OrEd-T-16.6-Specialness and Guilt-1

OrEd-T-16.6-Specialness and Guilt-1 43. In looking at the special relationship, it is necessary to realize that it involves a great amount of pain. Anxiety, despair, guilt, and attack, all enter into the special relationship, interrupted by periods in which they SEEM to be gone. All this pain must be understood for what it is. Whatever form it takes, it is always an attack on the self, to make the OTHER guilty. This has been spoken of before, but some of what is being attempted has not been touched on.44. The attempt to make guilty is ALWAYS directed against God. The ego would have me see God alone as guilty, leaving the Sonship unprotected. The special love relationship is the ego's chief weapon for keeping me from Heaven. Special relationship does not SEEM to be a weapon, but if I consider how I value it and why, I will realize what it must be. Special love relationship is the ego's most boasted gift, and one which has the most appeal to those unwilling to relinquish guilt. The "dynamics" of the ego are clearest here. The fantasies which center around it are often quite open, and judged to be acceptable and even natural. And it is not considered bizarre to love and hate at the same time. Even those who believe that hate is sin, merely feel guilty. 45. This is the "natural" condition of the separation, and those who learn that it is not natural at all seem to be the "unnatural" ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, being made to be its opposite. Everything here takes a direction exactly opposite of what is true. In Heaven, where the meaning of love is know, love is the same as UNION. In the ego's world, where the illusion of love is accepted in love's place, love is perceived as separation and EXCLUSION. 46. It is in the special relationship, born of the hidden wish for special love from God, that the ego's hatred triumphs. For the special relationship is the RENUNCIATION of the love of God, and the attempt to secure for the self the specialness which He denied. It is essential to the preservation of the ego that I believe this specialness is not hell, but Heaven. For the ego would never have me see that separation can ONLY be loss, being the one condition in which Heaven CANNOT be.47. To everyone Heaven is completion. Both the ego and the Holy Spirit agree on this. However, they are in complete disagreement on what completion is, and how it is accomplished. The Holy Spirit knows that completion lies in union, and in the extension of union. The ego believes completion lies in triumph, and the extension of the triumph to be over God. In this it sees the ultimate freedom of the self, for nothing would remain to interfere with the ego. This is the ego's idea of Heaven. It follows then that union, which is a condition in which the ego cannot interfere, must be hell. 48. The special relationship is a strange and unnatural ego device for joining hell and Heaven without telling them apart. The attempt to find the imagined "best of both worlds", has led to fantasies of both, and to the inability to perceive either one as it is. The special relationship is the triumph of this confusion. It is a kind of union from which union is excluded, and the basis for the attempt at union rests on exclusion. This is a perfect example of the ego's maxim, "Seek but do not find." 49. The "self" seeks the relationship to make itself complete. Yet, when it finds this special relationship, it gives itself away, and tries to "trade" itself for the self of the other. This is not union, for there is no increase and no extension. Each partner tries to sacrifice the "self" he does not want for one he thinks he would prefer. Then he feels guilty for the "sin" of taking, and giving nothing of value in return. How much value can he place upon a "self" that he would give away to get a better one?