I’ve identified certain different perspectives on forgiveness and I’d like to briefly share them as well as my own interpretation of what I think is most in line with the course.
General -> General
First, we have the general-to-general interpretation in which generalised forgiveness and/or generalised healing is applied to a generalised problem. It goes something along the lines of:
Forgive yourself for believing you are an ego or a body, and that’s the end.
It is assumed that if you find the “root” of all grievances or illusions, then you immediately forgive that and conclude that there’s nothing to forgive.
Example: Someone cut me off in traffic, I forgive this by going to the generalised issue: recognising that I am not an ego and not a body and neither is the “person” who cut me off in traffic. Because of that, nothing happened.
Specific -> Specific
Then you have the specific-to-specific interpretation which is something like:
Each individual grievance requires specific guidance in order to deal with it
With this idea, you need to use the Holy Spirit’s help to manually “untangled” each and every individual and specific grievance.
Example: Someone cut me off in traffic. I forgive this by asking the Holy Spirit how to deal with my anger and this particular situation. The Holy Spirit gives me some helpful thoughts and also tells me to smile to driver to communicate to him he is not at fault.
Specific -> General
This kind of forgiveness is where you specifically apply forgiveness to a specific grievance, however the application is the same every time. Summary would be something like:
Each individual grievance requires me to look at it specifically to recognise it’s unreality
In this sense, you do not do the work of “abstracting” up to the ego or body generalisation. You are still applying forgiveness to the particular grievance, but you are applying the same remedy to it.
Example: Someone cuts you off in traffic. You take the content of those thoughts that represent the story around all this which occurred. You recognise the unreality of the story and affirm that God would have never created that because it is out of accord with reality. You look at everything specifically, the mean-spiritedness of the other driver, his intent to put you in danger, all of this - specifically. Your healed mind which is joined with all minds, acknowledges reality automatically extends to all and requires nothing more for you to do.
Thoughts…
I believe the course aligns mostly with the last one (general-to-specific).
I think the first one (general-to-general) is a gross misunderstanding that actually has led to a lot of confusion and a lot of people doing the ACIM version of “spiritual bypassing”. In other words, you have grievances but you’re not looking at them or bringing them specifically to the light to be forgiven and dissolved in the light. You shortcut this process by telling yourself that you’re “not an ego” and therefore there’s “no work to do”. The general-to-general dismisses the power of thought because it presupposes that you can hold grievances and, if only you tell yourself you’re not an ego, you can heal at the same time. But they do have power, because you are free mind. Obviously not power to change reality, but power to change your experience and awareness, and therefore to make error and abide in illusions.
The second one (specific to specific) should be seen not as a remedy but perhaps the natural behaviour of a healed mind. A healed mind doesn’t think, for example, “I must smile at the driver to fix the problem”. The problem is already fixed, and the smile is an expression of you living as Christ, in joy and happiness, rather than desperately trying to behave correctly in order to solve a problem.
The third interpretations (specific to general) acknowledges the power of the mind, the uncompromising need for correction, but doesn’t give any weight to doing something correctly in order to fix a real problem. There is no real problem, and that’s what the Holy Spirit is saying.
An analogy?
Yes analogies are nice. Lets say you are looking through a window to a beautiful mountains, and the window has stains on it. These stains are errors. They paint the mountains in gross shapes and smudge and distort everything.
General-to-general would be telling yourself that the window doesn’t exist, but not really cleaning it.
Specific-to-specific would be dealing with each individual smudge, interacting with it, analysing it, trying to listen to guidance of what technique to deal with this particular smudge.
Specific-to-general would be cleaning every individual smudge as you become aware of it using one single all-in-one Holy Spirit certified cleaning formula. It’s the same formula, and it dissolves every smudge in exactly the same way because every smudge is the same.
