“Why don’t our closest relationships seem to work?” -Ken Wapnick April 4, 2013.... One question often asked by students of A Course in Miracles is, “Why don’t our closest relationships seem to work?” The answer is simply this: because we don’t want them to work; because if we wanted them to work, then they would work. And we don’t want them to work because that proves that we’re right and God is wrong, and herein lies the story; that if God is right, then we don’t exist. If God is right, there is no world; there is no individuality, there’s no separation, there’s no Body and there’s no I. And so, rather than give up the very special attachment we have to ourselves, we’re hell-bent, literally, on proving God is wrong. And so what better way to prove God is wrong than that nothing in this world works, and it’s all his fault. And so we begin and we end with relationships. That’s why they don’t work, because if we wanted them to work, they would work. The purpose of relationships is two-fold. It depends which self we’re choosing, or as the Course would say, which Mind we’re choosing, the Wrong Mind or the Right Mind. If we choose the Ego, which is the teacher of our Wrong Mind and thought system, then the purpose of relationships is to fail. The purpose of relationships is to prove that we’re right and the other person’s wrong. The purpose of relationships is to solidify, I believe, in the reality of guilt, but that the guilt does not lie within us, the guilt lies in someone else. The Course actually talks about two kinds of relationships: special love relationships and special hate relationships. The purpose of special hate relationships, quite clearly, it’s to say someone else has done me in, someone else has victimized me and I am the victim of somebody else’s abuse, victimization, insensitivity, unkindness, betrayal, abandonment, etc., and all my suffering is due to what this terrible person has done to me. And so, following my Ego, I would seek after people who will take advantage of me, who will abuse me, misuse me and basically treat me unfairly. And as an underlying agenda that we all have for this, if someone else is a sinner, and I’m sinned against, if someone else is a victimizer and I’m the victim, then that means a two-fold thing has been accomplished. It solidifies the fact that “I” exist, I’m a real individual, I have a history, I have a whole set of experiences that make me who I am, but, most importantly of all – it is not my fault. And so, as A Course in Miracles would teach us, this allows me to have my Ego’s cake and to enjoy it. I have my Ego’s cake of separation: that means I separated from God and that’s an accomplished fact – but it is not my fault. Someone else did it to me, which means that person will be punished instead of me. That whole series of relationships is what the Course calls special hate relationships. Then there are the more subtle special hate relationships that go under the guise of special love. These are the people we think we love. These are the people we think care about us, and whom we care about. These are the people that we’re dependent on. These are the people that we say, “Without you, my life would be meaningless. Without you, my life would be trivial. Without you, I would be unloved. Without you, I’d have a terrible image of myself. Without you, I would not even be born,” and so on. Our original special love relationship is with our parents. And so these relationships are set up to also reinforce separation. And very cleverly what we will do is, we set a trap, and we all draw a line in the sand. And it doesn’t matter whether that line is crossed in one day, one week, one year, or ten years or ten decades. At some point our special love relationship will fail. And then we say those famous lines, “Because of what you’ve done, I’m terrible,” and “What happened to you? You used to be such a kind, loving, sensitive, thoughtful person and now you’ve changed and I’m suffering because of you.” And so in an instant, that special love has turned into special hate. And so the purpose of all relationships, again from the Ego’s point of view, is to sustain our individual and special and unique identity, and blame somebody else for it. That allows us to keep our self but not to be punished. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit or Jesus, which are the two names the Course uses for our Inner Teacher, their purpose for our relationships is to learn and practice forgiveness. And the essence of forgiveness, from A Course in Miracles’ point of view, is that, no matter what you have done to me, no matter how unkind, no matter how attacking, insulting, abusive you have been, you are not responsible for my not feeling good about myself. In other words, your body may have power to take advantage and abuse and hurt my body, but you cannot affect my Mind. Only I have power over my Mind and if I don’t experience the Love and the Peace of God, it’s not your fault. No matter what you have done, it is not your fault. If I do not experience the Love and the Peace of God, it’s because I have thrown that Love and that Peace away – judging them as not nearly as important to me or as valuable as my own sense of personal identity. Rather than accept responsibility for this decision, I project it onto you and I say “You’ve done this to me.” One of the famous lines in the Course, in terms of its definition of forgiveness, is that we forgive someone for what he or she has not done to us, not what they have done to us. So again, whatever they’ve done to our bodies, our physical, psychological self, they are not responsible for the lack of Peace in our minds. And so we forgive them for not having done that to us. Without that understanding, forgiveness in this world is impossible. One of the points here is to recognize why this is so difficult. It’s so difficult because we have such a strong investment in being right and making the other person wrong. This can’t be said often enough: that if I let you off the hook, that means I am responsible for everything that I have experienced, am experiencing and will yet experience in my life. And that makes me totally responsible. And so our Ego tells us that if God ever finds out who the real sinner is, and I’m afraid that it would be me, I would be the one who would be punished. And to avoid that inevitable punishment, we continue to project onto other people and want other people to treat us this way. That’s what makes forgiveness so difficult and that’s what makes the Course so unique as a spiritual path. It doesn’t focus on Love, it doesn’t focus on Truth; it doesn’t focus on forgiveness in the usual sense of the word. It really focuses on the resistance we have to accepting the Love, and if we don’t let go of the resistance, nothing we do, no matter how many times we started the Course or any other spirituality, we will inevitably fail. What the Course says is, “Unveil for us our secret wish to be unfairly treated.” There’s a line in A Course in Miracles that says, “Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated.” And that is a problem. We want to be unfairly treated. This does not make me responsible for another’s Ego; so if you abuse me, if you hurt me, if you steal from me, if you kill me, I’m not responsible for what you’ve done. But I am responsible for how I feel about what you’ve done. And I am responsible for my secret wish that, once again, I do be abused and I would be unfairly treated. Because in that moment when that happens, I’m off the hook – and someone else will be punished instead of me.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 21:03:47 +0000
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