Teachings Based on ACIM

Guilt and Innocence.

The following quotes are taken from ACIM and help to clarify its position re the "states" of guilt and innocence.

• The acceptance of guilt into the mind of God's Son was the beginning of the separation, as the acceptance of the Atonement is its end.
  
  
• The world you see is a delusional system of those made mad by guilt
  .
• Guilt is the symbol of attack on God.
  
  
• To the extent to which you value guilt, to that extent will you perceive a world in which attack is justified.
  
  
• Guilt makes you blind, for while you see one spot of guilt within you, you will not see the light.
  
  
• Guilt is a way of holding past and future in your mind to ensure the ego's continuity.
  
  
• What guilt has wrought is ugly, fearful and very dangerous.
  
  
• You have displaced your guilt to your body from your mind.
  
  
• In the ego's teaching, there is no escape from guilt. The ego's belief in guilt is the belief from which all guilt really stems.
  
  
• Guilt asks for punishment and its request is granted. It is guilt that has obscured the Father from you, and it is guilt that has driven you insane.
  
  
• Feelings of guilt induce fears of retaliation or abandonment, and thus ensure that the future will be like the past.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit knows that all salvation is escape from guilt.
  
  
• The undoing of guilt is an essential part of the Holy Spirits teaching.
  
  
• Your kindnesses and every loving thought you ever had are beyond destruction and beyond guilt.
  
  
• In heaven there is no guilt, because the kingdom is attained through the Atonement, which releases you to create.
  
  
• Love and guilt cannot co-exist, and to accept one is to deny the other.
  
  
• Release from guilt is the ego's whole undoing.
  
  
• Where can guilt be when the belief in sin is gone?
  
  
• Send forth to all the world the joyous message of the end of guilt, and all the world will answer.
  
  
• God offers you the means to see the innocence of the Son of God.
  
  
• The innocence of God is the true state of mind of His Son.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit is the strong protector of the innocence that sets you free.
  
  
• Attest your brother's innocence and not his guilt.
  
  
• From everyone whom you accord release from guilt, you will inevitably learn your innocence.
  
  
• This is the saviour's vision; that he see his innocence in all he looks upon, and sees his own salvation everywhere.
  
  
• There is nothing in the Mind of God that does not share His shining innocence.
  
  
• The sight of innocence makes punishment impossible, and justice sure.
  
  
• Innocence is not real until it is total.
  
  
• Bring innocence to light, in answer to the call of the Atonement.

Lack and Abundance

The following quotes are taken from ACIM and help to clarify its position re the 'states' of lack and abundance.

Lack

• While lack does not exist in the creation of God, it is very apparent in what you have made.
  
  
• Lack implies that you would be better off in a state somehow different from the one you are in.
  
  
• Until the "separation", nothing was lacking.
  
  
• Projection occurs when you believe that some emptiness or lack exists in you, and that you can fill it with your own ideas instead of truth.
  
  
• When you make something, you do so out of a specific sense of lack or need. When you make something to fill a perceived lack, you are tacitly implying that you believe in separation. The ego has invented many ingenious thought systems for this purpose.
  
  
• What you deny you lack, not because it is lacking, but because you have denied it in another and are therefore not aware of it in yourself.
  
  
• A sense of separation from God is the only lack you need to correct. For you believe you can suffer lack, and lack is death.
  
  
• In a holy relationship each one has looked within and seen no lack. Accepting his completion, he would extend it by joining with another, whole as himself.
  
  
• Miracles are healing because they supply a lack; they are performed by those who temporarily have more for those who temporarily have less.
  

Abundance

• Miracles are affirmations of Sonship, which is a state of completion and abundance.
  
  
• The abundance of Christ is the natural result of choosing to follow Him.
  
  
• Give therefore of your abundance, and teach your brothers theirs.
  
  
• See His abundance in everyone, and you will know that you are in Him with them.
  
  
• Those who witness for me are expressing, through their miracles that they have abandoned the belief in deprivation in favour of the abundance they have learned belongs to them.
  
  
• Such is creation's law; that each idea the mind conceives but adds to its abundance, never takes away.
  
  
• Count then the silver miracles and golden dreams of happiness as all the treasures you would keep within the storehouse of the world.
  
  
• Also see lesson 165.

Perception and Knowledge

The following quotes are taken from ACIM and help to clarify its position re perception and knowledge.

• Perception is the outward picture of a wish; an image that you wanted to be true.
  
  
• Perception is temporary. Since perceptions change, their dependence on time is obvious.
  
  
• Perception seems to teach you what you see.
  
  
• Only perception can be sick, because only perception alone can be distorted.
  
  
• Perceptions are determined by their purpose, in that they seem to be what they are for.
  
  
• Perception is a continual process of accepting and rejecting, organising and reorganising, shifting and
  changing.
  
  
• Perception is the choice of what you want yourself to be; the world you want to live in, and the state in which your mind will be content and satisfied.
  
  
• Perception is the medium by which ignorance is brought to knowledge.
  
  
• The miracle acts as a catalyst, breaking up erroneous perception and reorganising it properly.
  
  
• You have no conception of the limits you have placed on your perception, and no idea of all the loveliness that you could see.
  
  
• Instruction in perception is your great need, for you understand nothing.
  
  
• Perceptions are built up on the basis of experience, and experience leads to beliefs.
  
  
• Perception will last until the Sonship knows itself as whole.
  
  
• True perception is the basis for knowledge, but knowing is the affirmation of truth and beyond all perceptions.
  
  
• Perception is not knowledge, but it can be transferred to knowledge, or cross over into it.
  
  
• I have spoken before of the higher or "true" perception, which is so near to truth that God Himself can flow across the little gap.
  
  
• Perception rests on choosing; knowledge does not.
  
  
• Knowledge never involves comparisons. That is its main difference from everything the mind can grasp.
  
  
• A condition in which opposites do not exist is the condition of knowledge.
  
  
• Knowledge can be restored only when you meet its conditions.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit is so close to knowledge that He calls it forth, or better allows it to come.
  
  
• Knowledge comes from the altar within and is timeless because it is certain.
  
  
• Knowledge is the result of revelation and induces only thought.
  
  
• Knowledge provides the strength for creative thinking, but not for right doing.
  
  
• Knowledge is His Will.
  

Sins and Mistakes

The following quotes are taken from ACIM and will help to clarify its position re sins and mistakes.

• There is no stone in all the ego's embattled citadel that is more heavily defended than the idea that sin is real; the natural expression of what the Son of God has made himself to be, and what he is.
  
  
• For sin has changed creation from an Idea of God to an idea the ego wants; a world it rules, made up of bodies, mindless and capable of complete corruption and decay. If this is a mistake, it can be undone easily by truth. Any mistake can be corrected, if truth be left to judge it. But if the mistake if given the status of truth, to what can it be brought? The "holiness" of sin is kept in place by this strange device.
  
  
• Sin is the proclamation that attack is real and guilt is justified.
  
  
• Attack and sin are bound as one illusion, each the cause and aim and justifier of the other.
  
  
• The belief in sin is necessarily based on the firm idea that minds not bodies can attack.
  
  
• Sin is the fixed belief perception cannot change.
  
  
• You do not see that every sin and every condemnation that you perceive and justify is an attack upon your Father.
  
  
• You can never hate your brother for his sins but only for your own.
  
  For sin and condemnation are the same, and the belief in one is faith in the other, calling for punishment instead of love.
  
  
• There can be no faith in sin without an enemy.
  
  
• Belief in sin arouses fear, and like its cause, is looking forward, looking back but overlooking what is here and now.
  
  
• To forgive sin is to change its state from error to truth.
  
  
• No one can forgive a sin that he believes is real.
  
  
• Sins are beyond forgiveness just because they would entail effects that cannot be undone and overlooked entirely.
  
  
• The ego does not perceive sin is lack of love, but as a positive act of assault.
  
  
• Darkness is lack of light as sin is lack of love.
  
  
• If sin is real, it must forever be beyond the hope of healing.
  
  
• It is essential that error be not confused with sin, and it is this distinction that makes salvation possible.
  
  
• What could sin be but a mistake you would keep hidden; a call for help that you would keep unheard and thus unanswered?
  
  
• For there is but one mistake; the whole idea that loss is possible, and could result in gain for anyone.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit recognises mistakes, and would correct them all as God entrusted Him to do.
  
  
• What you see clearly as a mistake, you want corrected.
  
  
• The Son of God can be mistaken; he can deceive himself; he can even turn the power of mind against himself. But he cannot sin. There is nothing he can do that would really change his reality in any way, nor make him really guilty. That is what sin would do, for such is its purpose.
  
  
• See Sin Versus Error Page 402 of Text.