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A COURSE of LOVE 16.12 Only forgiveness replaces judgment, but true forgiveness is as foreign to you as is true love. You think forgiveness looks upon another in judgment and pardons the wrongs you would enumerate. True forgiveness simply looks past illusion to the truth where there are no sins to be forgiven, no wrongs to be pardoned. Forgiveness looks on innocence and sees it where judgment would see it not.16.13 This form of forgiveness seems impossible to you because you look upon an unforgiven world where evil walks, danger lurks, and nowhere is safety to be found. Each separated one is out for his or her own self and if you do not watch out for your own safety, surely you will perish. Yet while you watch vigilantly you know that you cannot protect yourself and that you are not safe. There is only one of you and so many of "them." Never can you keep your guard up quite enough or secure a final guarantee against disaster. And yet you cling to all attempts to do so even while knowing they are ineffective.16.14 You think you cannot give up your vigilance because you know no other way to ensure your safety, and even if you cannot guarantee your safety against everything all of the time, you believe you can guarantee your safety against some things some of the time. And for this occasional protection that has no validity and no proof you give up love!16.15 While you claim you need proof before you can believe or accept something as a fact or as the truth, and certainly before you can act upon it, you live as if you believe that what has never worked before will somehow miraculously work in the future. You have nothing but evidence of a life of unhappiness and despair, where occasional moments of joy or the few people that you love out of the many that you do not are all that make your life worth living. You think that to be asked to give up the caution, protection, and vigilance that protects these moments of joy and people you love as well as your own self is to be asked to live a life of even greater risk than that which you live now.16.16 Your judgment has not made the world a better place! If history proves anything, it proves the opposite of what you would care to believe. The more the individual, society, and culture indulge in the desire to judge, the more godlike they think they make themselves. For all of you here know that judgment is not your place, and that it belongs to God and God alone. This is firmly attached to your memory of creation. To wrestle the right to judge away from God is an act against God, and like a child who has dared to defy his parents, the act of defiance fills the defiant one with boldness. Something dangerous has been tried and has seemingly succeeded. The order of the universe has flipped. The child believes she has "stolen" the role of parent away from the parent without having become a parent. God has become the enemy to those who judge just as the parent of a defiant child becomes the enemy in the child's perception.16.17 But the child is wrong. The child has made a mistake. And with this mistake, the child believes that the relationship with the parent has been severed. It is this belief in a severed relationship with God that seems to replace the holy relationship that cannot be replaced. Judgment thus reinforces the idea of separation, making of it something even darker than it started out as being. It no longer seems like a choice that the child has made, but seems to be an irreparable rift that a new choice cannot mend.16.18 Child of God, this is not so and cannot ever be, for the right to judge is but the right of the creator who judges all of creation as it was created and remains. You only think that you have changed the unchangeable.The inner light can answer any of this world's queries and resolve any of its problems. Beyond all of these concerns, the inner light will show you who you are and your relationship to all...and bring you an understanding of love and peace that transcends ordinary human thought processes. Discover what it truly means to "love one another" and to "see peace."
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