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    The End of Guilt: Realizing Your Innocence through A Course in Miracles
    The End of Guilt: Realizing Your Innocence through A Course in Miracles
    The End of Guilt: Realizing Your Innocence through A Course in Miracles
    Ebook114 pages2 hours

    The End of Guilt: Realizing Your Innocence through A Course in Miracles

    By Edwin Navarro

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Since the dawn of man, stories of guilt have formed the fabric of our history. From wars and conflicts to crime and punishment, guilt has driven our actions. We want to see guilt punished, but fear we may need to be punished as well. Everyone living in this world experiences guilt, whether at a deeply personal level or perceived in others. Guilt feels heavy and dark, like a great weight holding us down, and we look for ways to keep it hidden. Ultimately, hidden or not, the guilt remains and impacts our relationships and the decisions we make in life.
    This new book by the author of ‘It’s All Mind’ explores a new way of looking at guilt, the way of ‘A Course in Miracles’. Here guilt is examined from the idea of separation and the ego that wants to maintain that separation. Once seen this way, the Course provides us with the antidote to guilt, the idea of forgiveness, a brand of forgiveness unlike any taught by religions or psychologists. When forgiveness is applied to the guilt in your life, the dark and heavy burden will be lifted, and the Love and Peace of our True Home can be revealed.
    More than a theoretical book, it’s also a practical guide showing how you can use forgiveness every day to lift your personal burden of guilt and truly change your life. Through a simple step-by-step process, you will be able to apply the practice of forgiveness to the guilt you experience. With repeated application, a real transformation is possible, leading you out of the conflicts in your life to the end of guilt.
    “‘The End of Guilt’ is a very well-written, thorough treatment of one of the most important concepts in ‘A Course in Miracles’. The end of guilt opens the doors of Heaven.” - Jon Mundy

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEdwin Navarro
    Release dateMar 17, 2013
    ISBN9781301006656
    The End of Guilt: Realizing Your Innocence through A Course in Miracles
    Author

    Edwin Navarro

    Edwin Navarro is a West Coast author of spiritual writings and novels.

    Read more from Edwin Navarro

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    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      It gives us a lot of the meanings of guilt and forgiveness in one place, showing where guilt came from and how to release it, through forgiveness. Worth reading, seeing as guilt is something we all have, and peace cannot be ours until we release all guilt.

    Book preview

    The End of Guilt - Edwin Navarro

    The End of Guilt

    Realizing Your Innocence

    through

    A Course in Miracles

    by Edwin Navarro

    The End of Guilt

    Realizing Your Innocence through A Course in Miracles

    by Edwin Navarro

    Published by Navarro Publishing at Smashwords

    Copyright (c) 2013 Edwin Navarro

    All Rights Reserved

    Excerpts from A Course in Miracles copyright (c) 1975, 1992, 1999

    by Foundation for A Course in Miracles.

    Cover by thecovercounts.com

    theendofguilt.com

    To Ken

    my teacher, my inspiration, my friend

    Contents

    Introduction

    1 What Is Guilt?

    2 A Brief History of Guilt

    3 The Rules-Based Life

    4 The Philosophy of A Course in Miracles

    5 Guilt and A Course in Miracles

    6 Releasing Our Guilt through Forgiveness

    7 The Guiltless Life

    8 The End of Guilt

    Suggested Reading

    Note: This book contains quotes from A Course in Miracles, which are referenced using the following shorthand,

    First Letter – T for Text, W for Workbook, M for Manual for Teachers

    For Text quotes, the T is followed by the Chapter, Section, and Paragraph numbers.

    For Workbook quotes, the W is followed by the Lesson and Paragraph numbers.

    For Manual quotes, the M is followed by the Chapter and Paragraph numbers.

    Examples: T-11.VI.7, W-169.5, M-21.1

    Introduction

    Depending on who you listen to, guilt is either a necessary limiter to one’s behavior, or a severe debilitating psychological problem. In the first case, we worry that if we don’t feel any sense of guilt, we would be out of control, with no moral sense. In fact, we often use terms like sociopath for someone who feels no guilt.

    On the other hand, we consider extremes of guilt to be a psychological problem, often rendering an individual unable to function normally in society. Such a person will see judgment at every turn, and may never believe there is a way to lead a normal life.

    We talk about the weight of guilt, how it pulls us down, how we’re tied to those events in our past for which we judge ourselves harshly. Memories of painful experiences, and most importantly, our part in the creation of that pain are present in everyone who lives in this world.

    ‘If only’ and ‘I should have’ are the mantras of the guilty person as one’s life is re-examined continuously. It seems as if only time can heal the guilt in our lives, but often time simply covers it over with other events, and what was thought to be long past can resurface.

    But where does this guilt come from? In this book, we will look at guilt from many different angles, dissecting it into its component parts, and ultimately realizing how it is created. Once we recognize these mechanisms, we will discover a powerful answer to guilt.

    The Rules of Life

    In most systems of thought, there exists a set of rules we are meant to live by. Whether these rules grow out of religion or philosophy, or are simply passed down through the generations, they represent the core beliefs with which we make decisions every day.

    We live with a set of rules in our minds which guide our behavior. Everyone’s rules are a little different, so in some cases we might judge someone else’s behavior differently than we would judge ourselves. For instance, we might excuse a behavior in a child that we wouldn’t excuse in ourselves.

    Though everyone carries these rules around with them, if asked to explain why we did something, sometimes we don’t actually know and will even make up reasons that seem to make sense. We often feel guilty about actions we have taken without understanding why what we did feels wrong.

    Ultimately, though, we will at some point along the way violate one or more of the rules in our minds, and the result will be feelings of guilt. These guilty feelings seem to have a real stickiness to them, often living in our minds throughout our whole lives.

    It appears the only way to eliminate guilt is not to violate the rules that would cause us to feel guilty. Oddly though, no one ever seems to be able to completely avoid violating these rules. Even people we consider the saints, the gurus, the high priests, all seem to have failings, leaving us mere mortals to despair of ever leading a guilt-free life.

    A Course in Miracles

    This book is based on a powerful system of thought called A Course in Miracles. The Course, as we will refer to it, was written during the years 1965 to 1972 and was first published in 1976. It consists of three parts – a text, a workbook for students, and a manual for teachers, all totaling over 1000 pages. The text and the manual are to be read and studied, while the workbook consists of 365 daily lessons that provide a more direct experience and application of the ideas from the text.

    The Course was written by Helen Schucman, a clinical psychologist who worked at several hospitals in New York. In describing how the Course was created, she refers to herself as a scribe, writing what came to her at different times of the day, always in a fully conscious state. She was able to stop the scribing process whenever she wanted and immediately return to it when she was ready. The author of the Course says he is Jesus, and it is written from the perspective of a teacher.

    For the purposes of this book, the process of the creation of the Course is not important. What is important is the system of thought, the philosophy presented in the Course. We will use that philosophy and apply it to our subject of guilt, and see how the principles and concepts contained in that philosophy will first show us where our guilt truly comes from, and then how we can free ourselves.

    The End of Guilt

    We will begin our discussions by defining guilt as precisely as we can, looking deep into its eyes, and finding those mechanisms that create our guilt. We will look at examples, from simple personal guilt to the weight of societal and moral guilt.

    Next we will explore guilt from a historical perspective, looking at the ancient and modern religions which provide the moral rules for many people in our societies. We will look at how the great philosophers incorporated guilt and morality into their systems of thought. Finally we will examine guilt from the point of view of modern psychology.

    With this background, we will see how the rules in our minds guide our everyday decisions, and how by constantly violating those rules in ways, both great and small, we build our edifice of internal guilt.

    Once we understand guilt in all its aspects, we will introduce the philosophy of the Course. With this as our basis we will re-examine guilt in a new light, discovering its illusory nature. Through the practice of forgiveness, we will see how we can free ourselves of each instance of guilt, one at a time.

    Finally we will examine what it means to live a life without guilt. How will the world look through the eyes of a guiltless person? How would such a person operate in the world? What would be the moral code that would guide them? What if everyone lived this way?

    So let’s begin the journey from the pain of our lives to the end of guilt.

    Chapter 1

    What Is Guilt?

    Before we can look at ways to eliminate guilt from our lives, we first need to define exactly what guilt is. For most people guilty feelings are easily recognizable, though if asked to define guilt, they may be more likely to describe guilt in reference to a particular act than in the abstract.

    We will be looking for a broad, general definition of guilt that will encompass the guilty feelings that most people experience, including other experiences similar to guilt, such as shame and regret. We are limited, though, by the use of words, which the Course refers to as symbols of symbols… thus twice removed from reality (M-21.1). We will use words to try to describe our experience, knowing the experience will always be beyond the words.

    In common usage, the word guilt actually has two different meanings. It can refer to a judgment imposed on someone by an outside agent, be it a legal system or religious organization, or from another individual. Throughout history, all societies have had some concept of crime and punishment. In some cases the guilt or innocence of an individual is determined by religious authorities, sometimes by appointed or elected judges, and sometimes by lay members of society.

    In all these cases the judgment is externally applied, and if the judged individual is part of that society, he is expected to abide by these decisions. Even if the person being judged does not consciously feel guilty, he must deal with the externally decreed judgment of his guilt, and accept the imposed punishment.

    If the judgment comes instead from an individual, we can have different reactions to this judgment – we could accept the judgment and feel guilty; we could reject the judgment and try to convince the other person they are wrong to judge us; or we might

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