The ultimate purpose of projection is always to get rid of guilt. Yet, characteristically, the ego attempts to get rid of guilt from its viewpoint only, for much as the ego wants to retain guilt you find it intolerable, since guilt stands in the way of your remembering God, Whose pull is so strong that you cannot resist it. On this issue, then, the deepest split of all occurs, for if you are to retain guilt, as the ego insists, you cannot be you. Only by persuading you that it is you could the ego possibly induce you to project guilt, and thereby keep it in your mind.
Yet consider how strange a solution the ego’s arrangement is. You project guilt to get rid of it, but you are actually merely concealing it. You do experience the guilt, but you have no idea why. On the contrary, you associate it with a weird assortment of “ego ideals,” which the ego claims you have failed. Yet you have no idea that you are failing the Son of God by seeing him as guilty. Believing you are no longer you, you do not realize that you are failing yourself. (A Course in Miracles, T-13.II.1-2. See also ACIM Text Made Simple.)
When we believe we are a body with a unique identity, we are believing we are not our Self. We have disowned our true Self and chosen instead to believe we are a made up identity. This belief must be carefully defended because if we let it go, it will seem to be our death. This belief has made us unaware of the eternal Self God created one with Him.
Identifying with a separate self image brings with it intense guilt because it believes it has attacked God, our Source. It is this deep-seated guilt that is intolerable. It must be hidden to protect what we believe we are. This is the purpose of projection — to convince ourselves that the guilt is in others, not ourselves. Yet the source of the projection remains in our mind, retaining the guilt by hiding it from our awareness.
The antidote for this cycle of guilt and projection is to offer all our projections to the Holy Spirit for His reinterpretation. With this practice, the Holy Spirit will teach us to recognize the truth of our oneness in Love that has been hidden by the projected guilt. We will learn to see that only Love’s innocence is real.
We are not separate but one Self in the unity of Love. This Self is eternal and cannot die. The “death” of the ego’s substitute self image is simply the recognition that this substitute is not real. It is impossible that our true Self could ever be anything but eternal Love. The release of the false self image awakens us to the memory of our oneness in God.
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