IV. Your Function in the Atonement, P 10
10 The guiltless and the guilty are totally incapable of understanding one another. Each perceives the other as like himself, making both unable to communicate, because each sees the other unlike the way he sees himself. God can communicate only to the Holy Spirit in your mind, because only He shares the knowledge of what you are with God. And only the Holy Spirit can answer God for you, for only He knows what God is. Everything else that you have placed within your mind cannot exist, for what is not in communication with the Mind of God has never been. Communication with God is life. Nothing without it is at all.
Journal
Here are some thoughts that came to me as I read this. First, Jesus divided everyone into only two groups, those who think they are guilty and those who know they are guiltless. That feels significant to me. For awhile now I have had the feeling that guilt is the only effect of the separation. It seems like there are many other effects but I think they are just different forms that guilt takes.
For instance, some people are jealous. Jealousy seems to say that the other person is guilty of betrayal and it also says that the jealous one is guilty of not being good enough and of being a victim. I think that guilt is far more pervasive than normally realized. When I am afraid for someone I love, this, too, is an expression of guilt. They are guilty of making me afraid. They are guilty of not being enough and so being vulnerable. I am guilty of attacking them with my thoughts that they are guilty, weak and vulnerable.
And behind all of this is the unconscious guilt, the guilt that sourced all other forms of guilt, the guilt that occurred when we believed that we had separated ourselves from our Creator. The error we often make is that we think we have to stop doing things that make us feel guilty. A Course in Miracles is helping all of us to realize that the belief in guilt is the problem we must solve. Just this morning, a friend of mine told me about an experience she had which triggered guilt. She said that Holy Spirit let her know that only the ego cares what she does. It is our beliefs that need our attention.
Then Jesus tells us that the guilty and the guiltless cannot communicate. They don’t understand each other. I can see that this is true. When someone is telling me that they feel guilty for the jealousy in their heart and all the pain it has caused others, I don’t see their guilt. I cannot join them in their fear and regret. I cannot understand it. I see in them what I see in myself. I don’t see the belief in jealousy in me so I don’t understand it in them. Sure, I understand on an intellectual basis but not in an experiential way. I cannot share the feelings with them, and communication is sharing, so we are not communicating.
Then Jesus gets to the point he is making in this paragraph. The reason we need the Holy Spirit is that God and we cannot communicate. We believe we are unlike God and so we cannot “relate” to God. And God cannot relate to what we think we are. God has no belief in, or experience of, our guilt, our fear, our suffering. What God knows is what He created, and we don’t know the Self He created. There is no basis for sharing and so no communication.
Without this communication, there would be no life. By seeing ourselves different from God we cut off the communication that gives life. So what God did was to place in our mind His Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit knows what we think we are and He knows what we actually are. So God communicates to His Holy Spirit in us and the Holy Spirit faithfully communicates to us what He is given.
And God knows us because He created us and so we must be lovable, in spite of our belief in guilt. The only explanation is that guilt is not true. When we accept that one true thing, we will wake up and know God. Without the unnecessary and untrue burden of guilt, we will be able to communicate with God directly. In the meantime, we continue to live only because God communicates to us through the Holy Spirit. How God must love us!
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