How many times have you ever heard people pondering on what “the key to happiness” might be? This is an age-old question that humans globally have been trying to answer, and today I would like you to consider a possible response to this enigma. Lesson 121 of A Course in Miracles states that, “Forgiveness is the key to happiness.” Allow me to unpack what that statement means and how it can manifest in your life, starting today.
The lesson in the course begins with evidence for its audacious claim to identify the key to happiness by explaining that the “unforgiving mind” has a number of qualities that rob us of our happiness. For example, the unforgiving mind is full of fear, devoid of love, troubled with sadness, and lacks hope from any pain and suffering we perceive in life. There is a laundry list of problems that the unforgiving mind causes: essentially it is paranoid of a series unconscious dangers seen in the outside world. The unforgiving mind is caught in a bubble of damnation because it sees the problems of the world as sins that are permanent, human wrongdoings that are fixed in place and cannot be changed. This is the buildup about the state that the unforgiving mind is stuck in. With that said, you can already begin to imagine the freedom that can come from the forgiving mind.
Have you ever come into contact with someone who is having a bad day? If you lean into the verbiage that they use to burrow themselves into a hole of victimization, you can imagine that this person choosing forgiveness toward the people and situations that they feel caused their “bad day” can enable them to harness the power needed to turn their day around 180 degrees. By choosing forgiveness and letting go of unforgiveness, they can free themselves from their victim mentality or incessant focus on suffering. Forgiveness, therefore, amounts to letting go of this frame of reference and stepping into love and light.
The traditional connotation of the word, “forgiveness” may include giving someone a “free pass” or “not holding something against someone” when they do something “against” you, and while that definition is valid in some respects, the true nature of forgiveness is much greater than that. It is the total and unconditional relinquishment of attack thoughts that reside inside of us, regardless of the external triggers that we may experience.
There are many ways that forgiveness can be expressed in our daily lives, and the lesson in A Course in Miracles continues by offering a practical exercise that helps us practice a type of forgiveness that will usher us into the happiness that the lesson claims forgiveness provides. I call this exercise “The Triangle of Light.” The exercise encourages us to pick someone in our life that we don’t like, have some kind of grievance against, or consider to be an enemy. Then we should try to find a bit of light in this person that we are observing and allow this light to grow.
How can we find light within someone we don’t particularly like? No matter how annoying, toxic, or unpleasant a person may be, try to identify one small positive thing about them and then allow your sentiment toward that small thing to grow and expand. Secondly, we are encouraged to think of someone we consider to be a friend, someone we admire, and send light from the person we “dislike” to that person. And then the final step is to extend that light from the person we “like” toward ourselves, and continue circulating this light around the triangle. It’s an interesting exercise that can be practiced anytime toward an unlimited number of people in your life.
Now, I beg the question of how does seeing the light in an adversary and extending it to someone and bringing it back to us relate to the conceptual topic of forgiveness being the key to happiness? This is a question I struggled with in my studies on the lesson. I believe that what it’s getting at is the difference between the “essence” of who we all are and the “forms” that we see them in. While the form may be the body or role they embody in your life, the essence is their pure and perfect nature, a more enduring aspect of everyone’s spiritual perfection. When we decide to view the light within these people, we are really digging down into the freedom of going beyond the level of “form.” This strengthens us to accumulate the freedom to detach from the worldly grievances that we may experience and finding a way to transcend them.
Years ago, while attending Union Theological Seminary, I got into a nasty conflict with an administrator. I had a negative attitude toward this person due to a situation, which caused us to take an immediate dislike to one another. Over the next five or so years, I had several interactions with him and none of them were pleasant. Ten years later, after I finished the program, I attended a work meeting and I was surprise to find him sitting at the table in which we would all working very closely as a team. “Is this going to work?” I thought to myself in stress. In this job role as a consultant, I was responsible for talking about forgiveness, illustrating it, and diving deeper into the concept of it. Over time, he and I began to grow an authentic liking to one another - something I never thought would be possible with this individual. This allowed us to become a prime example in the workplace of what true forgiveness looks like, as we developed our friendship and laughed about the times we let silly conflict have the better of us. We were able to demonstrate harmony, forgiveness, and teamwork - and, needless to say, my daily work life was much happier with the drama behind us.
While this is a more relationship-focused example of forgiveness, the conscious decision to overcome past grievances and align for peace and joy is always accessible to you in any situation. I challenge you to practice radical forgiveness to cultivate your own happiness today.
