January 26, 2016
What is guilt? How does the Course define guilt? In the Glossary of Terms, guilt is defined as: The painful emotion that stems from believing that you have sinned and have thus corrupted your being, making yourself worthy of punishment and unworthy of love. The Course teaches that this belief is false, for your true nature as God’s holy Child is incorruptible. Further, the following is from the Glossary-Index by Kenneth Wapnick: the feeling experienced in relation to sin; its reflection from our minds is seen in all the negative feelings and beliefs we have about ourselves, mostly unconscious; rests on a sense of inherent unworthiness, seemingly beyond even the forgiving power of God, Who we erroneously believe demands punishment for our seeming sin of separation against God; following the ego’s counsel that to look on guilt would destroy us, we deny its presence in our minds, and then project it outward in the form of attack, either onto others as anger or onto our own bodies as sickness. We are actually willing to look at all kinds of “sources” of our pain provided they are not the deeper source to which they bear no real relationship at all. We deny its presence in our minds as it seems unbearable to us. And that’s exactly what the ego wants us to believe, thus blocking our awareness of our true holy nature, our true holy Self.
Real relationships are pure. They are used by the Holy Spirit to heal. They have a holy purpose. No real relationship can hold one spot of guilt and maintain its purity or holiness. When we place a condition or project guilt on a relationship, we make it “special” and so block our awareness of its purity. All relationships we allow guilt to touch we use to avoid the person and the guilt. In this way we block ourselves from the awareness of the holiness of the person and our own holiness. Unity – Oneness – cannot rise in our mind when we look to the past and the guilt and pain we place there. The past is gone. The past is not in us. Yet we allow the past and the guilt we associate with it to stand between another and ourselves, blocking our awareness of our Oneness. We believe there are problems between us that are not there and thus use each other to fix what needs no fixing! This is indeed insane.
What would happen if we stopped doing as we have always done? It hasn’t worked very well so far. Once we seem to have fixed one problem, another seems to present itself. And then another pops up, and so on. Perhaps we can be open to the idea that we have not been willing to look at the deeper source of our pain and so our pain continues to present in a new form each time we think we have resolved it. Perhaps it’s time to change our thinking. Perhaps it’s time to bring our relationships into the now. The Course tells us:
Determine, then, to be not as you were. Use no relationship to hold you to the past, but with each one each day be born again. A minute, even less, will be enough to free you from the past, and give your mind in peace over to the At-One-ment. When everyone is welcome to you as you would have yourself be welcome to your Creator, you will see no guilt in you. For you will have accepted the At-One-ment, which shone within you all the while you dreamed of guilt, and would not look within and see it [At-One-ment]. T-13.X.5.1-5
Perhaps it’s time to stop what we’ve become accustomed to doing and look within to Spirit who waits there for our willingness to see differently. Peace is there within us, shared with all our brothers and sisters alike in Oneness, needing only our awareness to rise in our minds and join us in the Unity we are always. Peace, Joy and Love are within us waiting to be shared with all of creation. Let it be so.
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