Facing What We'd Rather Not Face

Notes on our responsibility for ending projection

Content Warning: Discussion of how internal horrors appear externally. More graphic than usual, including a graphic image. Love and gratitude to those of you who helped me work on this this week.

There is a force in the world that brings forth war and suffering. Its handiwork is everywhere - migrants hiding in shipping containers, bombs falling on Kiev, famine in Yemen. It's not all that is out there but it is out there.

Sometimes a fellow ACIM student will say, but Sean, all that is an illusion! It's not real!

wooden christs out back in snowy cold

This is an example (usually well-intentioned) of using Course metaphysics as a defense against application of what the Course is teaching us. We forget what the Preface makes unmistakably clear: A Course in Miracles emphasizes “application rather than theory, and experience rather than theology.”

To deny the appearance and apparent reality of conflict is a profound disservice to Truth and to healing. Jesus - and the Holy Spirit guidance we share with him as Christ - asks us to look directly at conflict.

Let us not save nightmares, for they are not fitting offerings for Christ, and so they are not fit gifts for you. Take off the covers and look at what you are afraid of . . . Let us not delay this, for your dream of hatred will not leave you without help, and Help is here (T-12.II.5:1-2, 4).

When we go into conflict this way, we eventually see past specific examples - things that happen to other bodies, that require my body to notice, like a bomb or an emaciated child. Instead, we "see" the fear, hate and anger driving those examples. They don’t have form; they aren’t confined to the interior of a skull.

I put "see" in quotes because when we see this way we are no longer using the body’s eyes. We are using Christ Vision, which is the means by which Christ Mind knows what is true and what is false. It's another level of perception altogether.

In Christ’s sight, the world and God’s creation meet, and as they come together all perception disappears. His kindly sight redeems the world from death, for nothing that He looks on but must live, remembering the Father and the Son; Creator and creation unified (W-pII.271.1:3-4).

When we reach the abstract level of fear, hate and anger the external horror show is instantly transformed - it gets worse. Before it gets better, it gets worse, because it’s no longer external - it’s internal. The "rough beast" that Yeats imagined "slouching towards Bethlehem to be born" turns out to be alive and well in us. The phone call is coming from inside the house.

Is it clear? There is not war, poverty and torture "out there." There is only fear, hate and anger "in here." Period.

All external appearances of suffering are a result of our shared projection of fear, hate and anger. Therefore, we cannot end that suffering through victory in battle or donations to the right NGO; we can only end it by facing its origins in the deep interior of our mind.

If you go deeply into your fear - your fear of murder, holocaust, starvation - then eventually you will see that you are the reason all those things exist. You will see that you want them, and that your wanting is what brings them forth. It was always thus, and will remain thus until we choose otherwise.

But Sean, you say. I don't want a holocaust. I don't want children to starve to death.

No.

What you don't want is the psychological pain and challenge of facing fear where it is, which is inside you and so you project it. And once it's outside of you, you deny it's yours, and so it runs wild in the world and eventually we get Dachau and Hiroshima and this:

Alan Kurdi, two-year old Syrian refugee boy who drowned with his mother and sister. Photo by Nilüfer Demir.

This is what our willingness to project has done. You think Alan’s mother took him on a raft into the ocean because you and I are channeling Christ energy?

No. She did it because we refuse to channel Christ energy.

I understand that all we want is relief from the pain and fear inside but we have to see that not only do we not get relief from all that (the denial involved in sustaining projection is brutal) but we are destroying our brothers and sisters.

You are doing this - up to and including Dachau, Hiroshima and Alan Kurdi - to yourself.

Fortunately, there is another way.

What saves us is that your projection and my projection are the same. Fear is fear, hate is hate. When you look at me and see a man who would destroy the world rather than face his fear, you see a brother who lives in fear of himself, who hates himself, and hates the God who made him this way. The grace is knowing that your brother’s struggle is your struggle.

This is where faith enters our ACIM practice. This is where faith has to enter our practice.

When you see the horror show, and recognize you are its author, then the only thing that will save you is your faith - weak, faltering, unjustified, naive - that you are wrong about yourself and the world, and that A Course in Miracles is correct that God really is Love, and you are not separate from anyone or anything, and that Creation is perfectly just, merciful and loving.

This is not an intellectual argument. It's not a theological proposition to which we give assent. It's closing your eyes and toppling into the abyss, trusting God to catch you.

“Toppling-in-trust" is what A Course in Miracles calls forgiveness. Its effect is that you will no longer deny the other, no matter how morally, ethically or physically repulsive you find them. You will love them in full recognition of the horror they bring forth through confusion, ignorance, hatred and fear because you will know that it is not their confusion, ignorance, hatred and fear but yours.

No one forgives unless he has believed in sin, and still believes that he has much to be forgiven. Forgiveness thus becomes the means by which he learns he has done nothing to forgive. Forgiveness always rests upon the one who offers it, until he sees himself as needing it no more (T-26.IV.1:5-7).

It's easy to forgive the sister who forgets to return our call, or the brother who screws up the dinner order. I am saying - because the Course is saying - find out for real what it means that there is no order of difficulty in miracles (T-1.I.1:1). Love the serial killer, the arms dealer, the camp guard and the war lord.

Like, love them.

Become nonviolent in the only way that truly matters. Trust God so much that loving your enemy is easy, natural, so much so you literally don’t even notice you’re doing it. And if you can’t do that, then at least don’t justify it. Call it what it is: a failure to think as God thinks (T-6.I.18:6), and a failure to meet our function of loving in a loveless place (T-14.IV.4:10).

I am saying become truly willing to take in your arms the most evil person you know and . . .

. . . and discover it is you who are held, you who are healed. It is you who are made whole. It is you who remember all this is a nightmare from which our Father in Heaven gently calls us to awaken.

You are a child of God, a priceless part of His Kingdom, which He created as part of Him. Nothing else exists and only this is real. You have chosen a sleep in which you have had bad dreams, but the sleep is not real and God calls you to awake (T-6.IV.6:1-3).

Those sentences are meaningless unless and until they apply to all our brothers and sisters, without exception or qualification, and that application is a decision that you and I must make together.

You understand why I am saying this, right? And why I’m saying it the way that I’m saying it? It's not that I figured something out about Love, or mastered A Course in Miracles, or became enlightened over the weekend. It's that I'm confused still, I'm lost still. I’m scared still.

This isn't a lecture; it's a cry for love.

Now what?

Love,
Sean