The process of manifestation is, simply put as follows: The conscious awareness creates an image, a mental image. This image gets impressed on the thinking stuff - which is, as Wallace Wattles in his book "The Science of getting rich" describes it:
"There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe. A thought in this substance produces the thing that is imaged by the thought."
This "Thinking Stuff" goes by many names; God, Allah, Mother Nature, Divine Substance... Whatever feels the most right to you is the name that is right for you. Remember, you are this stuff as you. So in order to be in harmony you have to be in harmony. If it doesn't feel right to you then you are not in harmony with it. It is that simple.
So the mental image created gets infused with feeling. This infusion happens regardless of whether we think we are doing it or not. The work we do around our feelings is really to keep ourselves in as constant a state of feel good as possible. And to have the state of "Feeling Good" be actually based on good things. Because it is possible to have a mental association between feeling good and destructive images. We've met those people. They live at all ends of the economic scale. They have stuff. Sometimes luxurious stuff. They have followings. Sometimes large followings. They have charisma. They can sway you to eat fire.
We've been those people to varying degrees. All that goes to show is nothing more than God is the vibration of good. And what you think is your good will cause you to vibrate and the Universe will respond with what YOU think is your good - leaving us, from time to time to scratch our heads and wonder where that fireball sandwhich came from. But even then, only those asleep to their own power - their own relationship to this Thinking Stuff scratch their heads. Those that are aware know. And seeing the fireball sandwhich and feeling the burn, they quickly work to change their thinking.
Another wy of understanding it is to picture a metal detector. It is designed to emit a signal that gets stronger and stronger the closer one gets to the metal source. That is how it is with us. Our feeling good is the metal dector signal that lifts us and moves us. We have the capacity to generate that as well. And the process of generating that is the process of manifestation that utilizes thought.
This is powerful. This knowledge has been used and abused time and again. A child can be taught that pain is pleasure. Pleasure being the good we are wired as spiritual beings to seek. And so this little creative spirit moves through their life manifesting all the ingrediants of a painful life and can't understand how a "God" could allow them to endure such hardships. They and others around them are focused on the "effect" and they think the effect is the cause. But it is the process of focus that is the cause and since it is in use targeted on the effect it is hard to see - like trying to see your own eyeball. With an outside source it is possibe but try to contort your eye to see itself - impossible. This is why, from time to time, certain answers come to us from something or someone outside us. This is the most powerful lesson as well as the most difficult to get. But once you get it it changes everything.
In her book "Your Invisible Power", Genevieve Behrand says:
"Try to remember that the picture you think, feel, and see is reflected into the Universal Mind, and by the natural law of reciprocal action must return to you in either spiritual or physical form. Knowledge of this law of reciprocal action between the individual and the Universal Mind opens you to free access to all you may wish to posses or to be. It must be steadfastly borne in mind that all this can be true only for the individual who recognizes that he derives his power to make an abiding mental picture from the All-Originating Universal Spirit of Life, and can be used constructively only so long as it is employed and retained in harmony with the nature of the spirit which originated it. To insure this, there must be no inversion of the thought of the individual regarding his relationship to this Universal Originating Spirit, which is that of a son, through which the parent mind acts and reacts. Thus conditioned, whatever you think and feel yourself to be, the Creative Spirit of Life is bound to faithfully reproduce in a corresponding reaction. This is the great reason for picturing yourself and your affairs the way you wish them to be as existing facts— though invisible to the physical eye—and living in your picture. An honest endeavor to do this, always recognizing that your own mind is a projection of the Originating Spirit, will prove to you that the best there is, is yours in all your ways. "
It is essential to have an understanding of this process in order to then understand the purpose forgiveness holds outside of any religious or metaphysical reference. Which only matters insofar as how you understand it keeps you in the harmonic vibrational relationship between your goog good and the Source. If understanding it religiously is what resonates with you then so be it. If spiritually or metaphysically then so be it. If quantum physically then so be it. Only you are hung up on it. The Universal Mind isn't. It is always in connection to you and giving you what you are imaging.
Thoughts, the mental images that are in your head are for giving to the "Thinking Stuff, the Universal Mind, God, the Sub-Consciousness." This is the realationship between you and "The Father-Mother God". When you get an image stuck in that process, as it happens with traumatic or ecstatic images, they get sent and re-sent over and over. This inturn ends up with a repetition of the same experience over and over and over - abusive relationships, crappy apartments, faulty this or faulty that. OR - in caps for emphasis - beautiful, loving relationships, amazing apartments in wonderful neighborhoods, happy this and exciting that..
Forgiveness fulfills an essential function. It takes the image we have been holding and lets it go and frees us up to create another image. That is our task as spiritual beings having spiritual experiences - to create images of experiences we can feel love about. We are here to feel love. To express love. Now don't get all weird on me. But go now and look on creation and tell it how much you love it - and watch the response that returns...