A Lesson from the Spirit

All-forgiveness is the path to true mercy.

Accept all-forgiveness into your heart, and the path to mercy becomes inevitable.
What do you feel when you are hungry? Thousands of images in your head begin their play with you.
The need to satisfy hunger is as natural as the need to satisfy the hunger of the soul.

But if in the first case you must be sated to feel relief, in the second you must rid yourself of all that oppression that chokes your faculties, cuts off the oxygen to the possibilities of a great soul.

If you paint a canvas with astonishing colors, you will feel only the mood of the flowers and forms depicted on it. But if you thoughtfully sketch fragments of your long-cherished memories, warm and beloved, those to which you want to return again and again when the thunder rages, then your sensations will be different.
Draw a smile on your face and you will hear kind laughter within. Draw a gentle breeze and you will feel that gentleness inside.

They say that this path to mercy is all-forgiveness.
Mercy is not simply an act of good will performed by someone in public. Mercy is born in silence. In your serenity, in your sincerity, where there is no place for falseness and judgment, where there is acceptance and all-forgiveness—not through the prism of approving someone’s actions (you are not their judge), but as one who was created to behold those deeds, to see them not for judgment’s sake but to hear the plea and request of the one beside you.
So begin with yourself, forgiving yourself for inattention, for lack of desire, irresponsibility, clumsiness, haste; accepting yourself wholly and forgiving even where you do not wish to return with your thoughts.
Where you cannot forgive yourself or anyone else, you leave only darkness, gloomy memories, oppressive troubles that remain in the space as a certain vacuum, where there is no oxygen, where there is no ability to breathe, and therefore no ability to live.

Open that vacuum, breathe life through all-forgiveness, and you will see how everything around fills with that life, new forms, where you will no longer be the same, and those who were with you will be transformed in an instant.
As if receiving a vaccine before an epidemic begins.
Thus you create life and multiply it on Earth; thus you manifest quiet, unseen mercy, opening hearts around you, enlivening and inspiring others to live.

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While it still hurts you to return to the past, you see only the bright colors of life as something pleasant, good, warm. But you cannot grasp depth without all-forgiveness. I speak of your depth: the depth of your gaze, your abilities, possibilities, knowledge…