Love and Forgiveness

Best-version transcript — the human transcription refined against a word-timed machine transcript of the cleaned audio. Spotted an error? Corrections are welcome.

The other day a friend of mine who is a minister asked me a couple of very interesting questions. He asked me, “Why is it that love is mentioned so often in the Bible?” And he wanted to know what the relationship was between love and forgiveness. And believe me, you can’t have one without the other. The wise have always said that love is the answer, and, believe me, this is really, really true. Because love is a deep understanding.

Love is being able to forgive and accept without judgment. Love is giving empathy for the unfortunate situation of others. And love—this is very important—love always comes in a positive feeling, not from the intellect but via a positive feeling, deep within your soul. And without this positive feeling, what some call love is only mere words and has no validity whatsoever.

You see, all you have to see is that the state of forgiveness leaves your mind free to enjoy without the weight of carrying grudges from the past. Believe me, the state of unforgiveness can be a very heavy burden to carry throughout your life. It will cause you nothing but grief and sorrow and, always, it is self-destructive.

This is why the wise from the past have always said “love and forgiveness.” To forgive is to forget. Now, I don’t mean deny. I mean forget it. It’s not worth carrying because it’s only a memory. Forgiveness—it’s magical. Forgiveness is like penicillin. It clears the passageway of your mind which, in turn, cleanses the soul and brings mental health. It brings happiness. It brings all these feelings to you, not to the one you give it away to but to you. And that’s very important.

I truly feel sorry for anyone who lives in a world of unforgiving nature. Their burden must be horrendous. I honestly used to believe if I forgive anyone who’d harmed me in the past, it’d be a sign of weakness. And now that I’ve got a little bit older and a little bit wiser, I realise it’s the opposite. Forgiveness is not weakness; it’s strength.

And this is why it’s so very, very dangerous to go to awareness groups who deal with negativity and hostility and dragging you back into the past horrors of your life. There’s no forgiveness there. Forgiveness comes from the now. Right now. You have to forgive. And it’s not denial. Because once you learn to forgive, you can look and see that those things really did happen to you, but it’s a deeper understanding.

It’s an understanding with love and forgiveness. And this is where the secret of the ages is found when you find love and forgiveness in your heart for those unfortunate people who do things to you and to others and they don’t even know they’re doing it. There’s innocence and ignorance, believe me. And, believe me, you can never, never have a happy marriage or a happy relationship with any human being when your mind is full of negativity and hate and unforgiveness. It just can’t be done. It is an absolute impossibility. And if anybody is ever leading you down that path, I ask you to really, really take heed of what you’re doing and check it out.

You look for common sense. You have love in your heart and forgiveness, that’s what you’re going to receive. On the other hand, if you’re unforgiving and full of spite and hate, that again is what you’re going to receive. You know the old saying “what you give, you receive”? A lot of people honestly, truly believe to get a happy marriage together that the couples have got to be upfront with each other and tell how they feel, all the negativity they feel and all the hostility they feel towards each other. There is no hope here, absolutely none. That’s the old awareness group thing from the sixtys and the seventys. There is absolutely no hope whatsoever when you’re doing this.

All you have to do is look for compassion towards each other, compassion towards your children, compassion towards humanity as a whole. Stop judging it. And once you stop judging, you’ll find your life will be much, much better. The only reason that wars are happening is because of ignorance of life, ignorance of the mind, ignorance of the soul. All life is a thought process. All society is created from a thought process. All rights, all wrongs are all created from a thought process. The way you act, the way you behave—they’re all created from a thought process.

Forgiveness is a thought process. Love is a thought process. Hate is a thought process. You could go on and on and on, and all you have to do is change your mind. Learn to change your mind. Go from negative to positive. Learn to forgive, because, as I said before, forgiveness is the way. I know people in the psychological profession and they have patients who are full of hate, anger, distrust from experiences they’ve had in the past. But to clear these negative thoughts away what that patient has to do, again, is to learn to forgive. And once you learn to forgive and it clears your mind and clears those passageways of your soul, this is where that person will find the happiness they’re looking for.

They’re looking for happiness, contentment. They’re looking for a stable life, a life where they can live with their spouse and their children and just enjoy themselves. And believe me, the way a lot of therapists are geared right now, taking those poor, unfortunate people back in the past, all their doing is continuing the agony that they’re going through.

When a couple has love in their hearts for each other, there is nothing in this world that they can’t do together. Again, I’d like to say look for a feeling, a positive feeling. This is where the secret lies: it’s in the feeling. You must find the feeling. If you don’t have that feeling of forgiveness, then it’s not forgiving. But once you find this feeling of forgiveness, you’ve found the treasure. You’ve found the greatest treasure in the world. You’ve found something that will assist you through life. It will assist you in every facet of your life. It will assist you in your marriage, in your work, in your relationship with every human being. And again, the word is called forgiveness.

Well, folks, again, I hope this little piece of tape you will find it interesting. Thank you.

Lately, I’ve been asked my philosophical views on the connection between thought and consciousness in our everyday life. First of all, we couldn’t possibly function without thought. All mental process, all mental functions must come via thought. That is why I say thought is the missing link that the psychologists have been looking for, for many years. It’s the missing link between mental sickness and mental health.

I said before thought is one of the main principles behind all mental function. Without it, there would be no reality. This is why it’s vastly important to understand the power of thought. Without the power of free thought, life as we know it right now wouldn’t even exist. It is always via thought that all rules and regulations are created throughout the world. Our society makes its rules via our own thoughts, the way we think. This is why one culture has different rules and regulations than other. They have different religions, different ways to function because they think differently.

And you think according to the way you’ve been brought up. So if you’re brought up in an Asian country, you’re going to think completely different than if you were brought up, say, maybe in Britain. There’s two different ways of functioning. Two ways of thinking. But it’s always via thought. All religions, theories, all sciences, literally all behaviour of humanity comes via thought. This is where the secret to mental health lies, in thought connected to consciousness.

Now, not too long ago, I heard someone argue that you couldn’t really prove that consciousness existed. That’s rather a flimsy kind of argument because they couldn’t even talk to each other. You wouldn’t even know that each other existed without consciousness. Consciousness itself. Put them together and they create what you call reality. All mental upsets and marriages come via your client’s thoughts. It’s the way they look at each other, the way they survey each other via their thoughts. They fight and they squabble. Now, when they first met, they were madly in love and they didn’t bring in the negative thoughts. They ignored it because they were madly in love with each other. But as time went on, you fall back into what you call habit, psychological habit.

And this is where the danger of a marriage starts when your old psychological habits come back because they get out of control. And people say, “I see what I’m doing. I see I’m in a habit. I see I’m fighting with my wife or my husband, but what can I do about it? Why am I doing it?” The second you do that, then you’ve missed the point. It doesn’t matter why you’re doing it because it’s a habit. And to see the habit, to see the negative habit, you must find negative causes: why you feel negative.

And believe me, there’s an infinite amount of ways that you can do it. You could go up to somebody and say you didn’t like the colour of their eyes, their hair, their nose. You don’t like the weather. You don’t like your mother-in-law, your father-in-law, your sister, your brother, your cousin, your boss. It goes on and on and on until there’s endless amount of excuses. But that’s part of the sickness. That’s part of the lostness is those excuses.

So my advice when you honestly find that you’re in a habit, no matter what the excuse, really look and see it’s a psychological habit. And if you can see all it is is a habit and the habit is thought—it’s created from thought. If you can see that, honestly see that, then that habit, like alcoholism, will start to die away. You see, consciousness is simply existence and form. And it is via thought that we can recognise the existence of consciousness. It is via these two principles that we function daily. It’s via these two principles that we can either see negative or positive. It is via these two principles that our reality exists.

That is the main principle behind the way we survey life from day-to-day, such as if we’re in a happy mood, we’re having happy thoughts, nothing else, just happy thoughts. If we see sadness, we’re seeing or hearing and feeling sadness. Because all our feelings come via thought. Thought creates feelings. And sometimes if a client’s thoughts are misguided, then you get bad feelings. And this is a psychologist’s or a therapist’s job is to change the feelings of the client who is suffering. And to change feelings, you must—absolutely must—change the thoughts.

It must be done via thought because thought directs us to how we feel. A lot of people think that because they’ve been married a few years, they’ve lost a lot of the love that they had for each other, the caring, the sharing, that it’s lost for good. But this is the furthest thing away from the truth, believe me, because I know many, many people that have been married many years, and each year gets more and more beautiful. Because they have realised that the love that they had originally was their thoughts, the thoughts to each other, and it grows. These thoughts get stronger because you get used to each other, and that is if you can keep away from the old habits.

You know the awareness groups telling you to be upfront? Well, in actual fact, they’re not helping your marriage. They’re helping to destroy a marriage for the simple reason they’re reinforcing the negative thoughts, the bad habits that create divorces, squabbles, and a lot of misery for a lot of innocent people.

And this is the beauty of starting to realise the connection between thought and consciousness and marriage. This is where a therapist can really, truly go on to patch up a marriage, make it better, even after many, many years. After maturity comes, this is when marriages get better because it’s a mature love. It’s a more understanding love, and understanding, again, comes via thought. So always look for the positive. Always. That is the only place, the only state that will get you to mental health is via positive thought.

And if anybody ever tells you otherwise, please be very careful and think about it because negative thoughts lead to negative habits. Positive, loving thoughts lead to just that. So if I was you, I’d really look and see the connection between consciousness and thought. And here lies the answer to all psychological functioning. Thank you.