Hi Everyone, I am so pleased to be able to share this wonderful information with you. This is the first part....more will follow next week. Have a blessed weekend. In Peace, Love & Appreciation, iriana
Special Relationships
"Love is not learned. Its meaning lies within itself. And learning ends when you have recognized all it is not. That is the interference; that is what needs to be undone." --ACIM
Nowhere in our lives is the backward, upside-down, and pain-producing thinking of the ego more apparent than in our relationships. Yet we have bought into the ego’s thought system so thoroughly that, although our relationships always seem to involve—and frequently end in—pain, we rarely question the very premises on which we attempt to build them.
What A Course in Miracles calls special relationships, or illusions of love, are those relationships in which we believe that something outside of us can fill up or compensate for what seems to be lacking inside—that something outside ourselves can make us feel happy, loved, worthy, safe, important, powerful, whole, fulfilled. Special love finds expression in our lives as addictions, such as addictions to alcohol, drugs, food, sex, work. We can have special relationships with things, like our cars, our homes, our possessions, our jobs. Most often, though, it is the special relationships we form with other people that cause us the greatest anguish, and at the same time provide us with the greatest opportunities for growth, transformation, and healing.
Special relationships with people are not limited to romantic or sexual relationships, although these kinds of relationships seem to be a place we frequently get caught in the illusion of love. But the dynamics and fantasies of special love can also operate in the relationships we have with our friends, our families, our teachers, etc. Whenever these relationships have become a source of conflict, disappointment, frustration, and pain in our lives, we can be certain that special love has been at play.
Special love is literally a contradiction in terms. Real love is inclusive, not exclusive. Its very nature is to extend, to share, to reach out from and beyond itself.
Real love sets no conditions, makes no demands, sets up no bargains. Real love is naturally generous, expanding. It gives freely and joyfully from the abundance of its own nature—which is limitless—and it can only increase in the giving. By contrast, special love is based on a belief in, and feeling of, lack. The longing for specialness says "I don’t have enough. I want and need more." This experience of lack grows out of our profound sense of separation from our real spiritual identity—from God and the love that is our true nature. Believing this state of lack to be our reality, we seek specialness as a substitute for the wholeness we have forgotten is our inheritance as part of God.
Specialness by its very nature must limit and exclude, because one is special by being set apart from others, by having something others do not have, by being different or by having more of something while others have less. Inherent in the very structure and assumption of specialness, then, is the set-up for envy, jealousy, fear of loss, and a belief that we need to defend whatever we have from others who would try to steal it from us. Specialness literally sets us up to be at war with each other, and war has nothing to do with love.
The Course points out that the special love relationship is the ego’s most powerful weapon in its arsenal for keeping us bound to our nightmares of guilt and fear. For in these relationships, the ego disguises its "gifts" of hopelessness and pain in glittering promises of the fulfillment of our hopes and dreams. When we end up, again and again, in pain, lonely, and unfulfilled, the ego counsels us to blame the other person and look for someone else. Or it tells us that we are, after all, not good enough—leaving us desperately hoping that someday someone will prove to us we are wrong. Finally, the ego may offer us the option of cynicism and the conviction that love does not exist.
The Course tells us there is an alternative to this cycle of infatuation, disillusionment, desperation, anger, and blame that characterize special love. But in order to be open to the alternative, we need first to recognize that beneath all its promises of happiness, special relationships really offer us nothing but self-attack and belittlement.
"In looking at the special relationship, it is necessary first to realize it involves a great amount of pain. Anxiety, despair, guilt and attack all enter into it, broken by periods in which they seem to be gone ... and even when the hatred and savagery break briefly through, the illusion of love is not profoundly shaken.
Yet the one thing the ego never allows to reach awareness is that the special relationship is the acting out of vengeance on yourself. Yet what else could it be? In seeking the special relationship, you look not for glory in yourself. You have denied that it is there, and the relationship becomes your substitute for it." --ACIM
Once we are willing to look truthfully at the pain and ugliness built into the very structure and dynamics of the special relationship, we eventually become willing to let go of the hope that we will ever find our fulfillment there. Finally we reach a point where we can genuinely say, "I hope there is an alternative to this, and I don’t know what it is."
The alternative that the Course holds out to us is not a swearing off or avoidance of relationships. The alternative is, rather, the transformation of the special relationship into a holy relationship—a relationship which has been given over to the Holy Spirit to be used for healing, to be used as a classroom for forgiveness.
"Be glad you have escaped the mockery of salvation (happiness) the ego offered you, and look not back with longing on the travesty it made of your relationships. Now no one need suffer, for you have come too far to yield to the illusion of the beauty of guilt ...
What guilt has wrought is ugly, fearful, and very dangerous. See no illusion of truth and beauty there. And be thankful that there is a place where truth and beauty wait for you. Go on to meet them gladly, and learn how much awaits you for the simple willingness to give up nothing because it is nothing." --ACIM