Enough Already

You need not fear the Higher Court will condemn
you. It will merely dismiss the case against you.
There can be no case against a child of God.

We are told in the book of Genesis that “a deep sleep” fell upon Adam. But nowhere in the Bible are we told that Adam ever woke up! In a sense, we are all still asleep, dreaming the illusions of separateness, loss, fear, shame, and death.

The weight that holds Adam’s (and our) eyelids closed is guilt. This emotion, prevalent as it is, is not natural to a human being. It is entirely learned. Children have no concept of guilt. They live in innocence and freedom. Guilt is cast over the child at a young age like a dark, heavy, tattered, foul-smelling cloak passed down through generations, binding innocent souls in a burdensome cycle of apologetic living.

The journey to freedom does not require you to become anything you are not. It simply invites you to throw off illusions of limitation and return to the Garden of Eden you enjoyed before you learned to be afraid. As Swami Satchidananda noted, “We started off fine. Then we got de-fined. Now we are getting re-fined.”

I had a revelation about guilt shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Around that time, I flew to Australia to present a series of seminars. In the wake of the attacks, American airports were heavily militarized. I remember entering the Honolulu airport and shuddering to see soldiers in combat uniforms patrolling the terminals with submachine guns. Travelers were searched bodily while agents opened suitcases in public, examining intimate personal possessions. IDs were checked and rechecked. Everyone from children to senior citizens was suspicious; it seemed as if one had to disprove one’s guilt before boarding an aircraft.

In Australia I had to take a domestic flight from Sydney to Melbourne. As I approached the Sydney airport, I felt anxious about going through the intense security screening to which I had become accustomed. To my astonishment, when I checked in for my flight, the agent did not even ask for my ID. After I told her my name, she smiled and handed me a boarding pass. As I made my way to my gate, the only security measure required was to pass through one metal detector, monitored by a few laid-back guards. I encountered no double-checking, searching, or disrobing. As I completed my minor screening process and boarded the airplane, I had the strangest feeling that I had somehow cheated or gotten away with something I did not deserve. The whole process seemed just too easy! I had nothing to hide, but still I felt somehow … guilty.

I had become so accustomed to being treated as a potential criminal or threat that when I was respected as innocent, that experience felt foreign to me. Suddenly I understood how all of us have been trained to feel guilty. We have been told for so long that there is something wrong with us that when we are treated as if there is something right with us, we can’t quite relate to that experience, and we just wait to be “found out.”

But there is nothing to be found out. While we have been taught that guilt is the truth and innocence the lie, innocence is the truth and guilt is the lie.

This indoctrination runs so deep on an emotional level that you are not likely to throw off such dense programming overnight. But a seed of this understanding can turn on a light that leads to the eventual undoing of guilt at the most fundamental layers of your being. That process is the most healing, liberating, and glorious of your life. If this idea sparks a vision of freedom in your soul, the process has already begun.

In the Hawaiian spiritual tradition, a newborn child is regarded as a “bowl of light.” If you observe a little child radiating positive energy, you can see an angel close to heaven. She has not yet learned all the conditions she must fulfill to merit love. She is already in a state of love, and has no concept of having to earn it.

Yet there comes a day when society drops a rock into the bowl of light. The child learns self-criticism, shame, and the sense: I must perform to deserve love. Now the rock obscures some of the light the bowl is emitting. As time goes on, more rocks fall into the bowl: fear, mistrust, a sense of lack, competition, envy, anger…. Eventually there are so many rocks in the bowl that only a tiny trickle of light escapes. Behold millions of people commuting to work and walking the streets of our cities, their eyes darkened, shoulders bent, sadness and pain oozing from their pores. Their beautiful bowls of light have become filled with so many rocks of disappointment, pressure, and obligation that they seem more dead than alive.

How can you escape the plight of the zombie and restore the original light shining in your bowl? Begin to pay more attention to the sense of delight within you than the sense of guilt, and act on what makes you happy rather than what fear demands you to do. Take time each day to feed your soul. Associate with people you respect and enjoy. Make play, recreation, renewal, and family time as important as work. Follow your creative impulses. Laugh. Trust your intuition more than external dictates.

The critical voice is not your own.

— Source unknown

Identify the voice in your head that tells you that you are evil or worthy of punishment, and identify the voice that affirms your innocence and your right to be happy. Which feels better? Which would you choose as your guide to life? Guilt and fear are habits you developed, and as such, they can be replaced by more rewarding patterns of thought and feeling. The habit of inner peace is easier to cultivate because it is your natural state. May your return be swift and easy.

If you do not know that you are already enough, nothing you do to become enough will make you enough. When you realize that you are enough, the self-proving game is over. I coached a woman named Donna who was very successful in business, but in pain emotionally and physically. Although she was the CEO of a thriving multinational company, her life was a frantic run on a treadmill to keep achieving more, more, and more.

As a child, Donna had taken piano lessons. During her practice sessions, her father, a very demanding man, sat beside her on the piano bench. He placed a 50-cent coin on the piano and told her, “If you play this piece without making any mistakes, you can keep the money.” If not, he would withdraw the coin.

Human beings are the only creatures on the planet who tell time and think they have to earn a living.

— Buckminster Fuller

At age six Donna found it difficult to play the piano perfectly. She almost never won the coin. When she grew up and entered the business world, she carried this attitude into her work life: You have to work very hard for a coin that you almost never receive. So Donna kept struggling to be perfect, but in her mind she never hit the mark. This belief led to an incessant quest for degrees, credentials, and approval. Although she had many such accolades, she was never satisfied with herself, so she experienced deep stress and the emotional and physical symptoms indicative of lack of self-worth.

During the period I coached Donna, she gradually let go of many of the overwhelming tasks she had taken on, she lost excess weight, and her health improved significantly. She grew happy, relaxed, and made life choices in alignment with her joy. She could achieve this only when she stopped trying to prove herself, and began to find beauty and worth in herself just as she was.

In his book Authentic Success, Dr. Robert Holden illuminates the dynamics behind Fraud Guilt, the feeling that “if you knew the truth about me, you would discover that I am a phony and you would reject me.”

Most people experience some degree of Fraud Guilt. We believe that we have somehow fooled people into liking us, and that at a core level we are not the person they think we are. Our real self, we sense, is far inferior to our social image.

A survey was done among CEOs of Hollywood’s top motion-picture studios. When they were asked, “What do you most fear?” the most prevalent answer was: “I fear that people will find out that I don’t really know what I am doing.” The irony of this response was that these executives really did know what they were doing. Even while they doubted themselves, they were turning out blockbusters. Meanwhile, that little voice of darkness kept nagging them and calling them phony.

Who was the real phony? A Course in Miracles tells us that “all defenses do what they would defend” against. The voice that calls you a fraud is the fraud—not you. The real you is magnificent and substantial. Your self-image as a phony is the liar.

Another name for Fraud Guilt is “inadequacy hypnosis.” I like this term because it reveals that our sense of not-enoughness is but a hypnosis to which we have succumbed. When so many people believe there is something wrong with them, the mass agreement creates an illusion that is easy to fall into and hard to get out of. Yet each of us must escape from this dark dream, because it is foreign to our nature. The moment we awaken, all the illusions the dream engendered dissolve with it.

The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

— Arab proverb

The pathetic voice of Fraud Guilt may become especially fierce when you are on the threshold of creating success, or when you have just done so. The closer you come to claiming your true power and happiness, the louder that nasty bugger will rant. Such resistance is a positive sign, for it indicates that you are breaking free of the prison in which guilt has held you captive. How do you overcome this ranting maniac? Simply notice this voice and keep moving ahead. Address it like a frightened child and explain to it that you are a good person, successful at your chosen endeavors for good reason. Tell it that it doesn’t need to worry about your being exposed. The best thing that could happen to you would be to be completely exposed, for in the light of full exposure you would discover that everything you thought you needed to hide was a trick of fear. In uncharted territory you discover your greatest self.

A long time ago it was discovered that if you can get someone to feel guilty, you can control that person. Guilt is synonymous with fear of punishment, and those who fear punishment will do practically anything to avoid it, even if the punishment is not merited or actually forthcoming. Sometimes the threat of punishment is as effective, or even more effective, than the punishment itself. Ultimately self-punishment is more effective than punishment by the outer world. This is all that guilt is.

Since guilt first infiltrated the human psyche, billions of people and societal institutions have used it as a tool to manipulate and control others. Some religions have honed it to a fine science. (It is said: “The Jews invented guilt, and the Catholics perfected it.”) While elements of religion bring people closer to God, guilt is not one of them. Guilt operates in a manner diametrically opposed to the true purpose of religion, for it leaves people feeling alienated from themselves and even hating God or religion.

It does not matter who invented guilt, and it certainly does not serve us to blame or seek revenge against those who perpetrate it. “We are protagonists and the authors of our own drama,” author Rebecca McClen Novick states. “It is up to us; there is no one left to blame. Neither the ‘system,’ nor our leaders, nor our parents. We can’t go out and hang the first amoeba.”

If you have been sullied or plagued by guilt or shame, waste no time on collaring the perpetrators, and do whatever it takes to get free. If you find yourself in a burning building, you don’t have time to analyze where the fire started. Just get out. Don’t delay awakening by studying the darkness. Step into the light.

A Course in Miracles teaches that any choice motivated by guilt will not take you anywhere you really want to go. Whenever you act from a mind-set of fear or guilt, your results will backfire, and you will have to return to the crossroads and choose innocence. The universe is benevolent in never rewarding guilt and always rewarding love. This code runs contrary to what you might conclude from watching morbid news broadcasts, but the foundation upon which the universe rests runs far deeper than the media would have you know.

Guilt is an interpretation, not a fact. At any moment you can reinterpret any event through the eyes of innocence rather than guilt, grace rather than karma. When you see through the eyes of innocence, you liberate yourself and everyone you encounter. When you filter events through the lens of guilt, you condemn yourself and the world. The Crucifixion was not an act that occurred once. It recurs every time you incriminate or punish yourself or another. Neither was the Resurrection a singular event. It recurs every time you release yourself or another. Each new day is an opportunity to be raised from the tomb of fear.

Guilt will tell you there is no end to it, but love will tell you that this feeling was never justified from the start. If there is any purpose to guilt, it is to highlight the power and exhilaration of freedom from it.

Perhaps future generations, hopefully wiser than those we have known, will look back on our time and ponder it with the same curiosity and compassion that we hold for past eras of slavery and despotism. If you wish to depose political tyrants, begin by removing internal tyrants. Daily we must heal thoughts and feelings of fear, alienation, and divisiveness.

I met a fellow who was glowing. “I just came from a therapy group, and I learned a new and exciting technique!” he exclaimed. “It’s called ‘shame reduction.’”

The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love.

— A Course in Miracles

I had to scratch my head. To me, “shame reduction” sounded a lot like forgiveness. There is nothing new about forgiveness, or our deep need to find it. Mercy has been around as long as guilt has required it for healing. Yet shame reduction—aka forgiveness—is new and exciting every time you apply it. When you come to the fork in the road where you have traditionally chosen guilt and you choose freedom instead, the heavens rejoice and a breath of relief ripples through the world.

Each day is a series of opportunities to end guilt, beginning with your own. Every person you meet, every situation, every perceived error is an invitation to “reframe” in favor of innocence. If you are wondering about your purpose in a relationship, a career, or life, the answer is to choose healing where you once perceived vengeance. Then the world will become new because you have finally become a friend to yourself.