X. Release from Guilt, P 1
1 You are accustomed to the notion that the mind can see the source of pain where it is not. The doubtful service of such displacement is to hide the real source of guilt, and keep from your awareness the full perception that it is insane. Displacement always is maintained by the illusion that the source of guilt, from which attention is diverted, must be true; and must be fearful, or you would not have displaced the guilt onto what you believed to be less fearful. You are therefore willing to look upon all kinds of “sources,” provided they are not the deeper source to which they bear no real relationship at all.
Journal
The entire purpose of A Course in Miracles is to convince us that we have nothing to fear and no reason to be guilty. Everything he tells us leads us to this conclusion. It is painful to live in fear and guilt. It disrupts our relationships and drives us to build defenses and to attack aspects of our selves. It drives some fully insane and others to suicide. For most of us we are simply left in uncertainty and doubt; we suffer and then we die. And it is completely wrong, completely untrue.
Up to now, our solution to fear and guilt has been to displace it. We try to throw it out of our mind and it appears as stories in our lives. I hear many of them from students and friends. My son is hurting himself. My daughter is marrying a tyrant. My boss is going to fire me so he can put his friend in my place and I will lose my home. I was diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer.
There are so many fearful stories within the mind and all of them are simply representations of the completely unnecessary fear and guilt of abandoning God.
It seems like salvation to us, this displacement. It feels terrifying to facing the fear and guilt within ourselves, so we make up images that express the fear and guilt and then we project them outward where we can pretend that they have nothing to do with us. Yes, we suffer in the stories, but we are also victims, and victimization and suffering seems preferable to responsibility, preferable to facing the fear and guilt where it exists, in our own mind.
As long as we can convince ourselves that the fear is out there, then there is always the hope that we can help that errant child, that we will find another job, that the cancer will be cured, and then we will be saved. No more reason for fear… until the next story. And there will always be another story because we have never faced our imagined darkness. We have looked outward instead of inward.
We are like frightened children who believe that the monster is in the closet or under the bed, and are so convinced of this, that we cannot imagine actually looking there. We believe the monster is in us and we dare not look or we will know for sure that it is there and there will be no hope for us. There is a way out of this awful cycle of pain and suffering, though.
We can look with the Holy Spirit. We can show him our guilt and fear as we see it, and ask Him for another way to see. We can do this with confidence because that is His function and our way Home. He is a built in safe-guard, placed in our mind for that very reason, that someday we would be finished with this experiment in separation and would need a Guide to bring us Home.
In fact, that is exactly what we are doing here and now. The ego mind is frightened of this journey, but we are no longer entirely identified with the ego. We are ready for this and we can learn to make this journey in a way that is less stressful. I have discovered, myself, that it is possible to detach from the story and thus to realize that the story is a mechanism, not the truth, and so I am more able to see the lesson rather than fear the story itself.
I have also discovered that if I give the mistaken thoughts to the Holy Spirit and just let Him heal me, I go through this without distress. However, if I call on Him and then try to figure out what to do and what it means, then it is much more difficult. Complete surrender is best in my experience. Surrender and trust are my bywords these days. I give it to the Holy Spirit and then I walk away, absolutely certain that my help and my struggle are not needed and that I know I am being answered.
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