FORGIVING MYSELF
If I Had Powers . . .
The key to forgiving both myself and others may be found in a statement by Rudolph Steiner:
If it depends on something other than myself whether I should get angry or not, I am not master of myself . . . I have not yet found the ruler within myself. I must develop the faculty of letting the impressions of the outer world approach me only in the way in which I myself determine.
For the first two-thirds of my life it never occurred to me that such a “faculty” was available to me. I was so long in taking self-dominion of my own being that not until my 42nd year did I experience my first mindful encounter with “the ruler within myself,” which initiated my commitment to innermost-self discovery after more than a decade of flirting around my self-awareness’s edges.
In those days my wife and I meditated each morning before I went to work. During each daily meditation a pick-up truck stopped in front of the house next door as its driver honked the horn to alert our neighbor that his ride to work had arrived.
I became increasingly irritated with the driver of the truck for disturbing my meditation. One morning I angrily exclaimed, "If I had powers, I’d give that guy four flat tires." To which my wife gently replied, "That's why you don't have powers."
I instantly got her point: like the sorcerer’s apprentice, I am not capable of wielding “powers” until I am sufficiently stable to responsibly command them. So I replied, “You’re right. If I actually did have powers, all I'd really do is bust his horn." And again she said, ever so gently, "That's a bit better." And again, I got her point: I was still in forceful reaction to my awareness of the horn.
Following our meditation on a subsequent day I announced, having mellowed considerably, "If I had powers, I'd see that his horn didn't work in this neighborhood." Yet again my wife quietly observed, "That's a bit better."
Now what? I thought that selectively silencing the horn was the ultimate solution.
I eventually recognized the real issue, as my wife did from the start: I was projecting my challenge "out there," as if the honking horn were my problem rather than my choice of relationship to it.
From this perspective, I also recognized that changing the time of our meditation to any other hour, when the neighborhood would be even noisier or we would be tired, was also a reactionary solution. The only satisfactory resolution of my inner turbulence was a non-turbulent response to the present circumstance.
In due course, such resolution was forthcoming. "If I had powers,” I announced to my wife one morning, “I wouldn't be distracted by that horn."
“Yes,” she smiled.

I had finally recognized that my distraction and upset did not exist “out there” in the horn. If it did, then everyone would be comparably distracted and upset whenever and wherever the horn was being blown. No, my serenity of being is forsaken in the same place that it is otherwise realized, within my state of mind rather than in the state of my outer world. Distraction and upset exist in me, not in the stimulus that evokes it. The honking horn, for instance, was itself neither distracted nor upset
As I thus recognized what “powers” are truly about, I commenced the ongrowing realization of my ability to relinquish self-distracting, reactionary states of mind. My flirtation with innermost-self discovery had ended, and my serious courtship thereof had begun. I had discovered the foundation of universal forgiveness.
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Thus begins the book, Forgiving Myself, an experiential account of the author’s cultivation of his generically forgiving nature, with which he considers all human beings to be similarly endowed. Concerning this endowment, he writes:
Forgiving Myself is an experiential account of the forgiveness necessitated by my choice, in the summer of 1965, to exercise the self-dominion of being my own person rather than continue to meet others’ expectations in order to win their approval and admiration. Liberating the who and how of my own being from such subordination – being who I am – has required my forgiveness of everyone and everything, myself included, that has aided me in my attempts to be who I am not….
I am now convinced that all human beings are endowed with a natural tendency to be forgiving. Forgiveness is a quality of the beneficial presence of my original state of being. I have only one state of being, and that being knows itself only as beneficent. Unforgiveness is not an alternate state of being, rather a state of mind that precludes expression of my innately beneficial presence.
I therefore experience forgiveness less as acts specific to particular relationships, times and places than as a positive state of being that transforms all of my relationships at and in all times and places. This state of being empowers me to be more universally forgiving overall, and consequentially more forgiving of specific persons, incidents, etc. When I release the grip of unforgiveness on myself, all else is likewise released from its grip. As I forego unforgiveness “in here,” my forgiveness of people and circumstances “out there” naturally follows.
Accordingly, my approach to forgiveness is one of general amnesty, not merely a person-by-person procedure. I have adopted a “batch-processing” strategy of self-forgiveness that releases unforgiving states of mind, allowing the beneficial presence of my innately forgiving state of being to flourish for the greater good of all concerned.
Most simply stated, I experience forgiveness as the release of everything unlike my forgiving nature. Whenever I allow my emotional and mental states to become transparent to the beneficial presence of my being, my undiminishable forgiving nature prevails.
Becoming thus transparent is what Forgiving Myself is all about.

About the Author
Noel Frederick McInnis is a musician, songwriter, poet, storyteller, humorist and an ordained minister in service to the Church of Forgiveness and Life Celebration Center, an independent church of Religious Science in San Carlos, California. He was instrumental in the founding of the North American environmental education movement in the 1970’s; managing editor of Marilyn Ferguson’s Brain/Mind Bulletin from 1980-83; editor of Douglas Yeaman’s The Power of Commitment; and editor of Barbara Marx Hubbard’s Book of Co-Creation. He is the Vice President for Communications, Publications and Networking of the Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance.
About the Book
The perspective of Forgiving Myself is conveyed in one of its “I-openers”:
Be, as water is, without friction.
Flow around the edges of those within your path.
Surround within your ever-moving depths
those who come to rest there—
enfold them, while never for a moment holding on.
Accept whatever distance others are moved within your flow.
Be with them gently as far as they allow your strength to take them,
and fill with your own being the remaining space when they are left behind.
When dropping down life's rapids, froth and bubble into fragments if you must,
knowing that the one of you now many will just as many times be one again.
And when you've gone as far as you can go, quietly await your next beginning.
ORDERING THE BOOK
Forgiving Myself will be published in October, 2001 by the Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance. Individual copies are $22 postpaid ($20 when no postage is required). Copies ordered in advance of publication are $17 ppd. ($15 when no postage is required). Quantity orders for resale or gifting receive a 30% discount on three or more copies ppd. ($14 per copy) and a 40% discount ($12 per copy) when no postage is required. On orders of ten or more copies the postpaid price is $13 per copy. Please make checks payable to WFA at the address below.
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