*** International Worldwide Forgiveness Day

August 3rd was designated as International Worldwide Forgiveness Day by the visionary, Robert Plath. His vision was it would be a day that would evoke the healing spirit of forgiveness worldwide. He created the Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance in 1996 to empower that vision.

Each year on this date the Alliance honors people who have made a contribution to spreading the message of forgiveness throughout the world, either by the work they have done or by the examples set in their own lives. You can see the current honorees by going to his website www.forgivenessalliance.org. I was proud to be nominated by the Alliance as a Champion of Forgiveness in 2002 and was honored to speak at their annual event in California.

As a counterpoint to our automatic “God Bless America” parochialism, what appeals to me most about this organization is that its focus is worldwide forgiveness. Their stated goal is to “establish this International Forgiveness Day (not just in America but) in every village and hamlet across the world by the year 2025.”

I am hoping you will respond to the call on August 3rd and will wake up feeling an urge to do some forgiveness work. If you do, two questions will arise. First, who shall I try to forgive? Second, what kind of forgiveness shall I use?

No trouble with the first for I doubt it would take you long to find someone in your own personal life against whom you still hold a grievance. To forgive them would be a wonderful gift to yourself and a great contribution to your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. Remember, you do forgiveness for yourself, not for those you are forgiving.

However, since the focus of the Forgiveness Alliance is worldwide, you might think about expanding your vision by looking to see how the benefits of forgiveness could be extended to people around the world. After all, do we not have judgments and grievances about those who are responsible for situations like Darfur, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Zimbabwe and other such seemingly bad conditions? Are those judgments not just as toxic to us as our other grievances, and, from an energetic point of view, don’t our judgments tend to keep the energy around the situations stuck? Of course they do.

As far as the second question is concerned, if you really want to make a difference to what is happening in those places, as well as release your own stress around it, then it has to be RADICAL Forgiveness. And that’s because it works NOT through the intellect, (as in traditional forgiveness where forgiveness is thought of as a conscious choice to let bygones be bygones), but through that part of us that connects us to the quantum field of universal consciousness. I call that our Spiritual Intelligence.

Our Spiritual Intelligence is the part of us that knows the higher purpose in everything that is occurring, which is, of course, the basic underlying principle of Radical Forgiveness — that there is a Divine purpose in everything. In that sense, what follows is there’s nothing ‘wrong’ happening and, therefore, nothing to forgive. (It’s a crazy idea, I know, but fortunately we don’t have to believe it. We just need to use the tools provided to activate our Spiritual Intelligence. That takes care of the process automatically from that point on).

The way it works is when we do our forgiveness work using the tools of Radical Forgiveness (these are what make it so easy and quick), we automatically make an alteration to our energy field. Then, because we are all part of what Rupert Sheldrake, the English biologist, refers to as the morphogenetic energy field to which all humans belong, our own shift in energy will have an immediate effect on the overall field. Consequently, if just a small number of people were to do a Radical Forgiveness process on the situation in Darfur for example, they would have an unimaginable but profound impact on the situation in that country. Things would start to move in the right direction. Positive changes would begin to happen immediately. It’s an energy thing!

So I invite you on International Worldwide Forgiveness Day to go to our website www.radicalforgiveness.com, and login to the free, online Radical Forgiveness Worksheet. By all means do one on something personal, but then cast your mind beyond self and even beyond the shores of the country in which you live, to the world ‘out there.’

Choose a situation about which you feel strongly. Then use the online worksheet to ‘forgive’ the politicians, world leaders, corrupt officials, greedy corporate leaders, criminal banks, the military industrial complex, etc., all those you see as being to blame for everything that is bad in the world.

This is the only way we are ever going to have world peace and harmonious relationships between everyone. And it really is up to us to create it. By doing the Radical Forgiveness work, we are, firstly, taking responsibility for having created, through our own consciousness, all these people and situations. Secondly, we will be taking back all that we have collectively projected onto these people. Only then will we begin to heal the misperception that we are all separate and need to attack each other. Only then will we stop fighting each other, abusing each other, stealing from each other and so on.

But we don’t have forever to make this choice. The clock is ticking. 2012 is just around the corner and I believe that we have to make the conscious choice to shift our consciousness from the fear vibration to love vibration by that time, or have it be a very difficult transition indeed. I may be right about this or wrong about it, but I would still ask you to take this day seriously, folks, and join the many amongst us who are already trying to change the world by seeing the perfection in the imperfection.

Happy Worldwide Forgiveness Day.

Blessings