Conclusion
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org,
please feel free to visit the school website)
We all experience pain at points during our lives. One way to deal with pain is to suppress it by engaging in activities that keep our minds off that which we do not want to see. This can turn into a life-long path, however, and one that will not be free from the effects of pain. For even suppressed pain will affect the health of our emotions, minds, and physical bodies. Radical forgiveness, non-judgment, acceptance, and increasing awareness offer us tools to lovingly reach out to these denied pieces of ourselves. We can offer these processes to the stored pain in our bodies along with any present or future situations that appear for us. The world doesn’t have to be looked at as a struggle in which we are separate beings striving to make lives amongst many other separate life forms. We can look at the world as being united through energy. In this view of life, everything that presents itself is a spiritual gift for us to evolve. We can resist or go with the flow. It is our choice.
Gangaji uses the metaphor of Spirit as a river in her book You Are That! (1996). We are all within this river of life, but we have the choice to let go or to cling onto a rock out of fear of flowing with the river. Those who cling to rocks will be continually struggling to keep their grips firm. They will always have the fear of letting go. Those who do let go of their rocks, however, will be able to use their intuition and knowledge to avoid any obstacles in the way, while flowing with the stream of life. People who have learned to fully accept life and release their blocks in order for life to flow better through them remind us that we too can find this space. Quantum physics is showing us that anything is possible. The realities we see are few in an infinite pool. We can heal ourselves and help in the healing of others because this is our true nature.
Dr. Stone also uses the metaphor of a river in Health Building (1985). “Life is a river; it is a road, a direction of energy waves and currents in our being that leads to more water of life, more space and tolerance and to higher pinnacles of love and understanding, through pleasure and pain, through success and failure, through trials and overcoming all our negative factors of thinking, doing and feeling, into harmony of love and its fullness of expression through understanding and compassion.” Each one of us can come more fully into the path of life through the practices described in this course. Let us really take in the words
The Dalai Lama offers in his book An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion In Everyday Life (2001). “I believe that each of us has the same potential to develop inner peace and thereby achieve happiness and joy. Whether we are rich or poor, educated or uneducated, black or white, from the East or the West, our potential is equal.” And take a few deep breaths. This is the path you have been walking through our exploration of forgiveness. May its benefits spread deeply into your life and those lives that you touch.