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Goodby Guilt

Remember the story in the Bible about the people who wanted to stone the prostitute? Jesus said that the one who was free of sin should cast the first stone. He knew that the prostitute was safe because no one there would have a clear conscience. He knew this because the desire to blame and condemn others comes from our desire to project our own guilt outside of ourselves.

We feel guilty and we don?t like that feeling so we try to get rid of it. We find someone else to blame, to shame, to condemn. What an awful cycle we have going. We have chosen to see our mistakes as sin, and so ourselves as evil when we make these mistakes. We spend our lives hiding from these sins by making someone else guilty.

Guilt, doubt, self recrimination, these are the chains that hold us to our smallest self. Who has not made errors; drank too much, ate too much, spent too much money, spoken harshly, any one of hundreds of errors on a daily basis? What are we supposed to do with these errors? Are we to allow them to bury us, for certainly they will if we accept them as the truth of who we are?  Am I a glutton because I ate too much? Am I a bad person because I spoke harshly when I could have offered comfort instead? Or are these just actions I took?

I will not be defined by my actions. I am the perfect creation of a perfect God. I will not hide the truth of myself behind mistaken actions. I have a choice. I don?t have to look at anything I?ve ever done as a defining moment. I can see these moments as simple learning opportunities.

What am I learning? I am learning to see myself as a creation of an awesome God. I am removing from my life all the mistaken thoughts that block my awareness of my true nature. As I do this, my actions begin to mirror my newly remembered truth. I begin, more and more, to act like the person I was created to be. This is easy to say, but we have not had a lot of practice thinking this way and most of us don?t know how to do it. We need a guide; someone to show us the way. Luckily we have a willing and able guide through the Holy Spirit.

Before we can feel comfortable going to the Holy Spirit for help, we have to learn to trust God. We have to trust that He loves us and isn?t angry with us. We have spent our lives hiding out from God thinking that He has been angry with us since Adam and Eve, and that every bad thing we do just makes it worse. Our only help is God and if we are afraid of Him we have no help, do we? Am I likely to bring my darkest thoughts to God and ask Him to correct them, if I think He is going to condemn and punish me for them?

We have been misinformed when we were told that God is a harsh God. We have also been told that God is Love and that is the truth about Him. It is only our fear that makes us believe anything else. The reason for this fear is that in our minds we have made God look like us instead of the other way around. And we didn?t choose our highest self, the self that in an accurate reflection of our creation, but rather our smallest, meanest self as the mirror in which to see God.

It is time to give God credit for being the Creator. I am not the creator of God. I am not going to see God as harsh, angry and vengeful. These things are not loving and God is Love. I can forget who I am, but God does not forget Who He is.  And, He knows who I am because He created me. He is not deceived by my mistaken beliefs. God is not changed by my thoughts about Him, and neither am I changed by my thoughts about myself. What God creates, remains forever as He created it.

Julia Cameron wrote in Answered Prayers: Love Letters from the Divine, ?My will for you is not harsh or unpleasant. It is gentle and perfectly tailored to your unique needs. Do not fear my direction. I am your heart?s happiest guide.? This is an apt description of what we can expect from the Holy Spirit, the Voice for God within us. Rather than trying to rid ourselves of our guilt by projecting it onto others and onto the world, and even onto God Himself as we have done in the past, we can turn to God with this guilt and let Him reveal to us the truth about ourselves.

We can trust God to love us and to care for us, to bring us comfort and guidance, and never to condemn us. If I know that God loves me, and I know nothing else, I know enough. Instead of trying to hide my sin by seeing it in others, I can give my sin to the Holy Spirit, and let Him show me what to do with it.

He will show me that my error is not who I am; that I simply listened to the wrong voice, and so made a wrong choice. He will remind me that a mistake is not a sin, and that I am still part of God my Father. He will gently remind me that there is another Voice. I can listen to Him instead. It will take practice and patience, but is not a child of God worth patience?

What is most helpful to me is to remember that all errors are just thoughts.  If I am doing something wrong and feel guilty, I want to stop doing it. However, if I haven?t changed the thought that precipitated the action, I will just do it again. As I continue to repeat the action, thinking it is wrong, then the feeling of guilt becomes cemented, and I start to think of myself as bad. I hate the way that feels, so I look around for someplace to put the blame.

The place to make the change is at the level of thought. Changing behavior is a temporary fix at best. When I focus on behavior I am overlooking the cause and nothing is really going to change. No matter how big the error seems, how miserable I have made myself through believing in the error, it is just a thought, and a thought can be changed. Changing the thought and a change in behavior will follow.

So, how do we get into the blame game? This can be observed in any relationship. For example, John wants to buy a new gun and Ann says they can?t afford it right now. John knows this is true, but really wants that gun and convinces himself that it is a deal of a lifetime and buys it anyway. Then he feels guilty about going behind Ann?s back and about spending money he couldn?t afford.

John is pretty uncomfortable with this feeling so he starts thinking that Ann always buys what she wants. She?s always telling him how to spend the money. She?s always bossing him around. If she showed him some respect sometimes, he wouldn?t have to do things like this. He feels like he was pushed into an untenable situation by Ann?s unreasonable attitude. That Ann is so guilty, and John is now just her hapless victim.

If John wants to stop this vicious cycle he will have to change his mind about making Ann guilty. Sometimes it can be hard to withdraw the blame, especially if you have spent a lot of time building a case against the other person. Sometimes all you can think of is the seemingly obvious fact that they really did this to you.

What I have found true, is that I don?t want anyone to be guilty. I don?t want to be guilty, and I don?t want the other person to be guilty. If I believe in your guilt, then I have made it clear that guilt is a real thing and so I can be guilty, too. We are one, you and I, and if you are guilty then I am guilty. I want to move completely out of the guilt story.

Once John decides to withdraw the blame he had projected onto Ann, he wonders what to do with the guilt. Surely someone has to be guilty, right? And if it is not Ann, it must be him. At first, this part can be painful because there is a temptation is to internalize the guilt.  But that was the old way of thinking. This is the time to stop bouncing the guilt around and to completely undo it.

Now John is learning that finding and placing guilt is not helpful. If a mistake was made, it is only further error to move into guilt. Jesus has taught us that the way to undo guilt is through forgiveness and love. Even at the crucifixion, having been publicly beaten and nailed to a cross, Jesus continued his mission of showing us how to live. Did he take this moment to condemn and blame? No, he forgave. He was showing us that forgiveness is the proper response to whatever seems to be happening.

And he didn?t try to move the guilt to someone else. He didn?t say that if only the apostles had stayed awake in the garden with him, he?d never been captured so it must be their fault. He didn?t say that if Judas had not betrayed him he wouldn?t be up here. He did not try to accept the blame himself by saying if only he had not been so openly defiant of the authorities. Blame did not enter into this at all. His response was forgiveness which saw no blame in anyone.

Forgiveness is love and love is forgiveness. Jesus taught me that my only response to error of any kind is forgiveness and love. Our friend, John, could have blown the whole blame and guilt story out of the water if he had recognized his own innate goodness, and then seen his actions as errors rather than sin. This would have placed him in the position of choosing differently rather than using projection to protect himself from the intolerable burden of guilt.

If he was confused about this, it was only because he forgot what God is, and so forgot what he is. When he remembers that God is love, he will be able to see that thoughts of blame, anger, fear, and guilt cannot be coming from God, because they are not love. If they are not coming from God, they are not true, and call only for correction. Correction will never be blame and guilt, but will always be love and forgiveness. Life is just a series of thoughts brought into action. Change your thought, and your life changes. Bring your thoughts into alignment with your true nature, which is love, and your life will reflect the Will of God. Goodbye guilt, blame and condemnation.

© 2006, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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