ACIM Chapter 14. III. The Decision for Guiltlessness P 12-14

ACIM Chapter 14. III. The Decision for Guiltlessness P 12-14

Photo by John Gardiner of Whangarei, New Zealand 

III. The Decision for Guiltlessness P 12-14

12. Would you deny the truth of God’s decision, and place your pitiful appraisal of yourself in place of His calm and unswerving value of His Son? ²Nothing can shake God’s conviction of the perfect purity of everything that He created, for it is wholly pure. ³Do not decide against it, for being of Him it must be true. ⁴Peace abides in every mind that quietly accepts the plan God set for its Atonement, relinquishing its own. ⁵You know not of salvation, for you do not understand it. ⁶Make no decisions about what it is or where it lies, but ask the Holy Spirit everything, and leave all decisions to His gentle counsel.

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13. The One Who knows the plan of God that God would have you follow can teach you what it is. ²Only His wisdom is capable of guiding you to follow it. ³Every decision you undertake alone but signifies that you would define what salvation is, and what you would be saved from. ⁴The Holy Spirit knows that all salvation is escape from guilt. ⁵You have no other “enemy,” and against this strange distortion of the purity of the Son of God the Holy Spirit is your only Friend. ⁶He is the strong protector of the innocence that sets you free. ⁷And it is His decision to undo everything that would obscure your innocence from your unclouded mind.

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14. Let Him, therefore, be the only Guide that you would follow to salvation. ²He knows the way, and leads you gladly on it. ³With Him you will not fail to learn that what God wills for you is your will. ⁴Without His guidance you will think you know alone, and will decide against your peace as surely as you decided that salvation lay in you alone. ⁵Salvation is of Him to Whom God gave it for you. ⁶He has not forgotten it. ⁷Forget Him not and He will make every decision for you, for your salvation and the peace of God in you. (ACIM, T-14.III.12:1–14:7)

Do you want salvation?

I know that I do. That is why I study and practice the Course. I want to be saved from my mistaken beliefs because that is the only problem I have. It is my beliefs that hurt me and nothing else. Jesus reassures us that we have not changed creation, that we are still as God created us. In many different ways, he tells us that our Identity is safe, that creation cannot be affected by dreams. Here is one of my favorite passages.

 The miracle establishes you dream a dream, and that its content is not true. ²This is a crucial step in dealing with illusions. ³No one is afraid of them when he perceives he made them up. ⁴The fear was held in place because he did not see that he was author of the dream, and not a figure in the dream. (ACIM, T-28.II.7:1-4)

We are dreaming a dream, and the content is not true. As I come to accept this as truth, I stop resisting my own salvation. I wrote a script in which I would play victim and sometimes savior, but I am the holy Son of God dreaming a dream I chose. In my confusion that I am, instead, the dream, I became afraid of my Creator, whom I think I rejected. In my fear, I avoid my salvation.

Jesus wants us to know that we are deeply loved by our Father who knows our value. He knows we are perfect because everything He creates is perfect and is eternally as it was created. Each time we give way to the ego’s belief in guilt, we deny the perfection of God’s creations, but we do not change it. We are simply learning to deny the ego and so accept what has always been true.

There is nothing wrong with us.

We are just identifying with the dream character rather than our true Self. Since our true Self is perfect, we need do nothing about it. We just need to wake up. I’ve also come to understand that each seemingly separate part of myself is innocent regardless of what the dream says about them. If I see them, any of them, as guilty, I will be unable to believe in my own innocence.

I believe everything I read in these three paragraphs and everything I just wrote about it. And yet, I was just minutes ago judging people I read about in the news. I was judging like crazy, and that is what alerted me to an ego incursion into my thinking. Because the judgment was so extreme, it shook me out of my stupor. I asked the Holy Spirit to make my decisions about this situation and all other situations that showed up for me to look at. And thank goodness I am not left with only my ego to make decisions, or I would still be suffering. Accepting the Holy Spirit’s guidance, I went from distress to peace in a single moment.

I used to feel so guilty about the errors that I tried to hide them from the Holy Spirit.

This is so absurd that I can only laugh at myself now. The Holy Spirit is in my mind; for me to hide something from Him, I would have to hide it from myself. And honestly, sometimes that’s what I would do. I would push my errors down and pretend I didn’t know about them, or project them onto others and pretend they were the guilty culprits. It never really worked, but now I can’t even pretend it does, and for that, I am grateful. Something hidden cannot be healed.

When I was still hiding from my supposed ‘sins,’ I thought they kept God from loving me, and even the words in the Course couldn’t convince me I was forgiven and loved by my Creator. But when I was finally able to absorb what Jesus is telling us, I forgave myself, and then I was able to accept that God didn’t forgive me because He never condemned me. I am safe in His Love and His gentle Care.

I will probably forget who I assigned as my Decision Maker, and fall into the same unhelpful choice for the ego, but I will never again do it unconsciously. Because I have seen the effects of my choices, I will recognize my error more quickly and make the better choice more quickly. I choose the Holy Spirit as my Decision Maker. This is how we learn.