X. RELEASE FROM GUILT, P 4
4 When you maintain that you are guilty but the source of your guilt lies in the past, you are not looking inward. The past is not in you. Your weird associations to it have no meaning in the present. Yet you let them stand between you and your brothers, with whom you find no real relationships at all. Can you expect to use your brothers as a means to “solve” the past, and still to see them as they really are? Salvation is not found by those who use their brothers to resolve problems that are not there. You wanted not salvation in the past. Would you impose your idle wishes on the present, and hope to find salvation now?
Journal
I immediately thought of my oldest daughter, Sheryl. I have memories from her childhood that pop up into my mind that used to cause me extreme distress. Some of those memories still carry a sharp sting. I have spent her whole life trying to somehow make up for my mistakes as a mother, to somehow atone for my sins. And so I used that relationship as a way to solve the past. And all along, all she has done is love me. And, weirdly, her present love has not seemed as meaningful to me as my imagined sins. If I keep maintaining that past relationship with Sheryl, I will never have a present relationship with her.
Even as I write this (and I know that what Jesus says is true) I hear the ego mind dredging up old stories and insisting I can’t just pretend they didn’t happen. The ego mind says that they make me guilty and unworthy of her love. This is how the ego maintains the illusion, carrying the past into the present and assuring the future remains the same. This is the purpose of guilt, to keep the story going through blocking actual relationships. It stands like an impenetrable wall between our brothers and us, preventing union. There! Separation is assured and the ego gets to exist in the mind another day. Jesus is helping us to understand it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a simple way out.
“You wanted not salvation in the past. Would you impose your idle wishes on the present, and hope to find salvation now?”
I had a strange reaction to this. I don’t know how to express my feelings. I guess I felt silly. All this drama, all the tears and the frustration, the years of guilt and atoning, and Jesus reduces my angst to “idle wishes”? I also felt resistance from the ego mind to this idea. And maybe that is why I felt confused. I have prayed for release from the belief in guilt and when I am offered that release, I don’t want it. I don’t want to be wrong? Maybe. If Jesus is right that my worry and regret were over idle wishes, then did I waste my life agonizing over my sins? How could something so painful and persistent be reduced to idle wishes? Is this a joke?
And yet, as I think of this I feel a lightening in my mind, a burden lifted, a darkness dissipated. I will accept this extraordinary gift! I go back to the two sentences and I realize something else. Jesus is saying that in the past I had an idle wish to be guilty, and guilt precludes salvation, so I had an idle wish to remain outside salvation. Guilt was the way I assured this wish would be granted. Now I want salvation. I have experienced separation and I am through with it and want to return to my natural and true state as the divine being that I am. Jesus is just pointing out the obvious to me. If guilt is how I maintained the illusion, then keeping that idle wish in my mind will prevent me from achieving my new goal, which is to awaken from the dream of separation. It is just an idle wish, nothing more, nothing real or strong or immovable, just an idle wish. How could something so insubstantial stop me from accepting salvation?
Whooo! I’m feeling so light that I might float away!
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