Psych. 2.- II. 1 – 4. Jesus: “To be a teacher of God, it is not necessary to be religious or even to believe in God to any recognizable extent. It is necessary, however, to teach forgiveness rather than condemnation.
Even in this, complete consistency is not required, for one who had achieved that could teach salvation completely, within an instant and without a word! For he who has learned all that is worth learning does not need a teacher, and those already healed have no need for a therapist. Until then, relationships are still the temple of the Holy Spirit. They will be made perfect within time, and thus restored to eternity.
‘Formal’ religion has no place in psychotherapy, but neither does form have any real place in religion! In this world, there is an astonishing tendency to join contradictory words into one term without perceiving the contradiction at all. The attempt to ‘formalize’ religion is so obviously an ego attempt to ‘reconcile the irreconcilable’ that it hardly requires any elaboration here.
‘Religion,’ as used here, is experience. Psychotherapy, too, is experience. At the highest levels of both, they become one. Neither is truth itself, but both can lead to truth.
What can be necessary, then, for you to find truth, which of itself remains perfectly obvious, except to remove the seeming obstacles to your awareness of it? No one who learns to truly forgive always can fail to remember God. Forgiveness, then, is all that need be taught, because it is all that need be learned.
All blocks to the remembrance of God are forms of unforgiveness, and nothing else. This is never apparent to the patient, and only rarely so to the therapist. The world has marshaled all its forces against this one awareness, for in it lies the ending of the grand illusion and all it stands for. Yet it is not the awareness of God that constitutes a reasonable goal for psychotherapy. This will come when psychotherapy is complete, for where there is forgiveness, truth must come. It would be unfair indeed if a belief in God were necessary to psychotherapeutic success. Nor is ‘belief in God’ a really meaningful concept, for God can be but known!
Belief implies that ‘unbelief’ is possible, but knowledge of God has no true opposite. Not to know God is to have no knowledge, and it is to this that all unforgiveness leads. And without knowledge one can have only belief.”