“I forgive you.” … Three of the most healing words you can say and hear. They say to another, “I recognize that beneath the action which I perceived as hurtful there lies a being just like me. We may never see things the same. We may never act the same, but at the very core we are the same. When we take away all thought and all actions, we are love, for we both come from the Source of all love.”
When one says, “i forgive you,” one is saying, “I see past your humanity, for I am human, too. I know what lies beneath that humanity, for it lies within me, too. In forgiving you, I help the spirit being within me to rise and emerge. May my forgiveness help you to recognize that same spirit within you.”
When all can see the Spirit within each other, there will be no more need for forgiveness.
A Course in Miracles deals much with the importance of forgiveness and attributes much of the power of wonders to it. I once knew a woman whose son had died and she was blaming God; she could not forgive God for something that happened to her son: that can be really puzzling to an outsider, even one trained in any religious practice to see the mental reversals required for such a paradoxical egoic "Mexican standoff…" The answer may be we need to transcend, forget, the erroneous definitions we may hold as well as to forgive those whom we may mistakenly blame for our own habits and accidents.