Doug Geiger

The Guiltless Self

Would it be helpful or useful if the Guiltless Self could be experienced within form, between bodies, in relationships and in the world we believe we see? Would it be helpful or useful to believe that the Guiltless Self could be experienced while I am at a job as a realtor, nurse or receptionist? Would it be helpful or useful if the Guiltless Self could be experienced in my relationship with my family or with a significant other? Would it be helpful or useful if the meaningful could be experienced within the meaningless?

Would it be helpful and useful or would it be simply keeping the deception and distortion of the ego thought system alive in the false split mind? The Course emphasizes over and over that there is absolutely no overlap between the two thought systems of fear and Love, yet we demand an overlap to be true.

Please tell me it can happen in form? Please tell me that it can happen within “my” world. Please tell me “I” can find and experience the True Self within self, the body identity. Please tell me “I” can experience guiltlessness within the insanity. Please tell me “I” can experience Truth within private, secret thoughts of attack, war and unforgiveness.

The most honorable and heartfelt prayers are rooted in this level confusion. We are desperate to believe that in some miraculous way God will find a path into the illusion of what I made to block God and the True Self out. “When you arrive God, I have a list of certain aspects of the illusion I want fixed, but the rest I want to keep as is for my little self.” This could only be the audacity and arrogance of the ego!

A term that is used regularly about the Course is that it is a “self study.” The term “self study” is spewed out at the most convenient times to shield something from surfacing. It is like the term automatically slams a door closed on a potential, ends a possible discussion, if even in form, and ejects a probable connection or link into orbit, never to be seen again. What if this Course is a True Self study meaning the experience of the True, One, Self, Christ and God in the eternal depths of Oneness? And if so, how could this new True Self study be anything about aloneness and separation in any thought?

We have an opportunity right now to experience the immediate awakening of the mind to True Self and God. The Holy Instant of the Guiltless Self is this instant and in every instant. To realize the True Self in Holiness in this instant however, we must be willing to relinquish littleness in every thought of form, bodies, relationships, the world we believe we see and the body identity, all of which simply represent the hidden beliefs of the guilty self. God’s Son is not guiltless in time, but in the eternity of the Holy Instant. The belief in the body identity keeps guilt beliefs unhealed and hidden in time.

The Atonement, the correction of error in the mind through forgiveness, sets us free from the beliefs in the guilty self and in that, all that represents the illusion fades from God’s Son’s awareness.

Am I ready for the Real World? Am I open to experiencing instant after instant of Holiness and freedom? The Holy Spirit is available now. The Holy Instant is available now. The Holy Relationship is available now if I am willing to be in relationship with ONLY Holiness! Am I willing to give over every plan I have of finding and experiencing the True Self in littleness, Holiness in the illusion of guilt, for these plans will never, ever be successful? We made the self of littleness to guarantee the experience of exactly what we are not, but there is another way and it is available in this instant!

While at a concert of “music inspiration” someone shared that the music had opened their mind to a true connection and communication. One of the presenters gently replied back, “oh, please do not be tricked by the music, or what you heard or saw. We will not find our True Guiltless Self in any belief of music, in any belief of a place, or in any belief of talking with someone we see as “holy” in form. Please do not settle for the meaninglessness when God’s Son has available in each instant the unlimitedness found in the Mind of God.” Quite a statement of Truth! Why settle for the littleness of any form when the Holy Instant is a choice away?

God can communicate only to the Holy Spirit in God’s Son’s mind, because only the Holy Spirit shares the knowledge of what God’s Son is with God. And only the Holy Spirit can answer God for God’s Son, for only the Holy Spirit knows what God is. Everything else that self has placed within the split mind cannot exist, for what is not in communication with the Mind of God has never been. Communication with God is life. Nothing without communication with God is at all. T14.IV.10.3-7 page 281

The Guiltless Self then does not have anything to do with form. If we are looking for or expecting the miracle to affect form in any way we are asking to keep the illusion alive, God and the True Self hidden.

Who, in simple honesty, without defensiveness and self-deception, would deny he understands the words we say; This world I seem to live in is not home to God’s Son. A memory of home keeps haunting God’s Son’s mind as Self believes Self lives where Self does not. (reference to W182.2)

There is no substitute for Self, Heaven, Truth and God. All who believe they walk this world simply believe in hell. God’s Peace and the True Self are surely not of hell. Only by choosing to believe in illusion can we accept that magnitude rests in littleness.

When I am still a Holy Instant, when the world recedes from my mind, when valueless ideas cease to have value in my restless mind, then will I hear His Voice, the Holy Spirit. So poignantly the Holy Spirit calls to the True Self that the True Self will not resist the Holy Spirit longer. In that Holy Instant the Holy Spirit will take the True Self to the Son’s home, and the True Self will stay with the Holy Spirit in perfect stillness, silent and at peace, beyond all words, untouched by fear and doubt, sublimely certain that Self is at home.

And so, we open now to the Holy Instant for the instant we want to be of Holiness this will be. The one we would not want it to be, it won’t. But now we choose to delay not!

“Grace is not given to a body, but to a mind. And the mind that receives grace looks instantly beyond the body, and sees the holy place where the mind was healed. There in the mind is the altar where the grace was given, in which grace stands. Do I, then, now, offer grace and blessing to my brother, for I stand at the same altar where grace was laid for us as one. And as one we are healed by grace together, that I may heal through faith.” (T19.I.13)

“The Holy Spirit will always guide us truly, because our joy is the Holy Spirit’s. This is the Holy Spirit’s Will for everyone because the Holy Spirit speaks for the Kingdom of God, which is joy. Following the Holy Spirit is therefore the easiest thing in the world, and the only thing that is easy, because it is not of the world. It is therefore natural. The world goes against God’s Son’s nature, being out of accord with God's laws. The world perceives orders of difficulty in everything. This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable. By demonstrating to my Self there is no order of difficulty in miracles, God’s Son will convince Self that, in my natural state, there is no difficulty at all because it is a state of grace.

Grace is the natural state of every Son of God. When the Son is not in a state of grace, the Son is out of the Son’s natural environment and does not function well. Everything the Son does becomes a strain, because the Son was not created for the environment that the Son has made. The Son therefore cannot adapt to the world, nor can the Son adapt the world to the Son. There is no point in trying. A Son of God is happy only when the Son knows the Son is with God. That is the only environment in which the Son will not experience strain, because that is where the Son belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of the Son, because the Son’s own worth is beyond anything the Son can make.” (T7.XI.1-2)

“Freedom must be impossible as long as you perceive a body as yourself. The body is a limit. Who would seek for freedom in a body looks for it where it can not be found. The mind can be made free when it no longer sees itself as in a body, firmly tied to it and sheltered by its presence. If this were the truth, the mind were vulnerable indeed!” (W199.1)

“I have spent my life in bringing truth to illusion, reality to fantasy, having walked the way of dreams. For I have gone from waking to sleeping, and on and on to a yet deeper sleep. Each dream has led to other dreams, and every fantasy that seemed to bring a light into the darkness but made the darkness deeper. My goal was darkness, in which no ray of light could enter. And I sought a blackness so complete that I could hide from truth forever, in complete insanity. What I forgot was simply that God cannot destroy Himself. The light is in the right mind. Darkness can cover the light in the right mind, but cannot put the light in the right mind out.” (T18.III.1)

“The holy instant is the result of our determination to be holy. It is the answer. The desire and the willingness to let holiness come precedes holinesses coming. We prepare our mind for it only to the extent of recognizing that we want it above all else. It is not necessary that we do more; indeed, it is necessary that we realize that we cannot do more. Do not attempt to give the Holy Spirit what the Holy Spirit does not ask, or we will add the ego to the Holy Spirit and confuse the two. The Holy Spirit asks but little. It is the Holy Spirit Who adds the greatness and the might. The Holy Spirit joins with us to make the holy instant far greater than we can understand. It is our realization that we need do so little that enables the Holy Spirit to give so much.

Trust not our good intentions. Our good intentions are not enough. But trust implicitly our willingness, whatever else may enter. Concentrate only on willingness, and be not disturbed that shadows surround our willingness. That is why we came. If we could come without shadows we would not need the holy instant. Come to the holy instant not in arrogance, assuming that we must achieve the state the holy instant’s coming brings with it. The miracle of the holy instant lies in our willingness to let the holy instant be what it is. And in our willingness for this lies also our acceptance of Self as we were meant to be.” (T18.IV.1 & 2)

“Let us seek no further. We will not find peace except the peace of God. If we accept this fact, we save our Self the agony of yet more bitter disappointments, bleak despair, and sense of icy hopelessness and doubt. Let us seek no further. There is nothing else for us to find except the peace of God, unless we seek for misery and pain.” (W200.1)

“Simply do this: Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto our God.” (T189.7)