And so, therefore, in this hour, beloved friends, we would wish to share with you the power of forgiveness — how to cultivate it, how to refine it, how to understand the depths of it that can be revealed to you as you forgive seventy-times-seven times, how to bring up within you that which has not yet been forgiven, but perhaps forgotten. We would speak also, in this hour, of what perception is, and what projection is.

Therefore, beloved friend, when you judge, you have moved out of alignment with what is true. You have decreed that the innocent are not innocent. And if you would judge another as being without innocence, you have already declared that this is true about you. Therefore, to practice forgiveness actually cultivates the quality of consciousness in which, finally, you come to forgive yourself. And it is, indeed, the forgiven who remember their God.

And I began to shift gears slightly. I began, even, to be seen as someone who was rebelling against the teachings of my Essene elders. For I began to move away from striving for God, from striving for perfection, and began to cultivate within myself the process of allowing. I discovered that if I looked upon my perceptions, my feelings, my behavior, exactly as they were, without overshadowing them with my own interpretations — if I could teach myself to embrace things with innocence — veils began to be dissolved from my mind. For when I was nine years old, I had already learned to be fearful of thinking, or speaking, or acting, in a way that was not in conformity to the prevailing wisdom of that time, even within the Essene community, which had already become rather rigidified. There was already much dogma. And dogma always leads to bickering.