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Study of Text, Chapter 13, I. Guiltlessness and Invulnerability, P 4. 5-18-16

I. Guiltlessness and Invulnerability, P 4

4 The journey the Son of God has set himself is useless indeed, but the journey on which his Father sets him is one of release and joy. The Father is not cruel, and His Son cannot hurt himself. The retaliation that he fears and that he sees will never touch him, for although he believes in it the Holy Spirit knows it is not true. The Holy Spirit stands at the end of time, where you must be because He is with you. He has already undone everything unworthy of the Son of God, for such was His mission, given Him by God. And what God gives has always been.

Journal
Man, this is good news and strange news at the same time. This journey through time is an illusion. We are already at the end of time. We have already been judged innocent. We are already abundant, loved, and safe; we have already overcome sickness, suffering and death. Or did any of it ever, even for an instant, touch us, except in our imaginations?

However, we set ourselves on this quest and so we must think we are on it, and that we must achieve our goal. We were given the Holy Spirit to help us do this. The Holy Spirit is the holder of the truth, and the Undoer of all insane ideas in the mind, and of the ego mind itself. Once we have slain the dragon and saved the day, we will discover we made up the dragon and the day had been saved the moment it was perceived as in danger.

Even though nothing is happening, it must happen because we chose it. In order to extricate ourselves from this dream, we must choose to awaken. That, really, is all there is to it. The desire to continue dreaming is the only dragon in this quest, and awakening the Son from the dream is how we save the day. We do it through forgiveness and acceptance. We surrender our armor and our sword and allow ourselves to be led from our sad little story and into eternity where we reside in the peace of God.

Everything we do toward that purpose is really just an undoing. I imagine it this way. I have awakened to the truth that there is a dream from which to awaken, and so I have turned around on my path and am walking back the way I came. As I do so, all that I have imagined I did is being undone. So I look at what I see there, the judgments and grievances, the sickness and suffering, the fear and the guilt. I ask my Guide to help me let go of these beliefs, and to see they were never the truth, but just stories within my story. I am changing nothing but my mind, but it must be changed.

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Study of Text, Chapter 13:Guiltlessness and Invulnerability, P 3. 5-17-16

I. GUILTLESSNESS AND INVULNERABILITY, P 3
3 As you look upon yourself and judge what you do honestly, you may be tempted to wonder how you can be guiltless. Yet consider this: You are not guiltless in time, but in eternity. You have “sinned” in the past, but there is no past. Always has no direction. Time seems to go in one direction, but when you reach its end it will roll up like a long carpet spread along the past behind you, and will disappear. As long as you believe the Son of God is guilty you will walk along this carpet, believing that it leads to death. And the journey will seem long and cruel and senseless, for so it is.

Journal
This idea of timelessness is hard for me to understand. I am so mired in time, that I cannot really imagine timelessness even though Jesus assures me that this is the truth. The idea of the carpet is really helpful. As long as I believe in guilt, I walk along this imaginary carpet of time, believing that it is leading me to death. When I let go of the belief in guilt, the carpet of time rolls up and disappears.

I am on this endless journey through time and time doesn’t exist. My mind boggles when I think of it this way. What is really helpful is that I am given a way for the journey through time to end even if I don’t fully understand or accept timelessness. I let go of the belief in guilt and it is done. The ego insists on guilt, and justifies this insistence by pointing out all the evil that I have done and others have done.

The Holy Spirit answers that idea with the assurance that what happened in the past does not exist because the past does not exist. If I hurt someone in this instant, a breath later, less than a breath later, that action is past and it is no more. I can keep the error real only if I insist that guilt is real. Insisting that guilt is real, I am insisting that time is real also, because I cannot have one without the other. I let go of guilt and time goes with it and I have only eternity. In eternity there is only innocence.
I had a situation where I was absolutely sure my boss was upset with me. I worried and fretted over it. I projected my feelings onto him, certain he was guilty of treating me unfairly and was responsible for my upset. I built this story up to monumental proportions and it occupied my mind all day long. I alternately felt guilty and then saw him as the guilty party. I was miserable.

Then I heard something that made me realize that I was completely wrong. My boss wasn’t upset with me at all. The entire scenario came from a misunderstood remark and was meaningless. It had no reality at all. While I was focused on the false belief that was all I could see or imagine. When I accepted it was false, it disappeared. Right now I have the memory of it having happened, but I couldn’t tell you anything about the details. It folded up like that carpet of time and disappeared because I lost interest in it.

If we keep staring at our guilt, nourishing it with our belief and our attention, it will remain as if true and it will drag us through misery, pain and to death. If, on the other hand, we notice the guilty thoughts and feelings, remember that guilt can never be true no matter what the appearance, the Holy Spirit will heal our mind. Then, like my story of the angry boss, it will roll up and disappear. Eternity is our home, not time. Eternity is the guiltless moment in which we exist until we change our mind and return to guilt.

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Study of Text, Chapter 13:Guiltlessness and Invulnerability, P 2. 5-16-16

I. Guiltlessness and Invulnerability, P 2

2 In the strange world that you have made the Son of God has sinned. How could you see him, then? By making him invisible, the world of retribution rose in the black cloud of guilt that you accepted, and you hold it dear. For the blamelessness of Christ is the proof that the ego never was, and can never be. Without guilt the ego has no life, and God’s Son is without guilt.


Journal
There is no guilt in God’s Son. Without guilt there is no ego. When I believe in guilt, I cannot see God’s Son. What I see instead is sin and guilt, and the need for retribution. When I allow the idea of guilt to be undone in my mind, the ego falls away and I experience what is commonly called an awakening. I am no longer dreaming about sin and guilt, pain, suffering and punishment. I am no longer dreaming about retribution and death. I am no longer dreaming about separation. I am awake to the truth and I see everything and everyone in its purity. I see everyone as part of my self.

What do I have to do to undo the ego and regain the memory of innocence and oneness? I must desire this above all things I currently believe. I am achieving this as I look at what I believe now and decide for God instead. I begin it by recognizing guilt in all its forms. I feel guilty if I don’t love someone completely, if I judge, if I gossip or am angry. Even if I don’t feel like I am guilty, there is a place in my mind that remembers the truth and so there is unconscious guilt. The source of all forms of guilt is the belief that I have betrayed God.

Jesus says that there are only two emotions, love and fear. It is equally true to say there is only love and guilt, because fear and guilt are so closely related. Fear causes guilt and guilt causes fear. So when I feel fearful, I automatically look for guilt. If I am ever afraid I must believe that I am guilty of something, or simply guilty. Otherwise there would be no call for fear. The guiltless cannot be afraid.

Guilt also shows up as a projection. I project the guilt I think is mine onto others. That is the purpose of others, as they are someplace to put my guilt, someone I can point to in my fear of God, and say, “There is the guilty one. Don’t look at me, look at them.” No matter how justified I might feel about seeing the guilt in someone, the guilt belongs to me because it is in my mind, and that is where it must be undone. We make up the most elaborate and convincing stories to justify our projections of guilt, but that doesn’t make them true.

Another way this shows up is in our situations. We think that something shouldn’t be happening, that it is too scary or too sad. We lose our job or someone we love dies, and we think it is not fair. Jesus said that we should beware of the desire to see ourselves unfairly treated, because it is just another form of guilt. The world is guilty for being what it is, and I must be guilty or I wouldn’t be its victim. Learning to spot the belief in guilt is necessary so that we can change our minds and let Holy Spirit heal us.

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Study of Text, Chapter 13:Guiltlessness and Invulnerability, P 1. 5-13-16

I. GUILTLESSNESS AND INVULNERABILITY, P 1
1 Earlier, I said that the Holy Spirit shares the goal of all good teachers, whose ultimate aim is to make themselves unnecessary by teaching their pupils all they know. The Holy Spirit wants only this, for sharing the Father’s Love for His Son, He seeks to remove all guilt from his mind that he may remember his Father in peace. Peace and guilt are antithetical, and the Father can be remembered only in peace. Love and guilt cannot coexist, and to accept one is to deny the other. Guilt hides Christ from your sight, for it is the denial of the blamelessness of God’s Son.

Journal
We are told some very important things in this paragraph. The most important to me is that the Holy Spirit wants to remove all guilt from our mind. Thank God that I don’t have to do that by myself. By myself means with ego. No decision made alone has power, so we make all decisions with either ego or Holy Spirit. Those are our only two choices. If I try to rid myself of guilt with the ego’s assistance, I will fail.

When I have asked the ego how to be rid of guilt I am told to deny it or to project it. I see that neither of these two suggestions works. My daughter is pregnant with her first child and she was expressing her fear of not being able to be a good mother to a newborn. She just doesn’t know how. I reassured her, but I noticed fear rising in me. When I looked at that fear I saw that it was really guilt. It was guilt for not doing a better job with my own first child.

I thought that guilt was gone, but it had been merely repressed. I had pushed it down so deeply that I could not see it anymore until now when it was triggered by my daughter’s fear. This is the best the ego has to offer when it comes to fear and guilt, temporary repression. Now I am looking at it again, and this time I am asking the Holy Spirit to look with me and to remove the guilt from my mind.

It is absolutely essential that the guilt be undone, not just for this one situation, but the belief in guilt itself must be undone. I am not just innocent of my errors with my firstborn, but I am innocent. I am innocence itself, and so is everything created by God. If I start trying to justify my behavior, I will find circumstances that cannot be justified. But if I know that guilt is an illusion and that innocence is reality, then no justification is needed. In fact the idea of justification is seen as part of the illusion of guilt, and has no place in the innocent mind of the Son.

The peace of God is everything I want, and I cannot have the peace of God and keep the idea of guilt. I cannot have love and guilt. I must choose. This is the fact that I must accept if I am to be free. Once accepted, the thing I must do is release the belief in guilt to the Holy Spirit so that my innocence will be restored to my awareness. I choose to do that now with the rules for decision.

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Study of Text, Chapter 13: Introduction, P 6. 5-12-16

Introduction, P 4

4 This world is a picture of the crucifixion of God’s Son. And until you realize that God’s Son cannot be crucified, this is the world you will see. Yet you will not realize this until you accept the eternal fact that God’s Son is not guilty. He deserves only love because he has given only love. He cannot be condemned because he has never condemned. The Atonement is the final lesson he need learn, for it teaches him that, never having sinned, he has no need of salvation.

Journal
Could it be true that I am guilty for nothing? I say that guilt is not real, and I teach this constantly. I teach the most what I most need to learn. As I accept the Atonement, the great Undoing, I let go of the guilt that has held me in stasis for so long. I accept that I have never sinned and that I am not guilty for anything I seem to have done in this insane dream of life. When I see myself as completely and always innocent, then I will see everyone that way, because I only see in another what is in me.

I also see another way this works. I notice I am judging someone and I remember how destructive this is. I ask for the Atonement and I want it more than I want to keep the other guilty. I feel the knowledge of his innocence settle over me and I know I have forgiven him, and in that forgiveness, I have forgiven myself. How could I experience that miracle and not be aware that it must also apply to me? In forgiving another, I am always forgiving myself. The guilt I saw on the other was just a thought in my mind, so when I forgive it, I am forgiven.

My final lesson, and everyone’s final lesson is that there is nothing to forgive. If it is not God’s Will it is nothing. It does not exist and has never existed. The world we see is nothing. What we do in the world is nothing. We are saved because nothing has happened that is not God’s Will. So what do I do with the judgmental thoughts in my mind? They are meaningless, but if I believe them, then I experience their disturbing effects.

Today, I begin my day, as I have for a couple of weeks now, by deciding what kind of day I want to have. Then I remember that I will be given this day if I make no decisions by myself. Here is what I did this morning. I surrendered this self to God. I decided with Holy Spirit to have the peace of God today. I decided that I will quickly notice any thought that is not true, and realize I must have decided with ego what the situation means. I will notice it makes me unhappy to think this way, and I will accept the Holy Spirit’s interpretation instead.

Today I will not judge myself or anyone else and if I forget my decision, I will choose again by asking the Holy Spirit what He sees in the situation. Today I will accept the Atonement as I realize that the world of injustice is an illusion, and there is another world, one that the Holy Spirit will give me if I will be willing to accept that what I see now is not real, and if I will be willing to let it go. This is the day I will have if I make no decisions with the ego mind.

I have been using the Rules for Decision for about a month now and I can’t emphasize enough how helpful this has been. Every lesson I do, everything I learn in the Text or Manual for Teachers is enhanced as I use the rules for decision to practice them. It is a small section of the Course, a couple of pages, but it is a perfect practice and each sentence is important. So much so, that I am giving an entire weekend to its study and practice in Portland in July. If you are interested in attending and learning with me how Jesus wants us to use this information to wake up, let me know and I will give you the details concerning the workshop.

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Study of Text, Chapter 13: Introduction, P 3. 5-10-16

Introduction, P3

3 If this were the real world, God would be cruel. For no Father could subject His children to this as the price of salvation and be loving. Love does not kill to save. If it did, attack would be salvation, and this is the ego’s interpretation, not God’s. Only the world of guilt could demand this, for only the guilty could conceive of it. Adam’s “sin” could have touched no one, had he not believed it was the Father Who drove him out of paradise. For in that belief the knowledge of the Father was lost, since only those who do not understand Him could believe it.

Journal
Do I repeat the “sin” of Adam? How about the mistake that Adam made? Do I repeat that? Do I look around and see pain, suffering and death? Do I see a world of guilty people? Even when my mind is fairly clear and I realize the guilt ridden thoughts in the mind are the product of the ego thought system and are not real, there are still subtle forms of guilt that I overlook, or call something else.

I was watching a drama on TV, and noticed that I was rooting for the good guy to overcome the bad guy. This is an example of a more subtle form of guilt. I could see one character as guilty only if I believed in guilt. Does it matter that I root for the good guy and against the bad guy? After all, it is just a movie. But the form of the belief is unimportant. It is still a belief in guilt and guilt is the foundation of separation. The structure will not fall while the foundation is still firmly in place.

Actually, that movie is a perfect example of how we keep the illusion in place. There was a good guy and a bad guy. There was no oneness, no one self. There was separation. The bad that all of us fear is part of us was projected onto one of the characters. It was his job to carry the “badness” so that the hero could be pure. This is what we do every day.

We see ourselves as separate from each other. In this way we can imagine that someone else is the bad one, and so we now believe we have preserved our goodness, at least to some degree. Then we try to “kill” the one who now represents the “bad” and so destroy all evidence that might lead back to us. Mostly we don’t actually kill them. We kill their reputation, or we kill our closeness, divorcing ourselves from that other bad one, distancing ourselves from the bad. Sometimes we do send them to the death chamber if we find them very guilty.

When we find ourselves guilty and cannot project it far enough away to destroy the belief in our guilt, we then suffer for what we did. We become isolated or depressed, or we punish ourselves with sickness or poverty. Mostly it is in smaller, less obvious ways that we punish ourselves, little accidents and little disappointments.

All the time we do these things we deny the one thing that would save us. We refuse to give up guilt as a belief. We continue to use projection and attack to defend our selves, and our belief in guilt. Now is the time to begin a new tactic, if we haven’t already done so, one that will ultimately work. Personally, this is my way of doing this: When I see guilt in any form, directed inwardly or outwardly, I remind myself that guilt is not real. I ask that my mind be healed of this unfortunate belief. I become still in my mind, if only for a moment, so that healing can occur. I will do this until there is no darkness in my mind.

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Study of Text, Chapter 13: Introduction, P 2. 5-9-16

INTRODUCTION, P2
2 The acceptance of guilt into the mind of God’s Son was the beginning of the separation, as the acceptance of the Atonement is its end. The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws that seem to govern it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds seem to be trapped in their brain, and its powers to decline if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and are no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel.

Journal
I don’t need to be convinced that the world is pretty awful. At its best, the world is still cruel because it always holds the threat of loss. When I love and feel loved, when I am at peace, when I am happy, I know that it will not last. Something will happen to undo this moment of respite from loss. So there is not a single moment of perfect love and perfect peace, when happiness is complete.

This world of uncertainty and loss is the result of guilt. It began when we accepted guilt into our mind, and thus separation began. I notice that Jesus says it began when we accepted guilt. So that means, guilt was not inevitable. We had a tiny mad idea, but was that the cause of our unhappiness? Or was it that the idea of separation brought with it the belief in guilt, and we accepted the belief as real? Isn’t that what we do now each time we choose to believe in guilt?

The world we see cannot be sustained without our moment by moment decision to keep it in place. We are deciding continuously for the world, and we do this by deciding continuously for guilt. When I think that I should not have said or done something, this is me deciding for guilt. Regret is past guilt held onto. Fear is guilt projected into the future. Someone else’s guilt is my guilt projected in an effort to be free of it.

When I read the news and think what a cruel act by someone, or when I judge a politician, or when I think that things should be different than they are, this is me deciding for guilt. What I am implying, even if I don’t use the words, is that the someone who acted cruelly is guilty for doing so, the politician is guilty for his policies, that the circumstances of my life are guilty for making me unhappy, and so they need to change.

Even when I think that it would be so good if my children would accept A Course in Miracles like I did, this is actually me saying they are guilty for not choosing what I think they should choose. I am implying that I would be happy if only they did what I want them to do, and that they do not make that choice makes them guilty for my unhappiness. In my mind, I or someone or even some circumstance is always guilty.

I was looking at a fence I paid to have constructed. I saw a flaw in the work, and I thought that the man who put it up for me should have done better. I thought that he was guilty of doing less than he promised. I felt foolish for hiring him. I thought I was guilty of bad judgment. I wondered if I made a mistake in choosing to spend my money in this way. Am I guilty for making a snap decision that I might come to regret?

And thus, the world I see continues to exist in my mind. As long as I continue to accept guilt as real and meaningful, pain and suffering and death will continue to exist for me. But there is a way out of the prison of guilt that I have designed for myself. My salvation is the Atonement. Just as I was free to accept guilt, I am free to accept the Atonement, and when I do I will have undone the separation.

I seem to accept the Atonement for this guilty thought or that guilty thought. I say to myself, I accept the Atonement in this situation. But there must come a time when all these acceptances lead to transfer of learning. Then I will know that guilt is not real, and I will know that there is only innocence. I will accept the Atonement and the world I see will be undone, and the real world will be revealed to me.

I cannot have the peace of God if I accept guilt into my mind, and I really believe that the peace of God is everything I want. Then the idea of guilt enters my mind, and obviously I think that keeping guilt alive is more important to me than the peace of God. I sometimes despair of this ever occurring for me. When I start to feel discouraged I think of others who have succeeded in awakening from this dream and I feel encouraged to keep making the choice for love.

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