Defensiveness is our problem. If we want to know peace, then we have to become responsible for our defensiveness. We have to become defenseless.
Defensiveness leads to attack, which inspires defensiveness in our brothers and sisters, which in turn leads to their attack on us, which inspires yet more defensiveness in us, which . . .
Defensiveness is weakness. It proclaims you have denied the Christ and come to fear His Father's anger. What can save you now from your delusion of an angry god, whose fearful image you believe you see at work in all the evils of the world (W-pI.153.7:1-3)?
There is another way.
Defensiveness and projection are similar. We project fear, guilt and hatred onto others because we feel threatened by fear, guilt and hatred. We don't want to face them where they are in us, so we cast them out. Then, believing we are free of fear, guilt and hatred, we despise others for being hateful, guilty and fearful.
When we see in a brother or sister some quality or attribute that deserves condemnation, it is simply our defensiveness at work. And if we actively do condemn that quality or attribute, then we are attacking that brother or sister.
The way out of this nightmarish loop is to become responsible for projection. To be responsible for projection is to be willing to adopt a posture of defenselessness.
Defenselessness is strength. It testifies to recognition of the Christ in you . . . Defenselessness can never be attacked, because it recognizes strength so great attack is folly, or a silly game a tired child might play, when he becomes too sleepy to remember what he wants (W-pI.153.6:1-2, 4).
We might think of this as a kind of internal ahimsa, a conscious decision to be nonviolent with respect to our selves and the whole of Creation.
That is, we recognize that defensiveness is a form of attack, perpetuating a cycle of violence with brothers and sisters who merit only love and respect, and so we refuse to be defensive. We refuse to project.
This means that we become willing to look at fear, guilt and hatred inside of us without resorting to projection as a means of defense. Are we scared? Angry? Uncertain? Then we will sit with it. With the Holy Spirit and Christ we will be present to it. We will not allow harm come to any brother or sister.
This is not easy! It is easy to hate Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It seems to just happen; it seems they are so obviously wrong about everything, to the point of being evil. How could any sane person see them otherwise?
It is easy to blame our parents for our lives. After all, they were in charge during our formative years. They were the adult in the situation. All that conditioning inflicted on us through negative reinforcement, punishment, intolerance of our true self . . . They did that. We were just kids!
It is so easy to project - and thus to defend ourselves - that we don't even notice it happening. It feels right, just, logical, fair. It feels healthy.
But the problem is never what others did or do. The problem is how we are looking at them. Right now we look at the world through a dense fog created by projection, which means we don't really see at all.
Because we do not see reality clearly, we default into attack and defense, which are both products of a belief in separation and major contributors to that belief. There has to be someone to attack and someone to resist the attack and mount a counter-attack.
And so long as we believe in separation, there always will be that someone . . .
So the suggestion is that we make an intentional decision to see our defensiveness and how it functions in our thinking. We want to see projection clearly; we want to perceive our innate need for self-defense clearly.
We want to lean all the way into our belief in separation. We want to see just how insane it is, and just how it much it hurts. Only then can it be unconditionally undone for us.
That is the work. That is what we have to do. And that is all we have to do, because the fix - which is forgiveness - is not a function of the separated self.
Extension of forgiveness is the Holy Spirit's function. Leave this to Him. Let your concern be only that you give to Him that which can be extended. Save no dark secrets that He cannot use, but offer Him the tiny gifts He can extend forever. He will take each one and make of it a potent force for peace (T-22.VI.9:2-6).
We do not have to undo separation. We do not have to extend love instead of projecting hate. Separation naturally ends when we stop giving attention to it. When we see what blocks the flow of love, then the flow of love is naturally restored.
We simply have to want that love, and want nothing else in addition to it.
To withhold the smallest gift is not to know love's purpose. Love offers everything forever. Hold back but one belief, one offering, and love is gone, because you asked a substitute to take its place (T-24.I.1:2-4).
True seeing is healing because clarity is healing because it restores to our memory what we are in truth. When we know that we are lost, then we are no longer lost but found. Our journey home ends where it begins: home.
This is what our study and practice of A Course in Miracles does: it delivers us to the beginning, forever new in us, which is the end of fear and the remembrance of Love.
Love,
Sean