ACIM Chapter 14. III. The Decision for Guiltlessness P 6, 7
III. The Decision for Guiltlessness P 6, 7
6. No penalty is ever asked of God’s Son except by himself and of himself. ²Every chance given him to heal is another opportunity to replace darkness with light and fear with love. ³If he refuses it he binds himself to darkness, because he did not choose to free his brother and enter light with him. ⁴By giving power to nothing, he throws away the joyous opportunity to learn that nothing has no power. ⁵And by not dispelling darkness, he became afraid of darkness and of light. ⁶The joy of learning that darkness has no power over the Son of God is the happy lesson the Holy Spirit teaches, and would have you teach with Him. ⁷It is His joy to teach it, as it will be yours.
7. The way to teach this simple lesson is merely this: Guiltlessness is invulnerability. ²Therefore, make your invulnerability manifest to everyone. ³Teach him that, whatever he may try to do to you, your perfect freedom from the belief that you can be harmed shows him that he is guiltless. ⁴He can do nothing that can hurt you, and by refusing to allow him to think he can, you teach him that the Atonement, which you have accepted for yourself, is also his. ⁵There is nothing to forgive. ⁶No one can hurt the Son of God. ⁷His guilt is wholly without cause, and being without cause, cannot exist.
What if someone really does hurt me?
If I think that someone has hurt me, I look at that false perception with the Holy Spirit so He can dispel it. In so doing, I am relieving myself of the belief that I am vulnerable. I am also relieving him of the belief that he is guilty. I am not doing this to him, but within my own mind, where guilt was first accepted. This can be a touch-and-go process. Sometimes, I tell myself that I have relieved us both of the belief in guilt, only to say or do something that lets him know he had hurt me. Clearly, I still like the idea of guiltlessness as it applies to me, but I want to retain the belief in guilt in case I need to make someone else guilty.
But eventually, I do realize that this is not going to work. If I believe in guilt, I will apply it to myself. And applying it to someone else was equally destructive. In the Workbook, Jesus says this: ⁷I am incomplete without your part in me. (ACIM, W-rV.in.8:7) I think this must be true for all of us. We are incomplete without all of us. This is a compelling reason to forgive the belief in guilt. That belief will always keep us separatep us separate.
Whether I think your guilt keeps you separate from me or that my belief that I am guilty keeps me separate from you, we are still not whole. So, if that desire to let you know that you hurt me pulls at me, I know what to do with it. Later in this chapter, Jesus will tell us to look at our perceptions with the Holy Spirit. ⁹He holds the light, and you the darkness. ¹⁰They cannot coexist when both of You together look on them. ¹¹His judgment must prevail, and He will give it to you as you join your perception to His. (ACIM, T-14.VII.6:9-11) This is how I undo the belief that I need and want guilt.
I would not bind myself to the darkness, so I must also free my brother.
I do this gladly. On occasion, I will hear about something so cruel, so unkind, that I will lose my way for a while. What redeems me is the realization that darkness has no cause. We learned in Lesson 13 that darkness has no cause — and what has no cause has no power. What seems to happen here is nothing because it has no cause. If it is not of God, it does not exist except in dreams.
This is not about behavior, about being nice. It is about withdrawing belief from the one idea that keeps the dream alive: that guilt is useful.
We may dream, but we are not the dream. God did not create guilt, so we cannot, in reality, be guilty. And really, who cares what happened in a dream once he awakens? Let us learn the happy lesson the Holy Spirit would teach and then teach it ourselves. Darkness has no power over us! Let us awaken from the dream of separation so that we can help our brothers do the same.
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