Ask: Removing Blocks to Love (Guilt/Fear)

Can you talk about what the Course says about love and removing blocks to love (guilt/projection)? – Anonymous

A Course in Miracles teaches that you do not have to learn Love, earn Love, or attain Love, because Love is always within you. So, if you are not aware of Love always, you must have obstacles to this awareness. To be at peace, then, you must seek for and remove your obstacles to your awareness of Love’s Presence within you.
God is an experience of Formless, Boundless Love, Peace, and Joy. This is your natural State of Being. “Love”, then, is another word for God. Your obstacle to being aware of your natural State of Being is your belief that you are something else, which takes the form of you thinking that a personal self in a body in a world is your reality. Underlying this belief is the belief that you have “attacked” God to make this separate “reality”, so at the heart of your identification with a personal self is guilt, and fear of punishment from God. You cannot identify with a personal self and escape this guilt and fear; they are the very core of the personal identity. This is why you have to release the personal identity to let go of guilt and fear. Guilt and fear also serve to maintain the personal identity in your mind, because they make you fear turning inward, where you would find God and undo the personal thought system.
The personal thought system (ego) does not want you to be aware of the guilt and fear in your mind, because, when you do become aware of them, you want to undo them, which would undo the personal thought system. (This is why it is so resistant to you being a student of the Course!). The way that the personal thought system deals with your guilt and fear, then, is to project them away from your mind. Now, it seems as though there is a world that is guilty and fearful, and you are an innocent within it. This works well for the personal thought system, because projection keeps guilt and fear in your awareness while keeping you from looking at their source within you, so you cannot undo them.
So, in order to become aware of Love-as-Reality again, you must begin by observing how your own mind works. The physical universe that you perceive is neutral -it has no meaning in itself. All of the meaning that you see, you project there. When you are in the personal thought system, rather than see the world as neutral, you take personally what occurs in it and you tie it into the “story” that the personal thought system in your mind has for the personal self with which you identify. This story usually takes some form where you are a victim of cruel others or a harsh world, where you are “innocent” and others are “guilty”, or where you are “right” and others are “wrong”.
As you take responsibility for these thoughts, the world that they make for you, and the sense of conflict within you that results, you are able to forgive them (let them go) in the recognition that they are not about the Truth (God) in you. Forgiveness of the personal thought system’s projections of guilt and fear, then, removes from your mind the obstacles to your awareness that Love is your Reality, and you are able to rest again in Love and Peace.

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Comments

jacomina said…
Taking responsibility for projecting our fear and guilt out there is so foreign to our western way of thinking. We avoid or run or attack people for their behaviour and then nothing in our experience ever changes in that endless insanity. But taking responsibility and then letting go is massive action that happens in our minds. Is this the "sorting out" that is required?
3:28 PM
ACIM Mentor said…
The "sorting out" refers to sorting out Truth from illusion. So, yes, sorting out facts from your projections of meaning (judgment)is a part of that process.
4:09 PM
jacomina said…
Well then very little is left in a day. I was aware that all of my thoughts, all of what I say, all of my existence is rooted in fear and guilt. Even in my communing with God, I was aware of my habit of projecting fear. So I noticed it and let it go, noticed it and let it go, noticed it and let it go. Needless to say I didnt get much else done in a day. God is all.
9:20 PM
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