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Everyone has experienced an event that they’re sure was terrible. Then, when you think about it ten years later, you realize that if that hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t be here right now enjoying life. So how could that have been a bad thing? It wasn’t a bad thing unless you choose to perceive it as “bad” in your mind. It’s just experience. You get to choose to label it, and thereby you choose to live by the resulting “reality”.

I know of a woman who was on an airplane while it was being commandeered, and she was shot in the head and thrown off the plane. She lay on the tarmac below the plane for some time until she could be rescued. When she got shot in the head it created for her a reality of being like the children that she had been teaching who had disabilities, and so she learned from her own experience what it was like to be the children she was teaching. It turned out to be a real blessing.

Changing the Planet Overnight

So, for me to sit here and say that “bad” things don’t exist, or that there’s no such thing as crime, sounds Utopian at best and absurd at worst. Yet for those who do understand, it’s right on. It is time for the greater body of us to recognize what’s really going on — Oneness! When we get to that point, when we get to that critical mass, people will recognize Oneness and they will recognize that if I slap you in the face, I have just slapped myself. But right now we do not recognize that if I hurt you, I have hurt myself. We don’t believe it and/or we don’t accept it. But it is the truth, and this truth can change the whole planet overnight.

I’ve heard many people claim that they are the way they are because of what their mother and father did. That’s history. They did that to you, you’ve had that experience, and you chose to feel what you’re feeling. Now you have the power to forgive, release and let go and make another choice. It doesn’t change what they did or all the behavioral patterns you acquired over many lifetimes that got you right to where you are, but in this instant, having the power to forgive, release and let go of that past, you can change your present, grow, and change your future. When you do this, you stop attracting those kinds of elements that “help” you have those “bad behaviors”, “accidents” or “victimizations.” You won’t need them. After all, you only create those things to give you another opportunity to make a different choice. They are neither “good” nor “bad”, they just are.

The Right to Imagine Anything & Create It

We work hard to get this right. We work hard to become who we are. We don’t have the right to judge one another for what we’ve created. You can observe others and you might not like what they’re doing, but it’s their right to have that experience. It might sound as though I’m condoning murder, mass suicide, and similar things. I would not want anyone to choose that for themselves. But I do recognize that free will gives you the right to imagine anything and create it.

The universe operates by The Law of Cause and Effect. If this happens, then that takes place. Paradoxically, we’re a part of that matrix while simultaneously creating it.

Cause & Effect Reality

I’ve heard this true story about a man whose wife and daughter were killed by a teenager who was having a drag race down the main street. She, not realizing how fast they were coming down the street, pulled out into traffic. The teenager collided with her, her car burst into flames, and she and her daughter were killed. The young man got off free because the woman was said to be at fault for pulling into traffic. The husband pursued this case for years to bring the teenager to justice for being responsible for his wife and daughters’ death.

When the husband was on TV he talked about forgiveness and said, “In order to do this I had to forgive him first, but I want him to see the repercussions; the cause and effect.” The case was retried, the man won his case and the teenager faced thirty years in prison. But the husband said no, that’s not my goal. I forgave him; I want to ensure that he’s able to see the cause and effect reality for which he is responsible. Then the teenager was filmed saying, “I will be eternally sorrowful for what I did.” And he thanked the guy for forgiving him.

Giving Yourself the Gift of Forgiveness

In the end the young man didn’t go to prison. It was really something. But here’s the corker: the husband admitted his concern for himself when he said, “If I didn’t forgive this young man, I would be tortured for the rest of my life.” There is a great resource out there in a book entitled Forgive & Forget, Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve. I recommend reading it when dealing with any issues of forgiveness.

When you forgive, you relieve yourself of a hook in your soul, so to speak. You are harming yourself if you leave it there by choosing to withhold forgiveness. Forgiving others is perhaps the most wonderful gift you can ever give yourself, while choosing not to forgive is like consuming poison and then waiting for the other person to die.

This article was excerpted with permission from the book:

The Order of Melchizedek: Love, Willing Service, & Fulfillment
by Rev. Daniel Chesbro with Rev. James Erickson.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Findhorn Press. ©2010. www.findhornpress.com

Click here for more info and/or to order this book on Amazon.

About the Authors

Rev. Daniel Chesbro is an ordained minister in the Order of Melchizedek. Trained at the Andover Newton Theological School, Crozer Seminary, and Colgate Divinity School, he is the head of A School for the Prophets and lectures every weekend throughout the United States and Canada. He lives in Consus, New York.

Rev. James Erickson has the gift of clairsentience. He is a psychic and aura reader as well as a healer. He was ordained into the Order of Melchizedek in 1993. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Read more articles by these authors.

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