Leaving Guilt Behind
A Course in Miracles uses language familiar from the Judeo-Christian tradition, such as “original sin,” while providing completely different meanings for these concepts (e.g., “sin” is not real; it is simply a mistaken belief.) The Course also teaches concepts and practices resonant with other traditions, such as the concept of a loving God of the Muslim tradition, the oneness of Hinduism, and the unified consciousness of Buddhism. Whereas guilt is a nagging, familiar feeling for those raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, guilt may not play such a major role in the emotional lives of people raised in other traditions. Instead, what may resonate more is grappling with a sense of shame or a striving for a sense of worth. Shame is an emotion wired into healthy psychobiology, and parents who don’t detect a sense of shame in their child are often justifiably concerned. A Course in Miracles teaches that concern with worth is universal, interwoven with the experience of being embodied. It is a chord that runs through the daily melody of life even among those who do not apparently experience shame or guilt. Whatever tradition or non-tradition you were raised with, I hope this post contains some useful ideas about leaving behind an experience of feeling “wrong” or “less than.” (On a practical note, if “guilt” does not capture your experience, please substitute your concept, such as “poor self-worth,” “shame” or whatever it may be, for “guilt” below.)
For many people, the start of a new year is associated with making resolutions and changing behavior. I am a great believer in change, although my emphasis over the years has shifted from changing behavior to changing my mind. To my amazement, behavior change often does follow. For example, practicing Course-style forgiveness has helped to change my relationship to food. For the greater part of my life, I garnered enormous enjoyment from food, especially preparing and eating it. Decade by decade, thanks to mindfulness practices, the hold that food has had on me has gradually become smaller, but the greatest shift happened in my decade of practicing the Course. Having just navigated the holiday season, which for me is usually a time of “no holds barred,” I found that for the first time ever, I continued to eat mindfully all through the season. Not only did I eat much less rich food overall, I also kept including (and finding delicious) lots of healthy food. I felt as much enjoyment from savoring smaller quantities of the special holiday foods my husband and I prepared as I did eating industrial quantities of these foods during ever so many past “no holds barred” holiday seasons. What’s more, now that the season has ended, I feel almost no guilt over the rich meals and desserts that I did consume.
I am far from free of guilt, though! If I were, as Course students would say, “I’d no longer be here.” This is because the whole world of form is a projection of guilt, including all the seeming, separated individual people in it. Anybody who believes themselves to be a separate individual has unhealed guilt in their mind. Guilt is in fact hard work to leave behind because beneath the ‘visible’ tip of guilt that we can each ‘see’ floating in the waters of our consciousness, there is a mammoth iceberg of guilt floating below our awareness. A Course in Miracles says,
The guiltless mind cannot suffer. (T.5.V.5:1)
That means that if we experience suffering of any kind, at any time, even the smallest twinge of pain in the tip of a finger, even the tiniest moment of annoyance at some reckless driver on the highway, our minds are not guiltless. And—let’s be honest—the vast majority of us have periodic “ego attacks” in which enormous feelings of anger, resentment, jealousy, fear, sadness, and, yes, guilt, flood our minds, often in the space of a heart-beat. Even aside from strong emotions, many of us, especially as we age, have increasing or chronic pain in our bodies. Does that make us bad? Absolutely not, according to A Course in Miracles, as well as other traditions that teach non-judgment, such as Buddhism. It just means that because there is an experience of suffering of some kind, there is unhealed guilt in the mind.
A Course in Miracles is very clear about the origin of conscious and unconscious guilt. The following quote simultaneously names the source of guilt and points to the means of leaving guilt behind:
Where can guilt be when, the belief in sin is gone? (T-19.IV.B.7:8)
According to the Course, it’s the belief in having sinned that gives rise to guilt. On the individual level, there are all the memories of actions we have taken in which we hurt, upset, or disappointed another person or in which we neglected a responsibility or even broke one or another rule or law. There are also memories of feeling shame due to our actions or the words or actions of others. And on the cosmic level, at the level of the universal mind that believes it has separated from God, the sin the mind believes it has committed is the sin of “stealing” God’s power. As the Manual for Teachers explains, stamped in our minds is the thought:
“You have usurped the place of God. Think not He has forgotten.” (M-17.7:3-4)
It goes on to say,
And now there is no hope. Except to kill... An angry farther pursues his guilty son. Kill or be killed… (M-17.7-8, 10-11)
In our worst nightmares, we are all ‘guilty as charged,’ irredeemably unworthy, and condemned to death.
Except that, we are not guilty of sin, we are far from unworthy, and we are not condemned to suffer and die. The belief in the reality of our guilt is actually itself a nightmare, a bad dream that we can awaken from. We are quite simply mistaken in our belief that we separated from God. Yes, the idea of separation arose, took hold in the mind, then took on an enormous life of its own. But it’s actually our investment in our supposed sin and sinfulness that needs to be examined and left behind. In reality, each and every one of us—no matter who we are in the world, no matter how heinous our actions by the world’s standards, no matter how awful and vicious our thoughts—is innocent.
The innocence of God is the true state of the mind of His Son [i.e., all of us as One]. In this state your mind knows God, for God is not symbolic; He is Fact. (T-3.I.8:1-2)
Complete awareness of our complete innocence is the end of the journey of awakening to our true nature as pure Love. But in the meantime, any experience of guilt signals that we are in our “wrong minds,” that is, identified with the ego thought system of separation.
Like any strong negative emotion, guilt is compelling. Feeling it pulls us into the entire framework of separation and sin. The experience of guilt itself makes us believe that guilt is justified. In other words, we feel guilt and we say to ourselves, “I must have done something wrong.” It matters not at all that we might not even be able to point to what we are guilty of. If we can point to something, well then, oh boy, our guilt is definitely justified! We feel guilty and we are convinced by our guilt that we have done wrong and are worthy of punishment. But with the help of our inner Teacher (which I call, “the Holy Spirit”), we can learn to treat the experience of guilt as a signal that we are simply mistaken. What we are mistaken about is the understanding of what we are. What we are is innocent, without blemish. Our innocence cannot be touched by anything at all, including any action in the world of illusion.
A Course in Miracles teaches that we cannot establish our own innocence, or even convince ourselves that we are innocent. In fact, having to defend or argue with ourselves about our guilt or innocence just serves to reinforce the ego thought system. Only the ego thrives on debate and conflict. The Truth needs no defense. Like forgiveness, it is ‘still and quietly does nothing’ (paraphrased from Part II of the Workbook, “What is Forgiveness?”) The Course tells us:
Innocence is not of your making. It is given you the instant you would have it. (T-15.IV.9:3-4)
To leave guilt behind, then, we have to learn to accept our innocence. We do this with the help of the Holy Spirit.
Experiencing guilt is no different from experiencing a loss of peace of any other kind. I have described the steps for returning to peace elsewhere (see for example, “I Am Not a Victim of the World I See,” published May 5th, 2020). What I would add here is the supreme importance of not trying to hide any of our thoughts from our Teacher:
The necessary condition for the holy instant does not require that you have no thoughts that are not pure. But it does require that you have none that you would keep. (T-15.IV.9:1-2)
The holy instant is the moment that we choose to think with the right-minded thought system of the Holy Spirit, which includes the understanding of ourselves as completely innocent. This always means suspending judgment. In order to achieve this, we cannot hide our thoughts or our impulses from our Teacher. That would just be an attempt to ‘make ourselves good’ or to somehow appear to be better than we think we are. We can’t, of course, actually hide our thoughts because our Teacher is in our minds! Remember, though, that our Teacher never, not for one moment, judges us. Our Teacher never, not for one moment, stops loving us completely and fully. But if we fear judgment, whether coming from ourselves or from our Teacher, and we try to hide our thoughts, this causes problems for us since it gets in the way of accepting our innocence. As I mentioned earlier, we cannot establish our own innocence which already belongs to us in its limitless entirety. Also, because we believe ourselves to be separate individuals, we consciously or unconsciously believe that we are guilty of sin. An important part of leaving guilt behind and accepting the truth about ourselves as blameless, is to allow the so-called “bad thoughts” of the ego-thought system of separation to arise in our minds so that we can look at them without judgment. That is, look at them with the unconditional love of the Holy Spirit.
It’s worth saying just a little more about the power of guilt and shame to make us want to hide or to deny our thoughts or actions. Denial is, after all, the mechanism that projected the world of form after the thought that we separated from God arose in the One mind. Of all the negative feelings any of us can experience, guilt is particularly intolerable. If we have ‘nowhere to go’ with our guilt, it will drive us to suppress our so-called “bad thoughts” and deny our so-called “bad actions.” But if we do that, instead of leaving guilt behind, we ‘push it down’ into the unconscious mind, where it just carries on exerting its power over us. Guilt keeps us bound; Course-style forgiveness sets us free. We forgive ourselves—and others—for what we—or they—appear to have done.
We do not need to attack our thoughts or ourselves for having them, and we do not need to try to hide our thoughts from the Holy Spirit. Our innocence is not tarnished by any thought or action in this world—or in any world! As we look at our thoughts and actions with the Holy Spirit, we heal the guilt in our minds that we associate with them. The Holy Spirit, which is the Voice for God, sees only our innocence, which we have never lost, and which we can never lose. As we let the Holy Spirit’s light of forgiveness shine in our minds, the guilt that we experience does not have to recede into the depths of the unconscious. Instead, it dissolves. By looking at our thoughts and actions with the love and non-judgment of the Holy Spirit again and again over time, we leave guilt behind, forever, and we gradually remember our true nature as one with Love.
The idea of truly leaving guilt behind can evoke a great deal of fear. Who would we be without our guilt? If guilt is dissolved, where does that leave our society? After all, we have rules and laws to help ensure a safe and orderly society. If people don’t experience guilt over their actions, what’s to prevent them from behaving in unacceptable ways? Dissolving guilt through the healing love of the Holy Spirit is a personal journey of enlightenment that is completely compatible with living in the world. People who are healing guilt are more likely to be gentle and kind than to be violent and antisocial, since aggression is of the ego. Even so, if people don’t follow rules or if they otherwise break laws, the consequences in place in our systems of governance still apply. Healing guilt is not a license to be lawless. The next post will explore a related idea about ‘doing the right thing.’
All quotes are from A Course in Miracles, copyright ©1992, 1999, 2007 by the Foundation for Inner Peace, 448 Ignacio Blvd., #306, Novato, CA 94949, www.acim.org and info@acim.org, used with permission.