ACIM Chapter 13. I. Guiltlessness and Invulnerability, P 1-3

ACIM Chapter 13. I. Guiltlessness and Invulnerability, P 1-3

I. Guiltlessness and Invulnerability, P 1

1 Earlier, I said that the Holy Spirit shares the goal of all good teachers, whose ultimate aim is to make themselves unnecessary by teaching their pupils all they know. The Holy Spirit wants only this, for sharing the Father’s Love for His Son, He seeks to remove all guilt from his mind that he may remember his Father in peace. Peace and guilt are antithetical, and the Father can be remembered only in peace. Love and guilt cannot coexist, and to accept one is to deny the other. Guilt hides Christ from your sight, for it is the denial of the blamelessness of God’s Son.

This paragraph tells us some very important things. The most important to me is that the Holy Spirit wants to remove all guilt from our minds. Thank God that I don’t have to do that by myself. By myself means with ego. No decision made alone has power, so we make all decisions with either ego or the Holy Spirit. Those are our only two choices. If I try to rid myself of guilt with the ego’s assistance, I will fail.

When I asked the ego how to get rid of guilt, I was told to deny it or to project it. I see that neither of these two suggestions works. When my daughter was pregnant with her first child, she expressed her fear of not being able to be a good mother to a newborn. She just doesn’t know how. I reassured her, but I noticed fear rising in me. When I looked at that fear, I saw that it was really guilt. It was guilt for not doing a better job with my own first child.

I thought that guilt was gone, but it had been merely repressed.

I had pushed it down so deeply that I could not see it anymore until then when it was triggered by my daughter’s fear. This is the best the ego has to offer when it comes to fear and guilt, temporary repression. Then, I looked at it again, and this time, I asked the Holy Spirit to look at me and remove the guilt from my mind.

It is absolutely essential that the guilt be undone, not just for this one situation, but the belief in guilt itself must be undone. I am not just innocent of my errors with my firstborn, but I am innocent. I am innocence itself, and so is everything created by God. If I start trying to justify my behavior, I will find circumstances that cannot be justified. But if I know that guilt is an illusion and that innocence is reality, then no justification is needed. In fact, the idea of justification is seen as part of the illusion of guilt and has no place in the innocent mind of the Son.

The peace of God is everything I want, and I cannot have the peace of God and keep the idea of guilt. I cannot have love and guilt. I must choose. This is the fact that I must accept if I am to be free. Once accepted, the thing I must do is release the belief in guilt to the Holy Spirit so that my innocence will be restored to my awareness.

I. Guiltlessness and Invulnerability, P 2

2 In the strange world that you have made the Son of God has sinned. How could you see him, then? By making him invisible, the world of retribution rose in the black cloud of guilt that you accepted, and you hold it dear. For the blamelessness of Christ is the proof that the ego never was, and can never be. Without guilt the ego has no life, and God’s Son is without guilt.

There is no guilt in God’s Son. Without guilt, there is no ego. When I believe in guilt, I cannot see God’s Son. Instead, I see sin and guilt and the need for retribution. When I allow the idea of guilt to be undone in my mind, the ego falls away, and I experience what is commonly called an awakening. I no longer dream about sin, guilt, pain, suffering, and punishment. I am no longer dreaming about retribution and death. There is no longer a dream of separation. I am awake to the truth, and I see everything and everyone in its purity. I see everyone as part of my Self.

What do I have to do to undo the ego and regain the memory of innocence and oneness?

I must desire this above all things I currently believe. This is achieved by looking at what I believe now and deciding for God instead. I begin it by recognizing guilt in all its forms. I feel guilty if I don’t love someone completely, if I judge, if I gossip, or am angry. Even if I don’t feel like I am guilty, there is a place in my mind that remembers the truth, and so there is unconscious guilt. The source of all forms of guilt is the belief that I have betrayed God.

Guilt often shows up as a projection. I project the guilt I think is mine onto others. That is the purpose of others, as they are someplace to put my guilt, someone I can point to in my fear of God and say, “There is the guilty one. Don’t look at me, look at them.” No matter how justified I might feel about seeing the guilt in someone, the guilt belongs to me because I saw it first in my mind. Then, I projected it outward. Thus, being in my mind, it is in my mind that it must be undone. We make up the most elaborate and convincing stories to justify our projections of guilt, but that doesn’t make them true.

Another way this shows up is in our situations.

We think that something shouldn’t be happening. It is too scary or too sad. We lose our job, or someone we love dies, and we think it is not fair. Jesus said that we should beware of the desire to see ourselves unfairly treated because it is just another form of guilt. The world is guilty of being what it is, and I must be guilty, or I wouldn’t be its victim. Learning to spot the belief in guilt is necessary so that we can change our minds and let the Holy Spirit heal us.

I. Guiltlessness and Invulnerability, P 3

3 As you look upon yourself and judge what you do honestly, you may be tempted to wonder how you can be guiltless. Yet consider this: You are not guiltless in time, but in eternity. You have “sinned” in the past, but there is no past. Always has no direction. Time seems to go in one direction, but when you reach its end it will roll up like a long carpet spread along the past behind you, and will disappear. As long as you believe the Son of God is guilty you will walk along this carpet, believing that it leads to death. And the journey will seem long and cruel and senseless, for so it is.

First, let me say that I appreciate that Jesus explains that we are not guiltless in time but in eternity. I have made many poor choices, of which I am guilty in this story of Myron. But in eternity, where I truly exist, I am guiltless. Guilt from time does not affect the eternal self.

This idea of timelessness is hard for me to understand. I am so mired in time that I cannot really imagine timelessness, even though Jesus assures me that this is the truth. The idea of the carpet is really helpful. As long as I believe in guilt, I walk along this imaginary carpet of time, believing that it is leading me to death. When I let go of the belief in guilt, the carpet of time rolls up and disappears. Forgiveness of guilt is simple. I look at it with the Holy Spirit without judgment. If I am looking without judgment, I am looking with the Holy Spirit because the ego always judges. If I look at it with the Holy Spirit, it is forgiven and healed.

I am on this seemingly endless journey through time, and time doesn’t even exist.

My mind boggles when I think of it this way. What is really helpful is that I am given a way for the journey through time to end, even if I don’t fully understand or accept timelessness. I let go of the belief in guilt, and it is done. The ego insists on guilt and justifies this insistence by pointing out all the evil that I have done, and others have done.

The Holy Spirit answers that idea with the assurance that what happened in the past does not exist because the past does not exist. If I hurt someone in this instant, a breath later, less than a breath later, that action is past, and it is no more. I can keep the error real only if I insist that guilt is real. When I insist that guilt is real, I insist that time is also real because I cannot have one without the other. I let go of guilt, and time goes with it, and I have only eternity. In eternity, there is only innocence.

One day at work, I was absolutely sure my boss was upset with me. I worried and fretted over it. I projected my feelings onto him, certain he was guilty of treating me unfairly and responsible for my upset. This story was built up to monumental proportions and occupied my mind all day. I alternately felt guilty and then saw him as the guilty party. I was miserable.

Then, I heard something that made me realize that I was completely wrong.

My boss wasn’t upset with me at all. The entire scenario came from a misunderstood remark and was meaningless. It had no reality at all. While I was focused on the false belief, that was all I could see or imagine. When I accepted it was false, it disappeared. Right now, I have a memory of it happening, but I couldn’t tell you anything about the details. It folded up like that carpet of time and disappeared because I lost interest in it.

If we keep staring at our guilt, nourishing it with our belief and our attention, it will remain as if true, and it will drag us through misery, pain, and ultimately, to death. If, on the other hand, we become aware of our guilty thoughts without judging them, they are forgiven. Then, like my story of the angry boss, they will roll up and disappear. Eternity is our home, not time. Eternity is the guiltless moment in which we exist until we change our minds and return to guilt.

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