When we're willing to see the innocence in another person even when he or she has behaved without love toward us, we activate the Law of Divine Compensation.

Forgiveness is "selective remembering"—a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go. But the ego is relentless—it is "capable of suspiciousness at best and viciousness at worst.

The term crucifixion means the energy pattern of fear. It represents the limited, negative thinking of the ego, and how it always seeks to limit, contradict or invalidate love. The term resurrection means the energy pattern of love, which transcends fear by replacing it. A miracle worker's function is forgiveness. In performing our function, we become channels for resurrection.

It's easy to forgive people who have never done anything to make us angry. People who do make us angry, however, are our most important teachers. They indicate the limits to our capacity for forgiveness.

The heart's transformation is not attained through the mind—it's attained through surrender, authenticity, forgiveness, faith, honesty, acceptance, vulnerability, humility, willingness, nonjudgment, and other characterological values that have to be learned and relearned continuously.

Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.

Love interrupts the past and opens the future to new probabilities.

Course in Miracles says that everyone we meet will either be our crucifier or our savior, depending on what we choose to be to them. Focusing on their guilt drives the nails of self-loathing more deeply into our own skin. Focusing on their innocence sets us free. Since 'no thoughts are neutral,' every relationship takes us deeper into Heaven or deeper into Hell.

Making another person feel guilty will never build unity or goodwill; only blessing, not blaming, can do that. All judgment does is to shut people down emotionally and psychologically.

I surrender my focus on the past that I might dwell fully in the present. May my mind not wander into the darkness of before, but rather be filled with the light of now. May my heart be open to the knowing that anything is possible in any moment, and God Himself is not held back by the fears or mistakes of yesterday. I forgive what has been, and embrace what is. I am at peace in the holiness of this instant, and release all else.

Forgiveness is a full time job, and sometimes very difficult. Few of us always succeed, yet making the effort is our most noble calling. It is the world's only real chance to begin again. A radical forgiveness is a complete letting go of the past, in any personal relationship, as well as in any collective drama.

The future is programmed in the present. To let the past go is to remember that in the present, my brother is innocent.