More on Specialness

Editor's note: This transcript has been lightly edited to bring clarification to certain points of the dialogue and for easier readability. For this reason, it does not match the corresponding audio mp3 word-for-word. However, the overall content and the expressed ideas remain unchanged.

Participant: The whole section on special relationships was real disconcerting to me. Can’t I see anything special in anybody? I still don’t understand it completely. If I go into a card shop, I feel guilty if I pick up a card for someone special. There are people who mean more to me than other people do; so, they’re special to me.

Speaker: This offering of the ego is just like all of its others. Some of the offerings of the ego are pretty gross so the mind can say, “Yuck, I can see this. I don’t want this.” But Jesus is saying that the special relationships are so insidious. They seem to offer so much value to the mind that the mind can’t see them as part of just another scam.

The special love relationship is the ego’s ace card. It’s sitting back saying, ah, you got through the whole deck. But, here’s the ace. Once the mind can start to see that offering for what it is then the ego is really out of business. That’s the good news! The ego has no hope of holding on with its stronghold. But I think I hear you say that it’s very disconcerting, you have issues when you go through some of that. If you also look at when we do make some people more special than others, it brings about the condition where there is order of difficulty in miracles. I’ve heard people say, I’ve been able to forgive my next door neighbor, I’m able to forgive my boss, but, my wife or husband! There are certain relationships that seem to be sticking points. It’s because there’s an order of difficulty that’s interposed by the mind. The mind has so much invested in some of these relationships. That’s why it’s held them up and held them dear, because it really believes that its worth is very much established through these relationships. Parents have the feeling of wanting to live through their children. Get the pictures out, children or grandchildren, they’re accomplishments. Like I’ve done a good job as a mother or a father or I’m a good grandpa or grandma and I feel a sense of pride and worth because of this and therefore there’s a special relationship set up with the kid. You can do the same with parents. Kids grow up and they think that mom and dad can do no wrong when they’re young. It’s devastating when mom and dad are no longer perfect. The pain comes from that specialness. I would say with the special love relationship even with the significant other like husbands and wives and couples, that there’s so much of an identity attachment that if somebody else starts to cut down or to start to say something about your special love partner, up come the defenses. You don’t know him or her. How can you say those things?! A lot of the defending comes in because a lot of the emotional eggs have been piled into this basket with this other person and there’s a big investment. So, I can sense where you’re coming from with that thing about special relationships because that’s the ego’s stronghold that it doesn’t want unveiled.

We were talking about the very deep ontological guilt that is buried in the mind in believing that I have actually separated from God which is too tremendous to look at and therefore gets splintered out into the world of form. It can be having an investment in a special love partner or having special hate relationships. You see maybe the Mussolini’s, the Hitler’s and the mass murderers are the ones who tend to be put into the special hate category. It’s like that’s awful. Who could do such a thing? Hitler would get in one category and mother Teresa fits nicely in another. Oh, everyone loves Mother Teresa. But it splits the sonship up. It even goes more into objects. It’s possible to form special relationships with cars, houses, particular foods, particular climates, body forms, jobs. There’s an ordering that’s going on. As you were saying it’s highly individualized. Each ego fragment seems to have a hierarchy of special things that are highly valued in this world and some things are seen as take it or leave it, and then there are ones that are downright rotten and should be avoided. That’s like a configuration and an ordering that takes place.

Participant: It’s all an avoidance of the core issue that I can’t face, that I think I’m separate from God. So, all these relationships are ways to hang on to the avoidance of going within.

Speaker: They’re distractions. We talked before about the mind being so afraid of not only the dark belief, seemingly the ego in there, but it’s afraid of what’s beneath the ego which is the light. It’s terrified because the ego has said, ‘Don’t go near that light. You’ve pulled yourself away from heaven and if you ever get down here into the mind and get down to that light, that light will just strike you dead so fast and will obliterate you.’ So, the mind has run away from the light and into the world of form and specifics, and it’s clinging and attaching itself to specific form to give itself some meaning. Because it feels like it’s thrown away the kingdom of heaven.

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