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Forgiveness

Forgiveness isn't something nice I do for someone who is "guilty."
Forgiveness is something nice I do for my own mind.
Do I want a mind that tortures me or one that is a friend to me?
--Hugh Prather, SPIRITUAL NOTES TO MYSELF

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An authentically empowered person is one who forgives. Forgiveness is
not a moral issue. It is an energy dynamic. When most people forgive
they do not want those that they forgave to forget that they forgave
and forgot. This kind of forgiveness manipulates the person who is
forgiven. It is not forgiveness, it is a means of acquiring external
power over another. Forgiveness means that you do not carry the
baggage of an experience. When you choose not to forgive, the
experience that you do not forgive sticks with you. When you choose
not to forgive, it is like agreeing to wear dark, gruesome sunglasses that
distort everything, and it is you who are forced everyday to look at Life
through those contaminated lenses because you have chosen to keep
them.
You wish everyone else to see the world that way, and it is indeed
that world that you are looking at, but it is only you who sees it. You
are looking through the lenses of your own contaminated love.
--Gary Zukav, THE SEAT OF THE SOUL, pp. 226-227

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He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must
pass
himself; for every man has need to be forgiven.
--Thomas Fuller

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Those who injured us did only what they knew how to do, given the
conditions of their lives. If you won't forgive them, then you
allow
those ancient injuries to continue their hold on you.
--Wayne Dyer

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Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than
the wound we suffered, to forgive the one who inflicted it. And yet,
there is no peace without forgiveness. Attack thoughts towardothers
are
attacks on ourselves. The first step in forgiveness is the
willingness
to forgive. If you can state, despite your resistance, your
willingness
to see the spiritual innocence, the light in the soul of one who has
harmed you, you have begun the journey to a deep and unshakable peace.
--Marianne Williamson, ILLUMINATA, pp. 131-132

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To err is human; to forgive divine.
--William Shakespeare

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Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, was reminded one
day of a vicious deed someone had done to her years before. But she
acted as if she had never heard of it. "Don't you remember it?" her
friend asked. "No," came Barton's reply. "I distinctly remember
forgetting it."
--Luis Palau