ACIM Workbook 4. What Is Sin?

4. What Is Sin? 1. Sin is insanity. ²It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth.

4. What Is Sin?

1. Sin is insanity. ²It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. ³And being mad, it sees illusions where the truth should be, and where it really is. ⁴Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold? ⁵What need have they of sights or sounds or touch? ⁶What would they hear or reach to grasp? ⁷What would they sense at all? ⁸To sense is not to know. ⁹And truth can be but filled with knowledge, and with nothing else.

Right off, Jesus tells us that we are all nuts. Haha.

If we believe in sin, and we do, or we wouldn’t be here, our mind has been driven mad as it looks for illusions to take the place of the truth. I see that this is true. We deliberately choose to dream rather than to live and choose to dream of pain and suffering. Then, we dream of death. Here is a simple example of choosing pain and suffering. Suppose you are not sure that you have enough money to last until you get paid. You have two choices.

You can worry about it and tell yourself scary stories about what might happen. In this case, you are choosing to suffer, or you can see if there is a way to avoid the potential problem and do that. Either way, you can be happy in the moment because right then, there is not a problem. This choice keeps you in peace. Now, think of how often you choose to suffer and how unnecessary it was that you did so. No amount of worry ever solved a problem and only caused misery.

Just the very fact that we made a body for the sensory feedback it provides doesn’t make sense.

Let’s consider touch. We use it as we reach out to discover the texture of the material that does not exist. Or taste allows us to discover if we like something that is in our mouth as if we actually had a body with a mouth. Supposedly, our eyes show us what there is to see. It is becoming clear that the body’s senses were made to help us believe our story of being a body, which makes the illusion of separation believable.

I see that each time I choose to see someone as guilty, I am using the belief in sin to deny the truth and to convince myself that my preferred illusion is what I want instead of my reality. Does that sound crazy? Yep, I think so. In truth, we are the innocent Sons of God. How could we become something God did not create? It could only be an illusion.

2. These related distortions represent a picture of what actually occurred in the separation, or the “detour into fear.” (ACIM, T-2.I.2:1)

How we have been wrong about sin! We decided that our game of separation was real, and we were guilty of it. Jesus refers to it as the detour into fear. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines detour: a deviation from a direct course or the usual procedure especially : a roundabout way temporarily replacing part of a route. Guilt is a deviation, not an intention. Our guilt was such that we even established religions devoted to guilt and invented rules when broken would be sins.  And yet, it is not true at all, just a deviation from our intended purpose.

2. The body is the instrument the mind made in its efforts to deceive itself.

²Its purpose is to strive. ³Yet can the goal of striving change. ⁴And now the body serves a different aim for striving. ⁵What it seeks for now is chosen by the aim the mind has taken as replacement for the goal of self-deception. ⁶Truth can be its aim as well as lies. ⁷The senses then will seek instead for witnesses to what is true.

In making a body, we would convince ourselves our error was a sin and deserving of punishment. Everything about the body proves that we are not what we are. We are eternal formless Love. The body seems to prove otherwise and, in so doing, seems to mock God. No wonder we have so much unconscious guilt.

But the Bible says that God will not be mocked, so we have actually done nothing, proving our sinlessness. It is a game we play, a game of striving. For a long time now, we have strived to make this virtual world work in our favor, but many of us, and eventually all of us, have changed the purpose of the striving. Now we strive to return our minds to sanity and remember who we are.

We were very clever in the making of the body if deception was our goal.

The body was made for this deception to convince us that we don’t know and that the body can help us discover what we don’t know. The Holy Spirit has a different use for the body. Truth can be its aim now as we use the senses to seek witnesses to what is true. The Holy Spirit makes use of all we make to dream. He uses it to awaken us.

Here is an example. When I was at the doctor’s office, I thought his nurse was brusque almost to rudeness. I realized I was judging her and thus distancing myself from her. Immediately, I lost the lovely sense of peace that is usually always here these days. So, I looked at my judgment with the Holy Spirit, and He healed my mind.

This miracle of healing always leaves me in awe and gratitude. After this brief moment of healing, I saw a confused Son of God, asleep and dreaming of suffering. I know how that feels and wanted only to give the love that was being called for.

3. Sin is the home of all illusions, which but stand for things imagined, issuing from thoughts that are untrue.

 ²They are the “proof” that what has no reality is real. ³Sin “proves” God’s Son is evil; timelessness must have an end; eternal life must die. ⁴And God Himself has lost the Son He loves, with but corruption to complete Himself, His Will forever overcome by death, love slain by hate, and peace to be no more.

Jesus tells us in a few strong words why we have guilt and why we want to wake up. Believing in sin and imagining that sin is real seems to undo reality. It seems to prove that God’s Son is evil and that we have undone God Himself. As I contemplate this, I recognize how I do this. Each time I use the body’s senses and emotions to prove that someone is guilty of abandoning or rejecting me, I prove how vulnerable I am. I prove I can be hurt and that my brother who must be separate from me is capable of hurting me. Did God create me weak and vulnerable, or did I undo God’s creation?

Either way, it is a frightening idea.

I suppose the fear of discovering the answer is so strong that I would rather try to find a way to navigate my dream world that is less painful than to try to awaken from it. If my fear of God has any truth, I would not be willing to take the chance of discovering it is so. There doesn’t seem to be any way out of this nightmare, so I continue to look outward for proof that my brother is guilty and I am just the innocent victim.

4. A madman’s dreams are frightening, and sin appears indeed to terrify.

²And yet what sin perceives is but a childish game. ³The Son of God may play he has become a body, prey to evil and to guilt, with but a little life that ends in death. ⁴But all the while his Father shines on him, and loves him with an everlasting Love which his pretenses cannot change at all.

We will, of course, succeed. We must succeed because nothing has actually happened. God’s love has not ceased to be, and how can we outrun His love? How could anything harm what God loves? So why is it that if we are loved and safe, this last paragraph pleads with us to end the game? We stubbornly cling to what we have made despite the cost, which is high, indeed.

5. How long, O Son of God, will you maintain the game of sin?

²Shall we not put away these sharp-edged children’s toys? ³How soon will you be ready to come home? ⁴Perhaps today? ⁵There is no sin. ⁶Creation is unchanged. ⁷Would you still hold return to Heaven back? ⁸How long, O holy Son of God, how long?

Ah! There is a way out of the maze of sin and guilt that ultimately ends in death only to be repeated over and over. As I continue to release the belief in sin everywhere I imagine I see it, my mind begins to clear. I start to see what these fearful images have obscured. I glimpse my reality and discover to my happy amazement, that everyone else is as brilliantly beautiful as am I.

Doesn’t this make more sense than what we believed before, that God could have created us badly or that we have the power to change creation? The process of forgiving our illusions and letting them go convince us that there is no sin and creation remains unchanged. Now each time I become so confused that I look for proof of sin, I remember this refrain: How long, O Son of God, will you maintain the game of sin? Not a minute more!

Jesus has told us that what we believe is true for us.

He has acknowledged that illusions or not, we suffer in our belief in them. This is why we want to end the dream. It is a dream of suffering. Let us turn our striving toward the truth that there is no sin and no reason to continue to believe in it. Or better yet, let us just drop the pretense. Perhaps today?

Regina’s Tips

If one reads this special theme with the judgmental mind of the ego, one might perceive that s/he is a sinner because s/he experiences a body. That is not what this lesson intends to teach.

Pretend like you had never heard the word “sin” before. This is the first time the sound of s—i—n has ever reached your ears. Someone uses that word, and you ask, “What is ‘sin’?” The answer is, “Sin is insanity.”

“Oh,” you say, because you know what insanity is. And as the person continues to talk using the word “sin,” your mind naturally substitutes “insanity” every time “sin” is heard.

Therefore, you hear, “Insanity is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where the truth should be, and where it really is. Insanity gave the body eyes, for what is there the lucid would behold? …”

Or said another way, the perceived world is not true. Those who choose to believe it without questioning it are deluded. Anyone who has awakened to truth, and therefore knows the unreality of the world, has no interest in it. They are drawn only to reality.

My Thoughts

In NTI, instead of the word insanity, ignorance is used. It says this:

“To listen to these thoughts and believe them is ignorance, for you are listening to what is not true, but believing what you hear. Any action you take based on these thoughts is ignorant action, for it is action based on untruth in an unreal world.

Ignorance is not guilt. It is a call for knowledge. It is the Holy Spirit that leads you through corrected perception to the right-knowledge that you seek. Right-knowledge is true knowledge, and true knowledge is the knowledge of truth.”

I like this explanation better because it moves us even further from the idea of guilt. If we look at our errors as simply ignorance rather than seeing them as proof of guilt, we will achieve our purpose much faster and with less suffering. This is what I mostly do. The ego is determined to find guilt and will do so in the smallest of errors.

Contemplation 2025