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We have been teaching the forgiveness pattern for over ten years now, and I'm happy to report that it has been put to the supreme test: it has been successfully used even by someone with a complete misunderstanding of the principles involved! Like any good recipe, if the steps are followed carefully, the results are good, whether or not the cook has an understanding of what function the different components serve.
The healing power of forgiveness is a very ancient teaching, but typically this teaching has been to point to a goal and describe it and its value, but without much information about what to do to get there. Now that we know how to do it, this ancient teaching can be manifest in the world.
One ex-prisoner of war asked another, “Have you forgiven your captors yet?” The second one replied, “NO, NEVER!” And the other one turned and said, “Then it seems like they still have you in prison, don't they?”
“One of my close friends spent, I think, eighteen years in Chinese prison and labor camps. In the early '80s they allowed him to come to India. On occasion he and I discuss his experiences in various Chinese labor camps. And he told me that during those periods, on a few occasions he really faced some danger. I asked what kind of danger, and his response was, 'Oh, danger of losing compassion for the Chinese.' That kind of mental attitude is, I think, a key factor to sustain peace of mind.”
–The Dali Lama
“If we could read the secret history of those we would like to punish, we would find in each life enough grief and suffering to make us stop wishing anything more on them.”
–Source Unknown
St. Peter: “Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?” Jesus saith unto him, “I say not unto thee until seven times: but until seventy times seven.”
–St. Matthew, 21
“To err is human; to forgive, divine.”
–Alexander Pope
“Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do.”
–St. John, 34
“Judge not, and ye shall not be judged”
–St. Luke, 27
In Warsaw, in 1939, a man watched as the Nazis machine-gunned hundreds of jews, including his wife, two daughters, and three sons. “I had to decide right then whether to let myself hate the soldiers who had done this. It was an easy decision, really. I was a lawyer. In my practice I had seen too often what hate could do to people's minds and bodies. Hate had just killed the six people who mattered most to me in the world. I decided then that I would spend the rest of my life–whether it was a few days or many years–loving every person I came in contact with.”
–George G. Ritchie, Return from Tomorrow, pp. 115-116
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