The Choice for Completion

Chapter 16 – 5. The Choice for Completion

In looking at the special relationship, it is necessary first to realize that it
involves a great amount of pain. Anxiety, despair, guilt and attack all enter
into it, broken into by periods in which they seem to be gone. All these must
be understood for what they are. Whatever form they take, they are always
an attack on the self to make the other guilty. I have spoken of this before,
but there are some aspects of what is really being attempted that have not
been touched upon.
 
Very simply, the attempt to make guilty is always directed against God. For
the ego would have you see Him, and Him alone, as guilty, leaving the
Sonship open to attack and unprotected from it. The special love
relationship is the ego’s chief weapon for keeping you from Heaven. It does
not appear to be a weapon, but if you consider how you value it and why,
you will realize what it must be.
 
The 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, for counting on the attraction of this offering,
the fantasies that center around it are often quite overt. Here they are usually
judged to be acceptable and even natural. No one considers it bizarre to love
and hate together, and even those who believe that hate is sin merely feel
guilty, but do not correct it. 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, and everything here takes a direction exactly opposite of what is
true. In Heaven, where the meaning of love is known, love is the same as
union. Here, where the illusion of love is accepted in love’s place, love is
perceived as separation and exclusion.
 
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 that He denied. It is essential to the preservation of the ego that
you believe this specialness is not hell, but Heaven. For the ego would
never have you see that separation could only be loss, being the one
condition in which Heaven could not be.
 
To everyone Heaven is completion. There can be no disagreement on this,
because both the ego and the Holy Spirit accept it. They are, however, in
complete disagreement on what completion is, and how it is accomplished.
 
The Holy Spirit knows that completion lies first in union, and then in the
extension of union. To the ego completion lies in triumph, and in the
extension of the “victory” even to the final triumph over God. In this it sees
the ultimate freedom of the self, for nothing would remain to interfere with
the ego. This is its idea of Heaven. And therefore union, which is a
condition in which the ego cannot interfere, must be hell.
 
The special relationship is a strange and unnatural ego device for joining
hell and Heaven, and making them indistinguishable. And the attempt to
find the imagined “best” of both worlds has merely led to fantasies of both,
and to the inability to perceive either 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. What
better example could there be of the ego’s maxim, “Seek but do not find”?
 
Most curious of all is the concept of the self which the ego fosters in the
special relationship. This “self” seeks the relationship to make itself
complete. Yet when it finds the special relationship in which it thinks it can
accomplish this it gives itself away, and tries to “trade” itself for the self of
another. 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. And he feels guilty for the “sin” of taking, and of 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?
 
The “better” self the ego seeks is always one that is more special. And
whoever seems to possess a special self is “loved” for what can be taken
from him. Where both partners see this special self in each other, the ego
sees “a union made in Heaven. “For neither one will recognize that he has
asked for hell, and so he will not interfere with the ego’s illusion of Heaven,
which it offered him to interfere with Heaven. Yet if all illusions are of fear,
and they can be of nothing else, the illusion of Heaven is nothing more than
an “attractive” form of fear, in which the guilt is buried deep and rises in the
form of “love. “
 
The appeal of hell lies only in the terrible attraction of guilt, which the ego
holds out to those who place their faith in littleness. The conviction of
littleness lies in every special relationship, for only the deprived could value
specialness. The demand for specialness, and the perception of the giving of
specialness as an act of love, would make love hateful. The real purpose of
the special relationship, in strict accordance with the ego’s goals, is to
destroy reality and substitute illusion. For the ego is itself an illusion, and
only illusions can be the witnesses to its “reality. “
 
If you perceived the special relationship as a triumph over God, would you
want it? Let us not think of its fearful nature, nor of the guilt it must entail,
nor of the sadness and the loneliness. For these are only attributes of the
whole religion of separation, and of the total context in which it is thought
to occur. The central theme in its litany to sacrifice is that God must die so
you can live. And it is this theme that is acted out in the special relationship.
 
Through the death of your self you think you can attack another self, and
snatch it from the other to replace the self that you despise. And you despise
it because you do not think it offers the specialness that you demand. And
hating it you have made it little and unworthy, because you are afraid of it.
 
How can you grant unlimited power to what you think you have attacked?
 
So fearful has the truth become to you that unless it is weak and little, you
would not dare to look upon it. You think it safer to endow the little self you
made with power you wrested from truth, triumphing over it and leaving it
helpless. See how exactly is this ritual enacted in the special relationship.
An altar is erected in between two separate people, on which each seeks to
kill his self, and on his body raise another self to take its power from his
death. Over and over and over this ritual is enacted. And it is never
completed, nor ever will be completed. The ritual of completion cannot
complete, for life arises not from death, nor Heaven from hell.
 
Whenever any form of special relationship tempts you to seek for love in
ritual, remember love is content, and not form of any kind. The special
relationship is a ritual of form, aimed at raising the form to take the place of
God at the expense of content. There is no meaning in the form, and there
will never be. The special relationship must be recognized for what it is; a
senseless ritual in which strength is extracted from the death of God, and
invested in His killer as the sign that form has triumphed over content, and
love has lost its meaning. Would you want this to be possible, even apart
from its evident impossibility? If it were possible, you would have made
yourself helpless. God is not angry. He merely could not let this happen.
 
You cannot change His Mind. No rituals that you have set up in which the
dance of death delights you can bring death to the eternal. Nor can your
chosen substitute for the Wholeness of God have any influence at all upon
it.
 
See in the special relationship nothing more than a meaningless attempt to
raise other gods before Him, and by worshipping them to obscure their
tininess and His greatness. In the name of your completion you do not want
this. For every idol that you raise to place before Him stands before you, in
place of what you are.
 
Salvation lies in the simple fact that illusions are not fearful because they
are not true. They but seem to be fearful to the extent to which you fail to
recognize them for what they are; and you will fail to do this to the extent to
which you want them to be true. And to the same extent you are denying
truth, and so are failing to make the simple choice between truth and
illusion; God and fantasy. Remember this, and you will have no difficulty in
perceiving the decision as just what it is, and nothing more.
 
The core of the separation illusion lies simply in the fantasy of destruction
of love’s meaning. And unless love’s meaning is restored to you, you cannot
know yourself who share its meaning. Separation is only the decision not to
know yourself. This whole thought system is a carefully contrived learning
experience, designed to lead away from truth and into fantasy. Yet for every
learning that would hurt you, God offers you correction and complete
escape from all its consequences.
 
The decision whether or not to listen to this course and follow it is but the
choice between truth and illusion. For here is truth, separated from illusion
and not confused with it at all. How simple does this choice become when it
is perceived as only what it is. For only fantasies make confusion in
choosing possible, and they are totally unreal.
 
This year is thus the time to make the easiest decision that ever confronted
you, and also the only one. You will cross the bridge into reality simply
because you will recognize that God is on the other side, and nothing at all
is here. It is impossible not to make the natural decision as this is realized.