ACIM Chapter 13. X. Release from Guilt, P 3, 4

ACIM Chapter 13. X. Release from Guilt, P 3, 4

X. Release from Guilt, P 3

3 In any union with a brother in which you seek to lay your guilt upon him, or share it with him or perceive his own, you will feel guilty. Nor will you find satisfaction and peace with him, because your union with him is not real. You will see guilt in that relationship because you put it there. It is inevitable that those who suffer guilt will attempt to displace it, because they do believe in it. Yet though they suffer, they will not look within and let it go. They cannot know they love, and cannot understand what loving is. Their main concern is to perceive the source of guilt outside themselves, beyond their own control.

If I want to love and feel loved, I must let go of the idea of guilt. Holding onto guilt precludes love. Seeing guilt in someone prevents true union with that one. In fact, seeing guilt outside myself increases my belief that I am guilty. I remind myself frequently how this works. I believe in guilt, and this belief stems from the idea that I separated myself from God.

I don’t want to acknowledge this unconscious guilt, so I project situations in which guilt seems to be caused by something else. Or even I caused it, but it is guilt for something less horrific than the idea that I destroyed God’s Oneness by removing myself from it. Often, I have, in the past, and sometimes now, projected the guilt onto others in the mistaken belief that if I see it outside myself, then it is not in me. I tell myself that I don’t have to do anything about it as long as it is outside of me. It seems to be someone else’s problem.

There is only one way to deal with this self-perpetuating situation.

I must break the cycle by taking responsibility for the guilt I see. As I take responsibility for the guilt I see, The Holy Spirit helps me see differently. This is not hard to do. It is actually very simple. ³It merely looks on devastation, and reminds the mind that what it sees is false. (ACIM, W-pII.13.1:3) I am innocent, and so is everyone else. There! No guilt! God did not create guilt, so guilt does not exist. God created us innocent, and so we are innocent. Again, no guilt!

It only feels difficult because we tend to get involved in the stories that represent the guilt we believe in. The stories seem to prove guilt, but that is backward. The belief in guilt came first, and then the stories are projected outward. Of course, the stories seem to prove guilt. They were made for that purpose.

(L 325: From there, the mind makes up an image of the thing the mind desires, judges valuable, and therefore seeks to find. These images are then projected outward, looked upon, esteemed as real and guarded as one’s own.)

Understanding that guilt was in the mind and then given form as a guilt story, we can then use the story to undo the belief in guilt.

I’ve talked about the relationship problems I had at work before I retired. I kept seeing my boss and my office manager as guilty. They did things that seemed to prove they were guilty. But eventually, I was able to look away from the story and focus on the lesson it presented. I saw that believing in guilt was making everything worse and that, in doing so, I was robbing myself of love and peace.

So, I asked the Holy Spirit to show me another way to see this.

I had to turn it over to Him several times before I was willing to leave it with Him, but eventually, everything changed. I began to see them as innocent, and I began to love them. It was actually amazing to me. The situation I had used to prove their guilt suddenly proved their innocence. As I let go of the idea they were guilty, I felt less guilt within myself. As a result, I learned that guilt is not real.

The stories are helpful in that they show us the effects of our beliefs and offer us the opportunity to ask for correction. But they are not the focal point. The guilt came first, and then a story of that guilt was projected. (L 15: My thoughts are images I have made) It is the belief in guilt itself that we will eventually let go of. And every time we release one of our images, accept that it is just a false image, and allow the Holy Spirit to correct our thoughts, we come closer to letting go of the belief in guilt. One day, we will make only beautiful, peaceful images because there will be no guilt in our minds.

X. Release from Guilt, P 4

4 When you maintain that you are guilty but the source of your guilt lies in the past, you are not looking inward. The past is not in you. Your weird associations to it have no meaning in the present. Yet you let them stand between you and your brothers, with whom you find no real relationships at all. Can you expect to use your brothers as a means to “solve” the past, and still to see them as they really are? Salvation is not found by those who use their brothers to resolve problems that are not there. You wanted not salvation in the past. Would you impose your idle wishes on the present, and hope to find salvation now?

I immediately thought of my oldest daughter. I have memories from her childhood that pop up into my mind that used to cause me extreme distress. For a long time, I tried to somehow make up for my mistakes as a mother, to somehow atone for my sins. And so, I used that relationship as a way to solve the past. And all along, all she has done is love me. And, weirdly, her present love did not seem as meaningful to me as my imagined sins. If I kept maintaining that past relationship with her, I would never have a present relationship with her.

Even as I write this (and I know that what Jesus says is true), I hear the ego mind dredging up old stories and insisting I can’t just pretend they didn’t happen. The ego mind says that they make me guilty and unworthy of her love. This is how the ego maintains the illusion, carrying the past into the present and assuring the future remains the same.

This is the purpose of guilt: to keep the story going by blocking actual relationships.

It stands like an impenetrable wall between our brothers and us, preventing union. There! Separation is assured, and the ego gets to exist in the mind another day. Jesus is helping us to understand it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a simple way out. As Jesus tells us in this paragraph: “You wanted not salvation in the past. Would you impose your idle wishes on the present, and hope to find salvation now?”

I had a strange reaction to this. I don’t know how to express my feelings. I guess I felt silly. All this drama, all the tears and the frustration, the years of guilt and atoning, and Jesus reduces my angst to “idle wishes”? I also felt resistance from the ego mind to this idea. And maybe that is why I felt confused. I had prayed for release from the belief in guilt, and when I was offered that release, I didn’t want it. If Jesus is right that my worry and regret were over idle wishes, then did I waste my life agonizing over my sins? How could something so painful and persistent be reduced to idle wishes? Is this a joke?

And yet, finally, by consistently choosing forgiveness, I began to think of this.

I began to feel a lightening in my mind, a burden lifted, a darkness dissipated. I did accept this extraordinary gift! Now, when I go back to the two sentences, I realize something else. Jesus is saying that in the past, I had an idle wish to be guilty, and guilt precludes salvation, so I had an idle wish to remain outside salvation. Guilt was the way I assured this wish would be granted.

But I came to want salvation. I have experienced separation, and I am through with it. Instead, I want to return to my natural and true state as a divine being. Jesus is just pointing out the obvious to me. If guilt is how I maintained the illusion, then keeping that idle wish in my mind will prevent me from achieving my new goal, which is to awaken from the dream of separation. It is just an idle wish, nothing more, nothing real or strong or immovable, just an idle wish. How could something so insubstantial stop me from accepting salvation?

 Whooo! I’m feeling so light that I might float away!

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