Book Excerpt Chapter Seven:

Freedom Through Forgiveness

Forgiveness:
The Key to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy

p. 153 - You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey from Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy by James Blanchard Cisneros.

	See a short flash presentation on Forgiveness.

Forgiveness is the key that opens the door to knowledge, peace of mind and joy. The door itself is the stumbling block, or judgment. The door maker is the ego. Each individual ego builds and decorates its own door. The door and the door maker represent the illusion of who we think we are. Forgiveness is only necessary because we have chosen to believe that the door and door maker are real. Once our belief in the door and door maker are released and disappear, so will our need for a key. What good is a key if there is no door? 

We have been offered a smooth road, and yet, what we see is a road full of holes. We sometimes talk a good talk, yet there are crevices in our minds, hearts and lives that although not real, we have made them real by our belief that we are something less than what we truly are. We are so richly blessed, but we continue to perceive holes in our roads, and so we secretly and silently look to fill these holes with materials that cannot last. Soon our roads become brittle and crack, and we must again make repairs. We complain about how incredibly bumpy our roads are, yet we cannot see, nor will we admit, that it is because of our own selves that our roads are bumpy. We continue to try and fill these holes with illusions and lies that will not stand the test of time. We curse the road, and curse and judge those we believe are responsible for its condition. We choose to look anywhere but within, and blame everyone but ourselves. My dear friend, we will never fix our roads with the same material that has helped us create the problem. Once we look within and realize that it is our own minds that create the holes, we move from trying to fix the road to trying to better understand our own minds. Once we obtain clarity in our minds, the holes in our roads magically disappear. They disappear because, they were illusions that we had simply chosen to believe as real.

Knowledge, peace of mind and joy are available in every situation. We can recognize this and obtain them through forgiveness or we can focus on judgment, their opposite, and obtain its result. The choice of which road we take and experience is ours.

If you have obtained peace of mind and joy in a situation, congratulations - no further instruction is necessary. If you have not obtained peace of mind and joy in a situation, then the following 10 steps may be helpful to you in changing directions:

• Accept responsibility. Acknowledge to yourself that, at this moment in time, it is your perception that is resulting in your lack of peace.

• Acknowledge that your lack of peace is not due to the external environment but to your internal reaction to it.

• Acknowledge that thinking with the ego, and judging the situation, has brought about a lack of peace.

• Do not condemn yourself or your ego for feeling the way you do.

• Acknowledge to yourself that there is another way, a more peaceful way to perceive this situation.

• Choose to see it as a learning experience, an opportunity to better understand how to choose peace.

• Offer gratitude for the experience and your inner shift.

• Forgive yourself and everyone else involved in the situation.

• Send love to yourself, your ego and everyone else involved in the situation.

• Be grateful for the opportunity that you have offered yourself to once again choose peace.
   

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of the great spiritual / self development book You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey from Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy by James Blanchard Cisneros.