In traditional Christianity the cost of man’s eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is death. You did something wrong to God and must pay a ransom. Jesus, the innocent one, was crucified and the ransom was paid. Belief in the ego costs you the awareness of God. The wages of error (missing the truth) is the illusion of suffering.
Guilt
Metaphysical Talk
David Hoffmeister talks about the metaphysics of “A Course in Miracles” (ACIM) in reference to the movie “Dark City.” Fear and guilt make this world go around and this is why forgiveness is necessary first before the reality of God’s Love can be remembered.
The Belief in Separation
The belief in separation is actually the belief in impossibility. The ego created the world. God did not create the world. You can’t connect a God of Love to a distorted perceptual world where there seem to be so many problems. We have a belief in the concept of duality. This is an error. This very error has to be exposed. We have to look at this error together and expose its falsity. This whole world was made as a giant hiding place. Duality is in the mind, not in the world. When the mind decided to take the idea seriously (forgot to laugh) the whole cosmos was created as a giant fig leaf to cover up the belief in shame and guilt. You have to look within and see and expose the shame for the nothingness it is instead of trying to project it into time and space. The problem is not time and space, it is in your mind that made up the belief. We need to release the error and realize that it has no consequence. The instant the error seemed to arise the Answer was given.
Non-Dualism and Time
Love is all there is, with no opposites. God is one and extends perfect oneness as Spirit. The present moment is the closest approximation to eternity this world offers. People’s dualistic thoughts, feeling guilty about the past, and fearing the future are covering over eternity. So, we let go of them in favor of an experience of the heart.
Following the Holy Spirit and Relationships
David explains how listening to and following the Holy Spirit brings peace and joy, as old relationships seem to be let go and new relationships that serve the Holy Spirit’s purpose come into awareness. Jesus says in A Course in Miracles that the only right use of judgment is asking yourself, “How do I feel?” If you start to get prompted to call certain people, and after the call you feel a certain vitality, then it shows the prompt came from the Holy Spirit. You listened, followed, and got the experience. If you find yourself being depressed, feeling fatigued or dispirited, and saying, “Wow, I’m glad I got that over with.” Then the prompts are coming in from guilt. All these relationships have guilt in them. Now the Holy Spirit is saying, the way out of the guilt is giving all the relationships to the Holy Spirit.
Body Image and True Desire
The world is set up as an identity substitution and the mask we wear as a body image is very shaky. People make a list of pros to try to offset the cons (negative feelings), but there’s an underlying fear. When you get down to the underpinnings, you can see that it’s taking a lot of energy to keep the mask in place, and it’s really not worth it. The ego has many tricks though, to make us believe that if I could just change this thing or that thing, I would be happy. We might think we would be happy if we could have our “ideal body image”, but it’s actually not true. Trying to create a perfect body image is an endless pursuit.
Transcend Guilt and Meaninglessness
A woman who killed a bird while driving her car asks, “How to let go of the guilt?” The ego world is complex and meaningless. The dream the ego made is designed to be so complex that there will be a pervasive and suffocating feeling of being trapped in a very crazy place. You are not afraid of a bad and hostile world. The thing that scares you the most is meaninglessness. You’ll even make up good and bad to avoid meaninglessness. Yet the deeper you start to go down and expose more layers, the more you’ll see this meaninglessness. But eventually you’ll come to a point of surrender. You can’t figure out what anything means. In fact the only escape is to have all meaning over to Holy Spirit.
The Impossibility of Duality
When you see the healing of God’s Son as all you wish to see accomplished by the world and by time and all experiences, you will know the Father and the Son. The world was made as a distractive device, and if we do anything to reinforce the duality of the world, we cover over the oneness that we truly are.
You Can’t Leave Heaven
The ego set up this world including the seeming responsibilities. Holy Spirit’s function is to unwind us from guilt of not giving over our peace when we interact with the world. Therefore the main function of teachers of God is to accept the Atonement for themselves. Always keep in mind that you are in Heaven, and you are never not there. The ego would say you have left, but that’s not the truth.