School for A Course In Miracles
"The universe of learning will open up before you."
The good news: there’s only one internal kind of guilt in our minds that all external behavioral guilt is a reflection of… and it’s not real.
The bad news (from the ego’s point of view): there’s only one internal kind of guilt in our minds that all external behavioral guilt is a reflection of… and it’s not real.
What does that mean? All seeming guilt in the world, whether it’s your guilt for what you did, or it (maybe sometimes) is my guilt for what I did… has nothing to do with what and where the “real” guilt is lurking. The “real” guilt is always in the mind, and we feel it because we have chosen the internal teacher of separation (the ego) rather than the Voice for forgiveness (the Holy Spirit). Instead of admitting that, we then project that guilt (we call it blame, resentment, anger, whatever) onto other bodies, or our own. It is always simply a distraction from the actual source of guilt in our own mind for choosing to listen to the voice for separation, and then quickly forgetting we did that. So believing now we are bodies, we wind up thinking we don’t feel guilty, but the other guy certainly should, because look at what he did. I may not be aware of my own guilt, but I definitely see yours.
It is the Holy Spirit’s job (and His only) to help us look at this process and realize what we are doing. Then He helps us let that internal guilt go by seeing we made it up… it’s not even real. However, don’t try to do this by yourself… cause we can’t.
We need to ask for the Holy Spirit’s help. We need Him to help us ‘step outside the box’ of believing we are bodies at the mercy of the world, and look at our identity as decision makers in our mind, choosing guilt or choosing forgiveness.
[It is always helpful to remind ourselves that when the Course talks about ‘mind,’ it is not talking about the place in our bodies between our ears (the brain). It is however referring to a place, an experience deep within ourselves, where we are constantly choosing in any given moment between one of two inner guides or teachers, who help us interpret what we believe we see… the ego or the Holy Spirit.]
If the ego is the symbol of the separation, it (the ego) is also the symbol of guilt. Guilt is more than merely not of God. It is the symbol of attack on God. This is a totally meaningless concept except to the ego, but do not underestimate the power of the ego’s belief in it. This is the belief from which all guilt really stems.
3 The ego is the part of the mind that believes in division (it is our own chosen, made-up, separated identity, at war with God). How could part of God detach itself without believing it is attacking Him? We spoke before of the authority problem as based on the concept of usurping God’s power. The ego believes that this is what you did because it believes that it is you (because we choose to believe the ego is us). If you identify with the ego (the thought of separation and sin), you must perceive yourself as guilty. Whenever you respond to your ego (as our guide) you will experience guilt, and you will fear punishment. The ego is quite literally a fearful thought. However ridiculous the idea of attacking God may be to the sane mind, never forget that the ego is not sane. It represents a delusional system, and speaks for it. Listening to the ego’s voice means that you believe it is possible to attack God (the sin we committed), and that a part of Him has been torn away by you (the guilt we feel). Fear of retaliation (the fear we will be punished) from without follows, because the severity of the guilt is so acute that it must be projected (onto the world).
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WB p.161 par.1; p.166 par. 2… Descriptions of ‘intense horror’ of ego’s guilt
You think you are the home of evil, darkness and sin. You think if anyone could see the truth about you he would be repelled, recoiling from you as if from a poisonous snake. You think if what is true about you were revealed to you, you would be struck with horror so intense that you would rush to death by your own hand, living on after seeing this being impossible. (Les. 93)
You see yourself as a ridiculous parody on God’s creation; weak, vicious, ugly and sinful, miserable and beset with pain. Such is your version of yourself; a self divided into many warring parts, separate from God, and tenuously held together by its erratic and capricious maker, to which you pray. It does not hear your prayers, for it is deaf. It does not see the oneness in you, for it is blind. It does not understand you are the Son of God, for it is senseless and understands nothing. (Les. 95)
Ch.5, p.86 par. 8… Decision of the mind
8 The continuing decision (in the mind) to remain separated is the only possible reason for continuing guilt feelings. We have said this before, but did not emphasize the destructive results of the decision. Any decision of the mind will affect both behavior and experience. What you want you expect. This is not delusional. Your mind does make your future, and it will turn it back to full creation at any minute if it accepts the Atonement (our guiltlessness) first.
Ch.13, p.236 par.1-2… Acceptance of guilt into the mind
1 If you did not feel guilty you could not attack, for condemnation is the root of attack. It is the judgment of one mind by another as unworthy of love and deserving of punishment. But herein lies the split. For the mind that judges perceives itself as separate from the mind being judged, believing that by punishing another, it will escape punishment. All this is but the delusional attempt of the mind to deny itself (its oneness with other minds), and escape the penalty of denial. It is not an attempt to relinquish denial, but to hold on to it. For it is guilt that has obscured the Father to you, and it is guilt that has driven you insane.
Ch.13, p. 261 par.6… Always in your mind
6 See no one, then, as guilty, and you will affirm the truth of guiltlessness unto yourself. In every condemnation that you offer the Son of God lies the conviction of your own guilt. If you would have the Holy Spirit make you free of it, accept His offer of Atonement for all your brothers. For so you learn that it is true for you. Remember always that it is impossible to condemn the Son of God in part. Those whom you see as guilty become the witnesses to guilt in you, and you will see it there, for it is there until it is undone. Guilt is always in your mind, which has condemned itself. Project it not, for while you do, it cannot be undone.
PROJECTION & PERCEPTION:
Projection is the fundamental law of the wrong (ego) mind: what we unconsciously believe we see inwardly (separation from God) determines what we seem to perceive outside our minds in the world. Projection reinforces and protects our inner unacknowledged guilt for believing we separated from Heaven, by displacing (projecting) that guilt onto someone or something else in the world, and then judging/condemning that guilt in our perceived victimizers.
We then are unaware that we even have a mind, and that the actual source of our projected guilt is lurking there. We don’t realize that the problem (guilt) is not out there, but within our mind. And we also don’t realize that the Answer (the Holy Spirit) to the made up guilt is in our minds too.
Projection is talked about in 22 of the 31 Chapters in the Text. It is mentioned and discussed more than 140 times throughout the entire Course, beginning in Chapter One.
II. The Alternative to Projection
1 Any split in mind must involve a rejection of part of it, and this is the belief in separation. The wholeness of God, which is His peace, cannot be appreciated except by a whole mind that recognizes the wholeness of God’s creation. By this recognition it knows its Creator. Exclusion and separation are synonymous, as are separation and dissociation. We have said before that the separation was and is dissociation, and that once it occurs projection becomes its main defense, or the device that keeps it going. The reason, however, may not be so obvious as you think.
2 What you project you disown, and therefore do not believe is yours. You are excluding yourself by the very judgment that you are different from the one on whom you project. Since you have also judged against what you project, you continue to attack it because you continue to keep it separated. By doing this unconsciously, you try to keep the fact that you attacked yourself out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe.
3 Yet projection will always hurt you. It reinforces your belief in your own split mind, and its only purpose is to keep the separation going. It is solely a device of the ego to make you feel different from your brothers and separated from them. The ego justifies this on the grounds that it makes you seem “better” than they are, thus obscuring your equality with them still further. Projection and attack are inevitably related, because projection is always a means of justifying attack. Anger without projection is impossible. The ego uses projection only to destroy your true perception of both yourself and your brothers. The process begins by excluding something that exists in you but which you do not want, and leads directly to excluding you from your brothers.
1 We have said that without projection there can be no anger, but it is also true that without extension there can be no love. These reflect a fundamental law of the mind, and therefore one that always operates. It is the law by which you create and were created. It is the law that unifies the Kingdom, and keeps it in the Mind of God. To the ego, the law is perceived as a means of getting rid of something it does not want. To the Holy Spirit, it is the fundamental law of sharing, by which you give what you value in order to keep it in your mind. To the Holy Spirit it is the law of extension. To the ego it is the law of deprivation. It therefore produces abundance or scarcity, depending on how you choose to apply it. This choice is up to you, but it is not up to you to decide whether or not you will utilize the law. Every mind must project or extend, because that is how it lives, and every mind is life.
2 The ego’s use of projection must be fully understood before the inevitable association between projection and anger can be finally undone. The ego always tries to preserve conflict. It is very ingenious in devising ways that seem to diminish conflict, because it does not want you to find conflict so intolerable that you will insist on giving it up. The ego therefore tries to persuade you that it can free you of conflict, lest you give the ego up and free yourself. Using its own warped version of the laws of God, the ego utilizes the power of the mind only to defeat the mind’s real purpose. It projects conflict from your mind to other minds, in an attempt to persuade you that you have gotten rid of the problem.
3 There are two major errors involved in this attempt. First, strictly speaking, conflict cannot be projected because it cannot be shared. Any attempt to keep part of it and get rid of another part does not really mean anything. Remember that a conflicted teacher is a poor teacher and a poor learner. His lessons are confused, and their transfer value is limited by his confusion. The second error is the idea that you can get rid of something you do not want by giving it away. Giving it is how you keep it. The belief that, by seeing it (guilt) outside you have excluded it from within, is a complete distortion of the power of extension (love and forgiveness). That is why those who project are vigilant for their own safety. They are afraid that their projections will return and hurt them. Believing they have blotted their projections from their own minds, they also believe their projections are trying to creep back in. Since the projections have not left their minds, they are forced to engage in constant activity in order not to recognize this.
4 You cannot perpetuate an illusion about another without perpetuating it about yourself. There is no way out of this, because it is impossible to fragment the mind. To fragment is to break into pieces, and mind cannot attack or be attacked. The belief that it can, an error the ego always makes, underlies its whole use of projection. It does not understand what mind is, and therefore does not understand what you are. Yet its existence is dependent on your mind, because the ego is your belief. The ego is a confusion in identification. Never having had a consistent model, it never developed consistently. It is the product of the misapplication of the laws of God by distorted minds that are misusing their power.
5 Do not be afraid of the ego. It depends on your mind, and as you made it by believing in it, so you can dispel it by withdrawing belief from it. Do not project the responsibility for your belief in the ego onto anyone else, or you will preserve the belief (in your own ego). When you are willing to accept sole responsibility for the ego’s existence you will have laid aside all anger and all attack, because they come from an attempt to project responsibility for your own errors. But having accepted the errors as yours, do not keep them. Give them over quickly to the Holy Spirit to be undone completely, so that all their effects will vanish from your mind and from the Sonship as a whole.
We maintain unconsciously our own chosen belief we are a separated entity from God Our Father, proven by the made up experience of pain and guilt we feel for the seeming disconnect from Heaven…
Then we project (displace) the source of pain outward, and now we believe the pain we still feel is not coming from my inner choice to be separate, but from a guilty someone or something external to me. It’s then their fault, not mine.
So the belief in separation and its corresponding feelings of guilt and pain are maintained internally, but now I don’t know (1) I have a mind where the pain is really coming from, and I am not aware (2) that the Holy Spirit in my mind can and will help me let go of that belief in separation from God and all my brothers, which was the made-up source of my pain and guilt.
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“Projection makes perception.” Ch.13 p. 248, par. 3; Ch.21 p.445 par.1*
“Nothing so blinding as perception of form.” Ch. 22 p.476, par.6*
“Seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world.” T 21 p.445 par.1
“Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated.” Tp.563
“And in your suffering of any kind, you see your own concealed desire to kill.” Tp.659 par.15
This 2013 seminar discusses the dismantling of the ego’s serious thought system of sin, guilt, and fear. This is held in place by our projecting a serious world—personally and collectively—its purpose being to rivet our attention on the body. In this way we are distracted from the decision-making mind that is the source of the problem and the answer. But the ego is easily undone when we pay attention to the gentle little man (symbol for Jesus) just in back of us, always reminding us to laugh at his joke: “It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity… .” His loving presence encourages us to meet the ego’s seriousness—in all its forms—with a gentle giggle, tender tickle, and sweet smile.
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(ACIM: Manual for Teachers # 28)
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