The Masquerade: The Cost of Masking Guilt and Our True Identity [STAFFCLS]

Loral Reeves, Dr. Jeffrey Seibert and Dr. Rosemarie LoSasso

The survival of the ego thought system depends on our unquestioned belief in guilt as real and our acceptance of the ego’s deceitful remedy for the resulting intolerable anguish: concealing the guilt from our conscious awareness by disguising it in myriad forms and then projecting it onto others. Our lives are thus driven by these dynamics, costing us any hope of more than brief respites from the pain and conflict. A still steeper price we pay for maintaining this masquerade is the splitting off from awareness the ultimate purpose of guilt: to render nonexistent our true Identity. These classes focus on the need to recognize that we are minds choosing to perpetrate this masquerade, and that true happiness will elude us until we are willing to accept this responsibility. Our work as students of A Course in Miracles therefore must be directed toward honest looking with our Teacher at this self-deception. With His help, we then can choose no longer to pay the price, and instead choose to accept the purity of our Identity as God’s Son, reflected in our practice of forgiveness.