Score Keeping

In Immortal Diamond, (Chapter Two) Richard Rohr writes...

Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are. In that sense, only the False Self can and will sin. The False Self tells lies because it somehow, is a lie. It steals because it has allowed itself to be stolen As Jesus said to those who were killing him, False Self "do not even know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34). The True Self is conscious, the False Self is largely unconscious, and you do evil only when you are unconscious.

Rohr quotes Jesus from the cross here, only he omits the words which precede them, "Father, forgive them..." But his line of thinking reveals what they mean; Jesus is speaking from his True Self (or "God Self" as I like to think of it) when he says these words. 

It is the ego which lies at the heart of the False Self that "feels" hurt, and that encourages us to hold grudges, that can't (or more correctly won't) forgive--because it feels threatened and endangered. 

The True Self (God Self within each of us) not only has the capacity to truly forgive the False Self of others. It can and will forgive even our own ego-based False Self. We can do this not seven times, as Peter asks Jesus, but "seventy times seven" as Jesus replies (Matthew 18:22). 

In other words, when we like Christ, live out of our True Selves/God-within-us Selves, we feel no need but to forgive.