Overcoming Guilt

It is impossible to identify with the body/ego and not feel guilt. You identify with what you believe in and if you believe an individual identity is your reality, you believe you have successfully overcome God and you will feel guilty for it. There is no way to escape guilt but by shifting your identity to Truth – where It really belongs.

Everyone tries to make the compromise of believing in this world and not feeling guilty. All of us, when we first become students of the Course and learn that sin isn’t real, feel relief. But then we have to learn what “sin” means and the way that it manifests to us. All the behaviors that are called “sin” and all the guilt we feel for them are meant to preoccupy us with the body/ego and “prove” that we have triumphed over God. So we seek at first to find the “right” way to live to not feel guilty, yet the source of our guilt is not our behavior; it is our mistaken identity.

The way to overcome guilt is learn that you have not overcome God. The way to overcome guilt is to listen to your Holy Spirit and learn Who you really are. In this way, you learn that nothing real has occurred, that God is unchanged by anything you do here; that therefore you are unchanged. This is what forgiveness means. There is no other way out of guilt.

www.acimmentor.com

Comments

Nadine M. Rosin said…
I "stumbled" on knowing this in myself today. Lovely to find this explanation here- so clearly, simply, and eloquently stated. Thank you!
10:26 PM
Anonymous said…
Hello Liz:) i want to express my thoughts about guilt. Well, many teachers say that we separate from god because we wanted to be special. I think that specialness comes after the thought "How would i be if i wasn't enough? If i wasn't perfect?" And then that thought was taken seriously, and we accept the fear to enter in us, making an illusiory void. But because love is love and can never leave us, we had to believe that love can leave us, that love can betray us. So we attacked love and then we felt terrible because we believed we killed the Love that we Love. We killed the justice.
6:19 AM
Paula said…
Hi Liz, I just had to share an experience I had the other day. I was looking at an old outer body experience I had 20 years ago with the Holy Spirit and it occurred to me that I couldn't have been guilty over something I'd been thinking about because I wasn't a body. Instantly there was an actual weight that I felt literally fall from my Being. It even made a clunking sound as I had this inner shift. It was something I've never experienced before. There was an actual movement along with this clunking drop of guilt and I felt it in my Being/Mind. Awfully hard to explain but I just wanted to know if you have experienced this too when releasing guilt?
8:17 PM
ACIM Mentor said…
Paula, yes I've feel set free, a lifting or a weight or burden. I don't remember ever having an actual clunk, though! But I've had similar shifts that felt quasi-physical.
5:31 AM
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