ACIM 5. V. The Ego’s Use of Guilt P 5, 6. The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, the mind heals the body because it has been healed.
ACIM Chapter 5. V. The Ego’s Use of Guilt P 5, 6
V. The Ego’s Use of Guilt, P 5
5 The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, the mind heals the body because it has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness because it cannot conceive of attacking anyone or anything. I said before that illness is a form of magic. It might be better to say that it is a form of magical solution. The ego believes that by punishing itself it will mitigate the punishment of God. Yet even in this it is arrogant. It attributes to God a punishing intent, and then takes this intent as its own prerogative. It tries to usurp all the functions of God as it perceives them, because it recognizes that only total allegiance can be trusted.
This is one of my favorite paragraphs because it clarified my confusion about sickness. When Jesus talks about healing, I wondered if he meant just the healing of the mind. If the body is not real, then maybe he was not interested in healing the body, and so maybe I shouldn’t be either. I hated that thought because when the body is sick, real or not, I feel like I am suffering. Surely, God does not want me to suffer.
All Forms of Suffering Are Healed
I see that, yes, it is the healing of my beliefs, but in that healing, all forms of suffering are healed, including my body. He says here that guilt is the cause of suffering, and when the mind is healed of the belief in guilt, it will be sane. A sane mind does not project pain and suffering. It does not punish itself. It goes on to explain the reason we punish ourselves through sickness. We think we are guilty, so God will punish us. Our magical solution to this is to quickly punish ourselves instead. This only makes it worse because we feel guilty for usurping a function we believe belongs to God.
What a mess we have gotten ourselves into. Here is my solution based on what I am learning through the Course. I notice I am sick, and I realize that I have done this to myself. I must have perceived incorrectly in some way. So, I ask the Holy Spirit to correct my perceptions. Now I wait to see how this is going to unfold. Sometimes I am made aware of the specific perception so that I can see my error. Sometimes I simply receive the healing. I know that I have received the correction because I feel peaceful, and typically the body heals quickly, sometimes instantaneously.
6 V. The Ego’s Use of Guilt, P 6
6 The ego cannot oppose the laws of God any more than you can, but it can interpret them according to what it wants, just as you can. That is why the question, “What do you want?” must be answered. You are answering it every minute and every second, and each moment of decision is a judgment that is anything but ineffectual. Its effects will follow automatically until the decision is changed. Remember, though, that the alternatives themselves are unalterable. The Holy Spirit, like the ego, is a decision. Together they constitute all the alternatives the mind can accept and obey. The Holy Spirit and the ego are the only choices open to you. God created one, and so you cannot eradicate it. You made the other, and so you can. Only what God creates is irreversible and unchangeable. What you made can always be changed because, when you do not think like God, you are not really thinking at all. Delusional ideas are not real thoughts, although you can believe in them. But you are wrong. The function of thought comes from God and is in God. As part of His Thought, you cannot think apart from Him.
What Do I Want?
The question we have to ask ourselves is, “What do I want?” We do not have endless choices, even though it seems we do. Our only choice is to accept reality as it is or to continue to pretend that we can affect reality with our beliefs. We cannot. We can believe in our choices and experience them as if they are real. But we cannot make real what is only an illusion.
All that is really happening is that we decide to use the ego to act out our thoughts about separation. Or we decide to use the Holy Spirit to awaken from separation. That is all that is going on here. We are constantly choosing one or the other, and our life reflects back to us the effects of our choice. Jesus wants us to remember that those are the only two options.
Am I at Peace? Am I Happy?
There is not a third option in which we choose something else or in which we choose nothing. We decide in every moment if we are going to believe the thoughts that align with the thoughts we think with God or if we are going to believe the thoughts that reinforce and continue to build on the idea of separation. I am free to believe anything I want, but my beliefs do not affect the truth.
They do, however, affect my peace of mind. For this reason, I choose to believe only the thoughts I think with God. When I notice that I am believing something else, I change my mind. It is easy to tell when my mind has strayed to ego again. The effects of ego thinking are painful. That’s all I need to know about them. If I am uncertain if I am thinking with God or ego, I just ask myself if I am at peace. Am I happy?