If the experience of guilt is nightmarish, what would the experience of innocence be?

Like the ideas in this Course’s Text that this Workbook practices, the ideas that are used for these exercises, correctly understood, are very simple, clear, and unambiguous. We are not concerned with intellectual accomplishments or logical baubles. We are dealing only in what will become very obvious, but has been unnoticed in the clouds of complexity that characterize the thought processes of the world.

If the experience of guilt is nightmarish, what would the experience of innocence be? This is surely not a difficult question to answer. The hesitation you may feel in answering is not due to the ambiguity of the question. But do you believe that guilt is merely a nightmare? If you did, you would understand at once how direct and simple this Course’s Text is, and you would not need a Workbook at all. No one needs practice to gain what is already theirs.

This Course has already said that your holiness is the awakening of the world. What about your own awakening? You cannot give what you do not have. One who is learning and sharing awakening must be awakening. How else could they truly teach awakening? Today’s exercises will apply to you alone, recognizing that your awakening is crucial to the awakening of the world. As you apply the exercises to your own world, the whole world stands to benefit.

Your holiness is the Answer to every question that was ever asked, is being asked now, or will be asked in the future. Your holiness means the end of guilt, and therefore the end of nightmares. Your holiness is your awakening and the awakening of the world. How could you to whom your holiness belongs be excluded from awakening? The Divine knows only Holiness. Thereby does the Divine know Its Own Children.

A full five minutes are required for the four longer practice periods for today, and longer sessions are encouraged, as well as more frequent practice. If you want to exceed the minimum requirements, more rather than longer sessions are recommended, although both are encouraged.

Begin the practice periods, as usual, by repeating today’s idea to yourself. Then, with closed eyes, search out your unloving thoughts in whatever form they appear: as uneasiness, depression, anger, fear, worry, attack, insecurity, and so on. Whatever form such thoughts take, they are fearful and therefore unloving to yourself and others. And so it is from them that you need to be awakened.

Specific situations, events, or personalities you associate with unloving thoughts of any kind are suitable subjects for today’s exercises. It is imperative for your own awakening that you perceive them differently than you have in the past, and perceive them clearly. And it is your blessing on them that will awaken you and give you vision.

Slowly, without conscious selection and without undue emphasis on any one in particular, search your mind for every thought that stands between you and your awakening. Apply the idea for today to each one of them in this way:

“My unloving thoughts about _____ are keeping me in my nightmare of guilt. My holiness is my awakening.”

You may find these practice periods easier if you include in them several short intervals during which you merely repeat today’s idea to yourself slowly a few times. You may also find it helpful to include a few short intervals in which you just relax and do not seem to be thinking of anything. Sustained concentration is very difficult at first. It will become much easier as your mind becomes more disciplined and less distractible.

Meanwhile, you should feel free to introduce variety into your practice periods, in whatever form appeals to you. Do not, however, change the idea itself in varying the method of applying it. In whatever way you elect to vary the idea, it should be stated so that its meaning has as its core that your holiness is your awakening.

End each practice period by repeating the idea in its original form once more, and adding:

If the experience of guilt is nightmarish, what would the experience of innocence be?

In the shorter applications, which should be made some three or four times an hour and more if possible, you may ask yourself this question, repeat today’s idea, or preferably both.

If temptations to mis-project – to blame the world you perceive outside yourself for what you are experiencing – arise during the day, a particularly helpful form of the idea is:

“My holiness is my awakening from this.”