Ch. 18. IX. 4 – 8. Jesus: “On the journey inward, you are no doubt severely tempted to abandon the Holy Spirit as you approach the outside ring of fear, but He would lead you safely through and far beyond.
The circle of fear lies just below the ‘conscious level’ of awareness, yet will eventually be recognized as the foundation on which the world seen by the body’s eyes is based! Here are all the illusions wrought of guilt, all the twisted thoughts, all the insane attacks, the fury, the vengeance and betrayal that were made to keep the guilt in place untouched.
The whole world you see has risen from this to keep the guilt hidden. Guilt’s actual intensity is veiled by its heavy coverings, thus it is seemingly kept apart from the world that was made to keep it hidden. Guilt’s shadow still rises to the surface, however, at least enough to hold its external manifestations shrouded in darkness. This brings despair and loneliness to the world, keeping it joyless.
The body cannot see any of this, for the body arose from this for guilt’s protection, which depends on keeping guilt unseen. The body’s eyes will never look on it. They will see but the coverings it dictates for them to see! The body’s eyes will never look upon the guilt itself. Yet what it dictates, they will see all around!
The body will remain guilt’s messenger and will act as it directs, as long as you believe that guilt is real. For the ‘reality of guilt’ is the illusion that seems to make it heavy and opaque, impenetrable, and a solid foundation for the ego’s thought system. Guilt’s tenuousness and transparency are not apparent until you see the light behind it. And then you see it as but a fragile veil before the light!
This heavy-seeming barrier, this imagined floor that looks like rock, is like a bank of low dark clouds seen as a solid wall before the sun. Its impenetrable appearance is wholly an illusion! It gives way softly to the lovely mountain tops that rise above it, and has no power at all to hold back anyone willing to climb above it and see the sun.
Guilt is not strong enough to stop a button’s fall nor hold a feather in a gentle breeze. Nothing real can rest upon it, for it is but an illusion of a foundation. Try but to touch it and it disappears; attempt to grasp it and your hands hold nothing.
Remember as a child how easy it was, looking up into the clouds, to imagine a whole world rising before you! A solid mountain range, a lake, a city, all can rise in your imagination. And from the clouds, the messengers of your body’s perception return to you, assuring you that all of it is ‘really there.’ Figures stand out and move about; actions there seem real; and forms appear and shift from loveliness to the grotesque. And back and forth they go, as long as you would play the children’s game of make-believe!
Yet however long you played your little cloud game, and regardless of how much imagination you brought to it, you did not confuse it with the world below, nor seek to make it ‘real!’ So should it be with all the dark clouds of guilt, no more impenetrable and no more substantial! You will not bruise yourself against them in traveling through!
Let your Guide teach you their insubstantial nature as He leads you through and past them to a world of light whereon they cast no shadows. Their shadows have lain upon another world, the one from which you have come, one much farther from the light. Yet from there to the light the shadows of the clouds of guilt cannot fall.”