Lesson 20 "I am determined to see."

Besides projecting your guilt onto others, you also project your WILL and your POWER.

You take a chunk of your own power, which is tied to your will, and you give it to someone else. As you shift ownership of the guilt into someone else's hands, you are not just handing over guilt but also "who is the cause" of the guilt. That causality, that power to cause, is your own will. So you simultaneously hand over your own will to the other person.

Then the other person now looks like they have an extra amount of willpower - an "alien will", a separate will. It seems like this will has power to do stuff, sure. But the problem is you now perceive that this will is separated from your own will and that it has power over or against what is left of your will. A split mind has a split will in conflict with itself.

This makes sense, because really you can only do anything to yourself, so YOUR OWN WILL that you put into the other person DOES seem to have the power to do something to you. IF it were really the will that belonged to someone else, it would NOT have the power to do anything to you.

So literally you are then acting against yourself, through someone else, using your own will as your own attacker. So even when you are victimized, it's still you doing it to yourself. Nobody ever does anything to you.

By disowning your will and handing it over, you strip yourself of seeming power, and become weakened or powerless. You have to do that because you can't see yourself as a victim if you are powerful. Nothing can happen to you but by your own will, so you literally have to lay down your own power and 'pretend' that you are weak, vulnerable, at-the-effect of the dream, and susceptible to being easily influenced. None of that is possible for those who are powerful, so you have to disown your power to do so. And since nothing happens without your consent, and BY your own will, you have to GIVE your own will to someone else in order for them to seem to use will against you. Otherwise they have no power over you.

You can't, however, get rid of power. Instead you displace it onto the people that you're projecting the guilt onto. You give it to them. And it is by giving them power over you, at least in your imagination, that you literally give them the 'power to do something to you'. They don't really have this power because it's really just your own will that you are afraid will attack you. But while you project and hallucinate that it is IN someone else, you associate it WITH someone else so that you can disassociate from your guilt, so now you think it is NOT your will that you see out there.

So really you are just afraid of your own will that you projected onto someone else, staring you back in the face and threatening to attack you. You think it's that person attacking you, but its really you. And you're afraid of the sense of power that they have, particularly the more you give it away and the weaker and more vulnerable you see yourself. They seem to loom large over you like there is nothing you can do and nowhere you can go to be safe from it. But it's really YOUR POWER that you're afraid of - the projected power that you need to reclaim.

So on the one hand, taking back that guilt and dropping your false innocence and letting go of victimhood seems like something you don't want to do, especially because it means you would have to own up to being guilty. But on the other hand, when you do take it back you are ALSO TAKING BACK YOUR POWER. You are literally taking back your own will, that you lost and displaced. The other person does not HAVE any power over you and the idea of an alien will was entirely an illusion. Nothing's stopping you from taking your power back. You just have to recognize IT IS YOURS and it is not theirs, because you gave it to them (or tried to).

So now you take back your guilt but also you take back your power, take back your will, and this renders you much less able to be victimized, or to believe that you are victimizable. Your sense of vulnerability will reduce and you will feel 'stronger' and more confident about being able to stand your ground. You won't NEED to stand your ground 'against' the oppressive others, however, because by taking your power back AWAY from them, they now are not artificially empowered and you no longer PERCEIVE that they have 'extra power' to do something to you. And so you are not threatened. And so you can now feel safe.

You are safe when you are in your own power. You are safe when you do not give your own will to other people. You are safe when you do not choose to be a victim. You are safe when there is nothing to be afraid of because the only thing you were afraid of was YOUR OWN WILL. You are only afraid of it when you disown it, and when you reclaim it you are EMPOWERED.

Then, when you take your guilt and you take it to Holy Spirit to let Him decide if you are innocent, and you ACCEPT that you are innocent, you will be even MORE empowered because you won't be weakened by guilt. Innocence needs no defense. True innocence is powerful.

"I am not weak but strong."

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

-ACIM

Whatever you are experiencing, comes from whatever mindset you have. Either you're in the ego mindset and thus experiencing a physical world of bodies, or you're in the Holy Spirit's mindset and on the spiritual level.

Thoughts/attitudes/beliefs/truth on the Holy Spirits level is completely incompatible with the ego's level. Never the two shall meet. So the ego is really confined inside its bubble of private insanity.

Within the ego's bubble, it starts to believe it can ACCESS and thus experience, what it is like in the Holy Spirit's world. It actually wants to do this because it wants to become more powerful, to have more domination and control, and to wield what would seem to be the kind of 'special' powers that Holy Spirit apparently has access to.

Except the ego has a problem. It cannot leave its mindset. It can't *actually* get into the Holy Spirit's mind. So it pretends that it can. And as always, it uses separation to do this (the same old story, separate in the name of joining).

The ego takes its own mindset and separates it even further, dividing it into 'good' and 'bad' parts. All still within the ego thought system. So now it labels some parts of itself/the world as good and some parts as bad. It sort of creates the illusion that it can 'borrow' some goodness from the bad stuff and attribute it to the good stuff, to make the good stuff seem extra special and sparkly and important and valuable. And of course that means taking some of the 'bad' that you'd find in this stuff and attributing it to the 'bad stuff' so that it seems extra bad - a repository for nasty dark judgements and hate and so on.

This creates the persona - the spiritualizing portion of the ego mind which tries to focus only on the 'good' interpretion of the world, and simultaneously creates the 'shadow', which is whats left of all the stuff that is 'not good'. For something to seem good, something else HAS to seem bad. To have special love there has to be special hate. To idol worship there has to be 'the enemy' who clearly do not get what's so special about the idol. And to have all the 'spiritual behavior' you must relegate 'unspiritual behavior' to the shadow. You try to hide everything bad IN the shadow, AS the shadow, and you then try to get RID OF the shadow. Tuck it away, hide it, destroy it. And then guess what happens?

The shadow part of the ego mind, the bad stuff, now takes the symbolic form of all of the enemies, attackers, victimizers, causes of sickness and so on. The 'goodies two shoes' part is the facade of special love and special appearances which 'saves face' and makes it seem like you are MORE spiritual ie more SPECIAL than you are. ie, if you sweep all of the sins under the carpet it LOOKS LIKE you're more innocent than you are. The ego's use of the persona is what gives extra weight to the idea that your persona is valuable, important, special, wanted, loveable (in an ego way), desirable, innocent (ego innocence) etc. And so the 'good ego mind' and the 'bad ego mind' are now AT WAR. Reinforcing the good reinforces the bad because it's like a seesaw - you take less load off the good end to make it seem 'lighter', the bad end gets badder and 'heavier/darker'.

So this ego attempt to divide itself and be at war with itself, which creates the persona and the shadow in conflict with each other (e.g. person who everyone always thought was 'good' gets unfairly attacked or sick etc), allows the ego to lend special meaning to some parts of its mindset - a glow of specialness - sacredness - holiness - spirituality. Not genuine holiness or genuine spirituality, but a fake APPEARANCE of it. A facade. This can take the form of huge sacrifices or changes in behavior, level confusion, trying to be good, trying to not be bad, trying to ATTAIN very lofty levels of 'spiritual advancement and capabilities' that make it look like you're very advanced and special.

Since the ego cannot leave its own mindset and cannot actually become spiritual, it just fakes it. It pretends it is spiritual. And it fools itself. And this is what YOU do. This is what I do. This is where we TRY to attain experiences and mindsets which are OUTSIDE of what THIS mindset (our current ego mindset) can achieve. Our ego mind tries to 'be spiritual', while KEEPING the ego mindset. This is because the ego wants to live in two minds. It wants to take the ego self TO the Holy Spirit and to KEEP it and to at the same time TAKE ON the Holy Spirit's power. Obviously this cannot be achieved because the Holy Spirit's mind completely dispels the duality that the ego is based on, and completely undoes it. But that doesn't stop our ego from trying!

So whenever you are KEEPING the ego mindset and are trying to INCLUDE spiritual mindsets in some way, you are spiritualizing.

Whenever you try to express, quote, espouse, affirm or act is if you are being or accessing spiritual truths which are WAY higher than the ego's mindset, and you cannot actually ACCESS and experience the level of mind where those truths can be EXPERIENCED, then you are spiritualizing.

So let's see... course quotes and concepts... for example the idea of oneness. You could say to someone like, "it doesnt matter because we are all one". Bullshit. This isn't an EXPERIENCE of the truth of that statement. You can only experience that at a level ABOVE the holy spirit in the mind of HEAVEN. That's the only place where this truth is experiential. Remember, truth is what you can experience. If you cannot experience it, you're kidding yourself every time you make statements about it AS IF you are living it.

Or how about even saying, "I am immortal spirit"... well.. not as an ego you're not. Who is saying you are immortal spirit? It's the ego. You can only BE immortal spirit when you have completely let go of the entire ego mindset. So this information is just... information from another world, from another dimension, another state of mind. Thus it has no PRACTICAL USE for you here, on the ego level, because you cannot EXPERIENCE it here. So it remains lofty. It remains a concept. And then if you spend time just regurgitating the concept, stating it, quoting it, because it 'sounds spiritual', then you are spiritualizing.

You're taking very high truths from very high levels of mind, which require AT LEAST a total atunement to Holy Spirit's mindset AND a total relinquishment of the ego's way of experiencing, and are trying to bring them INTO the ego's mindset. This is spiritualizing. Adding spiritual value to a valueless system. Borrowing spiritual truth from a level of mind that is beyond where you are at. That's faking it. That's spiritualizing your ego. And what happens then is that the best you can do is quote these things and say them and affirm them as if doing so is EXPERIENCING them when in fact you cannot experience them yet, and so they remain MENTAL, and that makes them INTELLECTUAL. Thus you end up intellectualizing the course's truths, you intellectualize higher levels of reality and you pretend that doing so means you are experiencing them here and now. You're not. The ego is deceiving you and trying to be special. And this makes these truths BECOME nothing more than specialness. And then you end up sounding like a bliss ninny, lol

Anyway. I'm sort of expressing this as it's coming to me.

You need to be realistic about the level that you're on, what mind you are IN, the scope of that mind, what is OUTSIDE that mind, what you can actually EXPERIENCE right now, and stop hitting yourself over the head with these lofty spiritualizing ego-inflating truths which you can't even experience yet. You need to focus only on the truths which you can PRACTICALLY APPLY, ie BE EXPERIENCED, to help you to transition your EXPERIENCE from what you are experiencing now in the ego mind to what Holy Spirit will allow you to experience in his mind. If it does not involve your experience, and if it is not practical and you can't actually USE it to change your experience, it is intellectual ego noise trying to spiritualize itself.

I know that I have done this over any over again, believing that if I could just say the correct thing or think the correct thought or understand the correct concept or say it in a special way, that meant that I am BEING IT. I believed that my intellect had the capability of experiencing the truth. Hah. It doesn't. The intellect is only activated when you are not able to LIVE the truth, but are trying to incorporate it into your experience, so you can inject it into your THOUGHTS, which are fantasies, and you can pretend you are living it, but really you are not. If it's stuck in your mind and isn't in your heart or in your feeling or in your actual direct experience of 'reality', then it's not really your truth right now. And if you accumulate a lot of that 'information', no matter how spiritual it is or how lofty the metaphysics, if you are not EXPERIENCING it, then you are spiritualizing your ego. This is what I have done over and over again.

All you are capable of is letting go of the ego mind and the way of experiencing that that mind gives you, and transitioning your experience of reality to the holy spirit's mind where you can experience HIS level of truth fully. Where you can LIVE IT. A course in miracles is all about LIVING the truth and PRACTICING it and PRACTICALLY EXPERIENCING it. The rest is just ego noise.

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT.

God's miracles are as total as His Thought, because they ARE His thoughts. God shines in them all with perfect light."

In heaven, in God's mind, all of God is in all parts of God. Not just that his left hand is on one side and his right hand is on another, so to speak, but all parts of him are simultaneously in all places.... if we can speak of it in terms of space. This is God's omnipresence. Not just that He is everywhere, but ALL of Him is in EVERY location at once. In this sense, God is kind of a "blur".

Similarly, when God has a thought, this thought is alive. It is a living being. His thoughts produce souls. The thing is, since God is whole, absolute, and omnipresent, when He creates or has a thought, it produces something which is also WHOLE, complete, omnipresent. This leads to the interesting and mind-boggling situation, that there are now TWO WHOLE THINGS. God and His child.

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they, were created neither partially nor in part."

"The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been FULLY created. There is no lack in it."

His children are not partial children. They are not finite children. They are infinite, absolute, complete, whole, eternal, endless, unlimited beings. They are completely whole in and of themselves. Which means God, who is whole, and who is whole in every part of Himself, creates a part (a thought) which itself JUST AS WHOLE as God is. And now there are two wholes.

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is perfectly natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you." (this is holographic - the whole in every part!)

Now, logically speaking, to the ego, this is impossible. It makes no sense whatsoever. How can there be two wholes? But heaven's nature has an attribute unlike spacetime which makes it completely possible. That attribute is the fact that everything OVERLAPS AND IS SHARED.

An analogy in spacetime would be that you literally occupy the same space as another person's body. That your atoms occupy the same space. They literally are right on top of each other, overlaid like two layers in one. This isn't possible in spacetime because it would cause atoms to explode, ie death would occur. But in heaven it's opposite - and life occurs.

God and his children are one, in that they are each a whole in and of themselves, and yet are so united that they SHARE and OVERLAP everything. One soul has all of God, full access, total unlimited complete "ownership" of everything God has. AND so does another soul. And another. And another. Each soul has everything.

In this world it's not possible to share anything because everything is finite. If I give you some pizza I can only give you half otherwise I'll have none for myself. But in heaven this doesn't happen. Both can have the whole pizza simultaneously. This is possible because they truly SHARE everything. They both simultaneously have full total access to everything. We both get the same full pizza. This unlimited sharing is oneness.

This same dynamic is actually what Jesus is referring to as "miraculous". This is the miraculous nature of the soul. It's able to have everything, while also sharing everything with others. And therefore there IS EVERYTHING LEFT for another soul to have everything.

Similarly when God creates you he does not "run out of" himself. Since God gives you everything, ego would say there is no God left over at the end. This is nonsense. God gives everything AND retains everything. He does not diminish by creating, he increases creation. This defies ego logic but is completely true and miraculous.

Actually it's not even possible TO create anything real, generally speaking, because if reality is already whole and infinite you cannot ADD to it. BUT, God HAS added to it, miraculously, not by "tacking on" extra being, but by SHARING HIMSELF. Making room, so to speak, within his own being, that he SHARES WITH His creations, so that no "extra room" is needed.

"Nothing real can be increased, EXCEPT by sharing."

This is only possible in a system where all the creations are sharing fully with each other, therefore overlapping fully, one with each other and cooperative. It doesn't require the cessation of individuality, only the cessation of conflict. Or more to the point, the absence of selfishness, which is the opposite of sharing.

All things that are real, are permanently miraculous. They are miraculous because they defy the strict boundaries, exclusions, boxes, limits and selfishness of the ego's thought system. In heaven it is not a problem for multiple individuals to have everything for themselves at the same time. This is impossible in this world. It was the selfishness and exclusion and attempt to NOT SHARE, that produced the entire ego thought system and all of space and time.

What that means is, in God's holographic thought system, every part of God, every individual being, is just as totally whole as God is, at the same time, without there being any issues of "no room" or "private ownership" or "hoarding" or selfishness. It's all totally shared. Shared so much that you are literally one with all your brothers. You are literally THEM, in a sense, because you SHARE everything with them. Yet you are still two, and are still brothers. There are many children of God who are all one.

What some people are calling a paradox, is actually MIRACULOUS. It's paradoxical to say many individual beings can co-exist and have everything at once. But miraculously they can. God is a miracle worker. "You are a miracle." "God's miracles." "Miracle are a universal blessing from God". God is ENTIRELY MIRACULOUS AT ALL TIMES. And being miraculous - having this nature - of shared minds, equality, oneness with others, is completely natural. It's how we're supposed to be all the time. It's why being a miracle worker is permanent.

This is also why miracles are not mere shifts in perception because the fact is that you are uncovering your PERMANENTLY MIRACULOUS nature. Your soul is always miraculous. You are meant to be miraculous all the time, every day. This is why "miracles are natural, when they are not happening something has gone wrong" and "every day should be devoted to miracles." This is also why Jesus is STILL miraculous even after accepting atonement.

Miracles are not the healing EFFECTS that occur, or the shifts. They are a REMEDY, a cause of healing - a spark of life which resurrects. Healing or shifting is the effect. When you are done shifting, you are STILL miraculous. If shifts were miracles you would stop being miraculous when you reached the atonement. You don't. You are in the process of RETURNING TO being miraculous FOREVER, uncovering your miraculous nature, and resuming the nature of your soul. All beings of light are eternally miracles and eternally miraculous.

I have almost as much trouble figuring out how to forgive something now as I did years ago when I started the Course.

When the ego comes up with some problem, it seems to be just as confusing and just as obscuring and distracting. I still seem to have to 'start out' the forgiveness process in a state of blindness and ego allegiance and in the midst of a learning difficulty.

Each time a new lesson comes along, you can bet it's just as 'new' to me as lessons that I learned a long time ago. As the next layer of the onion pops into my awareness, it's just as confounding and unobvious and difficult to deal with as the last one was to begin with. Its a new challenge. A new deception. And when this is happening, it seems that everything I have supposedly 'learned' about ACIM is thrown out the window and I can't even remember how to do a basic forgiveness.

This can make it seem as though I have made no progress whatsoever, because each time a new lesson pops up its back to square one. I can accumulate an intellectual understanding of the Course and evolve my grasp of the metaphysics over time, but when it really comes down to 'how well can I apply it', not a lot has progressed. I know I have gotten better 'skilled' at it if you will, but each challenge is still challenging.

I guess this is because there is simply a lot of 'work' to do, a lot of correction needed and a lot of stuff to sort out. The sorting out can take a long time, and just because you already sorted out 15 boxes of junk and 3 boxes of 'keepers' doesn't mean the next box of junk is any easier to decipher. Here I am, still shoveling shit.

Its not glamorous. It's not what the ego wants or expects, preferring to 'make a constant upward climb' in really noticeable ways. It's not something the ego can master like, some course you can take where you master a module and move on. You're having to constantly reapply the same learning and find ways, in seemingly very real new situations, how to transfer your learning to this new scenario. It's always difficult. And the ego is always resisting doing it just as much if not more than before. It's an ongoing struggle.

Someday I presume the pile of shit will reach the bottom and there won't be any more shit to shovel. Till then, you gotta keep on digging your way out and finding that extra ounce of willingness and extre desire to open up to Holy Spirit and develop more trust. It does get better over time, but it never fails to amaze me how each new lesson is just as much as hassle as the last. There's a lot of layers to the ego onion.

There is part of you which is already in heaven with God. It never left.

That means your spirit-self is already awake and one with God.

Jesus says that like you, He has everything that God gave Him. The only difference between Him and us, is that He has nothing else.

So there is a part of who we think we are, which is "foreign" and not *actually* who we are.

Our only job is to clear away the illusion of that "extra self", a second self, which pretends to be the only self, to reveal the True Self that you are already.

There is already a "second self" - your higher self, which exists already, in "addition" to your ego self. It seems like it does not exist at all, or that it is separate from "you". But you are it, and the "rest of you" that is ego is not.

You cannot make yourself become spirit, or therefore cannot "become" spiritual. You also can’t turn your ego into spirit. You can only stop trying to be something you are not. What is left after the fight against God is surrendered as not necessary, is who you always have been.

You are already immortal spirit. Your confused identity which thinks it is either partly or entirely something else, could in fact communicate with your spirit-self (or higher self) right now, here in the dream. I have even seen an apparition of someone’s "spirit" a couple of times.

Your awakened self already is awake and already exists. Holy Spirit loves to look upon the face of Christ. You as Christ can already communicate with "you as ego", in terms you might accept.

I’ve spoken with my own ‘higher self’ on occasion. I’ve also spoken with the higher self of other people on occasion. It’s interesting that they respond when I am thinking about or talking to some person who is ‘in a body’ and their already-awakened self steps in and says something.

Strange dynamic isn’t it, that the awakened self we are trying to "become" already exists. We are just waking up TO it, not building it from scratch for the first time.

This is also why God/Holy Spirit can communicate with you even while you are in the dream. You don’t have to "make" a Holy Spirit in order to do this.

You are already as God created you, and you are still as God created you. This real self is simply a bit covered up with some illusions which pretend that you are something else. You cannot remove or change what God created, you can only deny it.

This is also why you cannot make yourself die, in the biggest picture. What God has created, no man can put asunder. You cannot change God’s will, thank God.

Become who you already are.

There is part of you which is already in heaven with God. It never left.

That means your spirit-self is already awake and one with God.

Jesus says that like you, He has everything that God gave Him. The only difference between Him and us, is that He has nothing else.

So there is a part of who we think we are, which is "foreign" and not *actually* who we are.

Our only job is to clear away the illusion of that "extra self", a second self, which pretends to be the only self, to reveal the True Self that you are already.

There is already a "second self" - your higher self, which exists already, in "addition" to your ego self. It seems like it does not exist at all, or that it is separate from "you". But you are it, and the "rest of you" that is ego is not.

You cannot make yourself become spirit, or therefore cannot "become" spiritual. You also can’t turn your ego into spirit. You can only stop trying to be something you are not. What is left after the fight against God is surrendered as not necessary, is who you always have been.

You are already immortal spirit. Your confused identity which thinks it is either partly or entirely something else, could in fact communicate with your spirit-self (or higher self) right now, here in the dream. I have even seen an apparition of someone’s "spirit" a couple of times.

Your awakened self already is awake and already exists. Holy Spirit loves to look upon the face of Christ. You as Christ can already communicate with "you as ego", in terms you might accept.

I’ve spoken with my own ‘higher self’ on occasion. I’ve also spoken with the higher self of other people on occasion. It’s interesting that they respond when I am thinking about or talking to some person who is ‘in a body’ and their already-awakened self steps in and says something.

Strange dynamic isn’t it, that the awakened self we are trying to "become" already exists. We are just waking up TO it, not building it from scratch for the first time.

This is also why God/Holy Spirit can communicate with you even while you are in the dream. You don’t have to "make" a Holy Spirit in order to do this.

You are already as God created you, and you are still as God created you. This real self is simply a bit covered up with some illusions which pretend that you are something else. You cannot remove or change what God created, you can only deny it.

This is also why you cannot make yourself die, in the biggest picture. What God has created, no man can put asunder. You cannot change God’s will, thank God.

Become who you already are.

When you defend your ego self, you become righteous. And as you do this, you will become angry.

The Course says "anger is never justified", but when we are defending an idea of "why I am right", I AM attempting to justify myself.

I'm trying to say, "I am right because...", and I will use anger and intensification of the ego in order to try to 'rise up against' whatever is saying otherwise. How dare they accuse me!

Ok... so the antidote is simple. I have to be willing, even if I might have grounds in normal worldly terms for being justified, to let go of trying to be right. To let go of defending myself.

A person will only defend themselves if they believe they do NOT have grounds to stand on!

A person who is actually in the honest truth does not need to defend themselves because they don't perceive that something 'false' in them has been truly pointed out. They will stand firm and remain calm and smile.

It's only when a person's ego is activated, that they will start to defend it, because there is some truth to what the other person is then accusing them (their ego) of. And you'll try to defend that ego self because you, yourself, are horrified that 'its true' that your ego is standing on false ground.

So really we then get wound up by someone pointing out our flaws and our ego allegiances. If we didn't have these, we wouldn't be triggered and wouldn't try to defend it.

Defenses then are attempts to add shielding and extra protections to reinforce a FLAWED position - an ego position, which you've taken in error. And because that position is ego, it is vulnerable, and thus needs reinforcement and defense in order to keep bolstering it up, so that you can keep believing it is strong and firm. But it is really a weakness.

Funny that a show of anger is really a show of weakness, trying to appear strong to cover up a believe in a lack of true strength. And what is another word for a weakness or lack of true strength? Fear. Fear is always underneath anger and anger is a reaction to try to cover it up or compensate for it by *pretending* that you are excessively strong.

Choosing not to defend myself, by not believing that I'm 'right', which is an error, because that really means I'm 'wrong', allows me to stay calm and unengaged and detached from provocations.

There's nothing to defend when there is no ego present. And there's no need to then justify and rationalize why the ego is right.

When you blame another person or think that something outside of you has 'caused you' to change in some unwanted way, you THINK that you are being powerful by finding them guilty.

Jesus says in ACIM that anger is an attempt to make someone guilty.

Every time you are angry at someone you are trying to claim and prove that they are wrong.

You think that this makes you more powerful, because you feel JUSTIFIED, and you see yourself as having been unfairly treated.

You did not see what you did to yourself, so you think they did it to you. SOMEONE must be responsible! When you don't see that it was you, you start looking for another cause to pin it on. SOMEONE must be guilty.

It seems to feel empowering and justifying to find out who did this to you. It seems to make you more right and more innocent and more righteous, to point out how someone else was wrong - that it wasn't you.

You couple innocence with attack and justify it by explaining what it was someone ELSE caused.

But when you do this, although it seems like an experience of power and intensity, it is in fact a state of weakness. It is a state of disempowerment. Your attempt to find another person wrong means that you are finding them guilty and weak. But since they are YOU, you are indirectly finding this about yourself.

So as you project your blame, you will also feel guilty, because what you are accusing someone of, your mind (which is one with theirs) knows that you're talking about YOU as well. What applies to them applies to you even if you are in denial of that.

So having this angry reaction doesn't make you powerful, but it makes the ego seem powerful, and you will feel extra justified and innocent when you are like this. You will think this lets you off the hook. It's a way to conveniently shift attention away from YOUR guilt, to point out the guilt of others, so that people won't notice what YOU have been doing. It's a cover-up.

Thinking you have this angry power makes you disempowered, because you're giving away your certainty, peace, and are replacing your REAL innocence with a fake innocence. You're trading the strength and integrity of responsibility, for the weakness and loss induced by believing you are NOT responsible - that it's someone else who is.

If you are not responsible, you are not yourself. If you are not responsible, you are a victim. If you are not responsible, you are vulnerable to attack. If you are not responsible, you will go into unconscious insanity.

This is why as ACIM says, "anger is never justified". It literally is always a lie and always mistaken. You simply did not see what you did to yourself, what you chose, what you asked for, and what you created. If you are blind to your OWN responsibility, you will find everyone else to be responsible instead, because it's just you trying to make sense of WHY something happened.

When stuff goes wrong, it is not anyone's fault. Responsibility isn't fault. Responsibility is faultless.