ACIM Chapter 13. X. Release from Guilt, P 1, 2
ACIM Chapter 13. X. Release from Guilt, P 1, 2
X. Release from Guilt, P 1
1 You are accustomed to the notion that the mind can see the source of pain where it is not. The doubtful service of such displacement is to hide the real source of guilt, and keep from your awareness the full perception that it is insane. Displacement always is maintained by the illusion that the source of guilt, from which attention is diverted, must be true; and must be fearful, or you would not have displaced the guilt onto what you believed to be less fearful. You are therefore willing to look upon all kinds of “sources,” provided they are not the deeper source to which they bear no real relationship at all.
The entire purpose of A Course in Miracles is to convince us that we have nothing to fear and no reason to be guilty. Everything he tells us leads us to this conclusion. It is painful to live in fear and guilt. This disrupts our relationships and drives us to build defenses and to attack aspects of ourselves. It drives some fully insane and others to suicide. For most of us, we are simply left in uncertainty and doubt; we suffer, and then we die. And it is completely wrong, completely untrue. Fear and guilt do not exist except as an illusion. What we are cannot be afraid or guilty.
Up to now, our solution to fear and guilt has been to displace it.
We try to throw it out of our minds, and it appears as stories in our lives. I hear many of them from students and friends. My son is hurting himself. My daughter is marrying a tyrant. Or my boss will fire me so he can put his friend in my place, and I will lose my home. I was diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer. There are so many fearful stories within the mind, and all of them are simply representations of the completely unnecessary fear and guilt of abandoning God.
It seems like salvation to us, this displacement. It feels terrifying to face the fear and guilt within ourselves, so we make up images that express the fear and guilt, and then we project them outward where we can pretend that they have nothing to do with us. Yes, we suffer in the stories, but we are also victims, and victimization and suffering seem preferable to responsibility, preferable to facing the fear and guilt where it exists – in our own mind.
As long as we can convince ourselves that the fear is out there, then there is always the hope that we can help that errant child, that we will find another job, that the cancer will be cured, and then we will be saved. No more reason for fear… until the next story. And there will always be another story because we have never faced our imagined darkness. We have looked outward instead of inward.
We are like frightened children.
Children who believe that the monster is in the closet or under the bed are so convinced of this that we cannot imagine actually looking there. Only it is worse because we believe the monster is hiding in us, and we dare not look, or we will know for sure that it is there, and there will be no hope for us. There is a way out of this awful cycle of pain and suffering, though.
We can look with the Holy Spirit, showing him our guilt and fear as we see it, and ask Him for another way to see. We can do this with confidence because that is His function and our way Home. The Holy Spirit is a built-in safeguard, placed in our mind for that very reason: that someday we will be finished with this experiment in separation and will need a Guide to bring us Home.
In fact, that is exactly what we are doing here and now. The ego mind is frightened of this journey, but we are no longer entirely identified with the ego. We are ready for this and can learn to make this journey less stressful. I have discovered, myself, that it is possible to detach from the story and thus realize that the story is a mechanism, a concept, not the truth, and so I am more able to see the lesson rather than fear the story itself.
I have also discovered something else.
If I give the mistaken thoughts to the Holy Spirit and just let Him heal me, I go through this without distress. However, if I call on Him and then try to figure out what to do and what it means, then it is much more difficult because I get lost in thought. Complete surrender is best, in my experience. Surrender and trust are my bywords these days. I look at it with the Holy Spirit, and then I walk away, absolutely certain that my help and my struggle are not needed and certain that I know I am being answered.
X. Release from Guilt, P 2
2 Insane ideas have no real relationships, for that is why they are insane. No real relationship can rest on guilt, or even hold one spot of it to mar its purity. For all relationships that guilt has touched are used but to avoid the person and the guilt. What strange relationships you have made for this strange purpose! And you forgot that real relationships are holy, and cannot be used by you at all. They are used only by the Holy Spirit, and it is that which makes them pure. If you displace your guilt upon them, the Holy Spirit cannot use them. For, by pre-empting for your own ends what you should have given Him, He cannot use it for your release. No one who would unite in any way with anyone for his individual salvation will find it in that strange relationship. It is not shared, and so it is not real.
Growing up, I was influenced by my mom’s relationship with my father.
This isn’t unusual, of course, but how this worked for me is so perfect to help me understand what Jesus is telling us in this paragraph. My mom loved my dad, but she also hated him. My father didn’t live up to what she expected of him. He was an alcoholic and, when drunk, was violent. He didn’t always provide for us the way she thought a man should, and that was really upsetting to her. She was very prideful when it came to being able to take care of yourself financially, and she was always concerned about what others would think of her.
When I got old enough to date, she started telling me what kind of man to marry. She talked all the time about marrying someone who would take care of me and who would provide a good living. She said I should marry a doctor or an engineer because someone in that profession would always make enough money. Since, at that time in my life, I was very rebellious and usually did the opposite of what I was told, you would think I would have ignored this. But I guess all those years of being influenced by Mom’s fear of lack added up. I did actually marry an engineer, the first guy I knew who met my mom’s criteria for a safe marriage.
“No one who would unite in any way with anyone for his individual salvation will find it in that strange relationship.”
That was my first husband. I married him for my own individual salvation. My mom believed that salvation lay in being taken care of, and I believed her, so I did the only reasonable thing I could do considering my beliefs. Not that I didn’t like and love this man, but the relationship was built on a false foundation. I didn’t understand any of this at the time or understand my own motives enough to even question my choices. I don’t blame myself or my mom. We were both doing the best we could with what we had to work with at the time.
It is a good learning situation, though. Whether I had a clear understanding of the situation or not, there would have certainly been guilt. We cannot take what we think the other person has without feeling guilt for it. He had what I thought I needed, and I took it. In my mind, he offered little in return. I was not consciously aware of this feeling, but I was uneasy about the relationship because some part of my mind believed I was a thief, and I felt guilty about it. This also left me feeling more unworthy than I was going into the relationship. Though I was a very religious person at the time, it never occurred to me to turn the relationship over to God. I guess I missed Catechism the day they talked about that.
Perhaps if we had been more mature, it would have been different.
We might have made the relationship last longer, maybe even longer enough for us to gain some wisdom. The love was there, but the spiritual foundation was not. I displaced my guilt onto this relationship. I began to see him as the cause of my discontent. At that time in my life, I could not have taken any more blame, nor did I have the spiritual understanding to know the difference between blame and responsibility. So, like most of us do a lot of the time, I refused to look too closely at myself and simply blamed him.
I think nearly all relationships begin as special relationships in which we seek to get our perceived needs met. It is what we know in this world of separate beings with individual needs. But if we are spiritually wise, we can use those relationships to learn differently. We can give the relationship to the Holy Spirit. He will use all its elements to wake us. The challenges that are going to arise in any relationship, will be used to our benefit. It is in this way that the Holy Spirit transforms the special relationship into a holy relationship. If we keep our guilt, they never develop into real relationships. If we give the guilt to the Holy Spirit for purification, we can know what relationships are meant to be.
Check out this excellent relationship course from Pathways of Light: Creating a Spiritual Relationship — Removing the Blocks