue to love your life.
True happiness is that Reality we touch when all is lost. Money, love, family; these are all caught within the web of existence; and existence is nothing but stress compared to this Reality.
Existence has three characteristics, three laws of the universe, and they are that 1) everything changes. 2) life is stress. 3) no “self ” stands behind life. Reality, on the other hand, has never been born, will never die, does not come from a previous condition, and has the characteristics of eternity and unchanging ness. The three characteristics of existence are unassailable, and while we remain caught in them, we can never be truly happy although we try to convince ourselves otherwise.
Look into your own heart and see what is true. It is only when life is taken away for a brief moment, when we escape momentarily from existence and touch that reality that we cannot speak about, only then is true happiness possible. The miracle is that just touching this reality for a brief moment is enough to change our experience of life into one of happiness.
Everything that we think will make us happy, all that they tell us to accomplish, to be ambitious about, and to compete for, never does so for long. If none of this makes any sense to you, then you must continue seeking happiness in the things of the world.
If for some reason seeking happiness in the world does not work for you, in the long run, then there are things that you can do to ease yourself into a reality where happiness is assured.
By easing yourself into this reality, you are not required to give things up in a violent fashion; they fall away by themselves. If you ever become serious about real happiness, weary of temporary happiness slipping through your fingers time and again, then go after the missing element.
The missing element is emptiness, and there is a good way, a gradual way, and a certain way to bring this element into your life. Emptiness is the doorway to a new life, and the doorway to emptiness is meditation.

Why You Should Forgive.....

Concepts of right and wrong are not based upon any specific truth, but upon the perception of the moment, says David Nlmes

Have you ever forgiven anyone? You may quickly say ‘Yes’, which indicates you still remember the issue, which means it is not totally forgotten...and so therefore, it is not truly forgiven. We say we forgive, but we rarely do. We ‘excuse’, we ‘permit’, we ‘look past’, we ‘understand’, we ‘learn to live with’, but we never really forgive. We simply exchange our dislike of an event with the hope of returning to more pleasant times.What then, would you have to do to forgive? Is it possible to forgive while not totally forgetting the problem that created the reason for forgiveness in the first place? How do you forgive? How do I forgive?
To understand why total forgiveness seems almost impossible, or at least, very difficult, we need to ask why we value the concept of forgiveness in the first place. We need to look at what motivates us to either run from it or embrace it depending upon which end of the problem we see ourselves in. Let’s tear apart the whole concept of forgiveness and look at it the way it is.
What triggers the need to forgive or to be forgiven? Having done something wrong, you will experience the sensation of guilt. It might not happen immediately and it may take some time, but once you have done something wrong, the door is open for you to eventually feel guilty about it. The understanding of guilt is totally necessary for you to be on either side of the forgiving exchange. Now, having embraced the concepts of doing a ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ thing and then associating them with guilt, this opens the door for multiple levels of forgiveness to exist. For example, once the wrong deed has occurred, an opportunity suddenly appears for somebody to forgive you, and you can also forgive yourself.
What triggers the sensation of guilt? Somewhere, we were taught that certain things were ‘right’ and certain things were ‘wrong’. Later, we then create connections to events we experience and use our past examples of right and wrong to inform us of whether our actions or the actions of the people around us are proper. In time, we can easily see who has done something wrong and we know they are guilty and should admit to their crime and admit they are guilty. This then opens the door for us to forgive them and for them to forgive themselves. Our society and many religious structures look upon guilt as a mighty and necessary force that is used to help us maintain an orderly society. It can be difficult seeing how our world could exist without us taking turns being either the receiver or the distributor of guilt. What else could possibly motivate anyone to change? What if you were taught about right and wrong, in error? Imagine being in a country where it is ‘wrong’ for a woman to show her face in public. Imagine a situation where it is ‘wrong’ to cross the boundary from one country to another when you are not welcome.
Imagine a moment where it is ‘wrong’ to kill another person. Imagine a moment where it is ‘wrong’ to purposely exceed the speed limit while driving. Imagine being in a country where it is ‘not wrong’ for a woman to show her face in public. Imagine a situation where it is ‘not wrong’ to cross the boundary from one country to another because you are welcome. Imagine a moment where it is ‘not wrong’ to kill another person who is attacking you. Imagine a moment where it is ‘not wrong’ to purposely exceed the speed limit while driving, so that lives may be saved.
These examples clearly show how something that is ‘wrong’ in one instance, is ‘not wrong’ in another instance, which means our concepts of right and wrong are not based upon any specific truth, but solely upon the perception of the moment. With this being the case, ‘being right’ or ‘being wrong’ are totally transient in the eye of the beholder and have no absolute state of being. Truth is eternal and unchangeable, so from an eternal and unchangeable spiritual point of view, this means the whole concept of right and wrong is not real and simply does not exist.
What if you never did anything wrong? If the concept of ‘right and wrong’ is not a solid spiritual truth, since they change with perception, then these concepts are neither seen, nor experienced and they aren’t true. When we say somebody is wrong we are viewing things from an extremely narrow and erroneous perception. So, if there is nothing ‘wrong’ with killing, should we just let the world run amok with violence and terror and do nothing to stop it? In a perfect world, you would not fear that you had to stop it, but likewise, in a perfect world, the concept of ‘wrong’ or ‘fear’ would not exist in the first place and no threats would be perceived. To understand the concept it would be helpful to see that all improper behaviour and events are mistakes that occur due to our perception of an act.
Instead of using the perception tainted variables of to judge ourselves and others, let’s instead look at improper events simply as ‘mistakes’. For example, if I were on a train to Philadelphia and happened to mention to a fellow passenger about how excited I was to be heading for Chicago, it would be obvious to this man that I had made a mistake and had gotten on the improper train. This does not make me bad. This does not require any sensation of guilt and this does not require forgiveness.
All this requires is that I get off that train and get on the proper train. When the fellow passenger informs me of my mistake, he has not judged me, but is simply informing me of an error I have made. Since I have done nothing wrong, there is no reason to associate guilt or fear with what he tells me. Being open for truth, I will not feel attacked and I will feel no need to defend my mistake. Instead, I will be happy and thankful to the passenger for helping me see and undo the mistake.
Truth frees because there is no judgment of any kind and it eliminates the need to be forgiven. Likewise, guilt binds because it is dependent upon judgment and it requires your need to be forgiven.
All concepts and origins of guilt, sin, right, wrong, etc, are of our own making and are based upon fear. Only our mistaken perceptions have created these concepts, which are e not true. They are simply errors of thinking.
To change your course, all you need to do is to be open to see where you may be mistaken and then and it will heal your perception of this world and of yourself. There is really nothing at all to forgive in the first place.