Sean Reagan

Self-love is important. We cannot give away what we don’t have (or don’t know that we have). Just as importantly, we cannot accept love from our brothers and sisters if we do not recognize the love as it is offered.

Self-love is both how we know we have something to give to everyone, and how we recognize it in everyone, thus allowing it to be given to us.

Another way of saying this is to say that loving our self liberates us from fear, and allows us to both offer and receive more of the infinite love that we share with all creation.

To be liberated from fear is to be liberated from attachment to all its forms in the world – impatience, anxiety, worry, addiction, distraction, depression, angst, et cetera.

If you really want to immerse yourself in self-love ACIM-style, read – or reread – Marianne Williamson’s book A Return to Love. It’s easy to dismiss it as too New Age, too simplistic, too commercial. It’s easy to find ways in which it doesn’t align perfectly with A Course in Miracles, especially the course’s metaphysical underpinning.

Those are all fine arguments – I make them myself from time to time – but none of them undo the fact that Williamson understood in a deep and sustainable way how A Course in Miracles is premised on self-love.

Indeed, the extent to which Marianne Williamson is an “ugh” moment for us is the extent to which we are still scared of love. The mirror she offers us is vast.

Our defense against the light is always some form of guilt that we project onto ourselves or others. God can love us infinitely, the universe can support us unendingly, but until we agree with God’s kind appraisal of us and the universe’s merciful behavior, we will do everything in our power to keep the miracles were entitled to at bay. Why the self-hatred? (283)

The “why” part of that question is easy: fear underlies self-hatred. We project because we’re scared. A better question is how do we undo fear? Williamson has an answer for that (and it is the answer contemplated by ACIM): “through the acceptance of God’s will as our own” (283).

God’s will is that we be happy. God’s will is that we forgive ourselves. God’s will is that we find our place in Heaven now (283).

Williamson frees you to care about your own happiness. Do you like chocolate? It’s okay to eat chocolate. Got a less-than-perfect body? You’re beautiful. Put some fresh flowers out to remind yourself. Neighbor being mean? He’s just crying out for love. Give him some fresh flowers and chocolate.

Basically, treat yourself as gently, kindly and generously as you would a child or a beloved pet. Bring all your best self to loving your self. You deserve it.

This feels selfish – or it sounds childish – or perhaps both – but in practice it’s a form of self-acceptance and self-approval that works wonders in our unhealed mind. It clarifies our values, softens our expectations and maximizes our interest in cooperation with our brothers and sisters.

When we love ourselves, we have a lot of love to give away. We also recognize love in others and are happy to accept it from them.

Here, I want to say something about recognizing love in others.

Sometimes, people offer love but the “love” is actually fear wearing a mask of love. Under the guise of love, somebody is projecting fear.

An example of fear masquerading as love might be the friend who offers us unsolicited criticism about something sensitive – what our body looks like or how we parent, say. We didn’t ask, there was no problem and all of a sudden, here’s this person “fixing” everything. “I don’t mean to be critical but . . . “

This is not love – it’s fear. I’m scared that I’m not attractive enough or a good enough father and so I project that fear on to you. I want you to feel those feelings, not me.

But I also want to pretend I’m a good guy so I pretend I’m being helpful. “Hey, I notice you never exercise . . . “

That’s a fairly obvious example. Sometimes the projection of fear is much more subtle. Sometimes it’s habitual as often happens in families. We don’t even notice it happening until the Holy Spirit (or a lesser therapist 🙂 ) points it out.

Getting better at self-love allows us to get better at noticing fear-based behavior and not accepting it by pretending it’s a form of love.

“Not accepting” should be free of conflict. It’s not aggressive – it doesn’t even have to be vocal. It’s more like noticing the projection before it reaches you and gently side-stepping it. Someone says “that color’s not flattering on you” and you just smile and say in your shared mind, “Not today, sister – I love you too much.”

We all have issues. That’s a given in bodies in the world. So that’s not the problem. The problem is whether we are seeing our issues as symptoms of the deeper conflict between fear and love and – through interaction with the symptoms – choosing love instead of fear.

Sometimes we are the one who is projecting fear – our control issues, our insecurity issues, our unwillingness to be vulnerable issues. When people gently and nondramatically refuse these projections, it is a beautiful gift to us, even if it stings, which it probably does. These brothers and sisters are reminding us that our problems are our own and can’t be projected. We must face the fear where it actually is – with us.

So the question is always to notice the relationship we are in – with a job, a person, a political movement, a spiritual tradition – and be as honest as possible about what the relationship is for. Is it helping us discern between fear and love and thus helping us choose love?

Or is it keeping us away from discernment and thus making a choice for fear? Is the relationship healing the underlying error or is it reinforcing the underlying error?

It is not a crisis to experience self-love at the level of a body in the world. It’s okay to treat ourselves to a vacation, a meal, a good night’s sleep, a night out, whatever.

This is okay because these joys are symptoms of the underlying choice for love. When you are happy in the world, you are choosing love over fear. That choice is actually happening at a very deep level and up here – at the shallow and ephemeral (the phenomenological) level of bodies – it looks like a great sandwich or meditation or lingering by a pretty flower.

The stuff that’s problematic – the wars, the friends who died too young, our inability to quit drinking – are simply symptoms of the choice for fear.

A Course in Miracles teaches us not to despair when these show up because the choice for love can always be made again (T-31.VIII.1:5). That’s what the world is for – to provide a framework in which to choose love instead of fear, for us and for our brothers and sisters.

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In this post I talked about how projection can work in our lives, especially in terms of relationships. We project onto others what we do not want to look at in our own self, and then judge the other exactly the way we fear WE would be judged.

A lawyer was mean to me once, and for a quarter century I played the role of victim, never once bothering to look at what that role meant for my happiness or – more important for our shared salvation – his.

This is not a healthy way to live! It does not make us or anybody else happy. It seizes and clutches rather than liberates. It depresses rather than inspires.

Here I want to go one step further – again using a personal example – to hopefully show something about the subtlety and destructiveness of ego.

Jealousy has been a part of my life since I was a child. I don’t like to share; I never have. As a little boy I preferred playing alone to playing with others because sharing was complicated and no fun. I wasn’t the kid who took his ball and went home – I was the kid who stayed home with his ball. If I had to play with others, I did so grudgingly, resenting every moment that wasn’t all about me.

As I grew up, and not sharing became less socially viable, jealousy slowly morphed into a steady background hum. It touched every relationship to one degree or another. I wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t making others happy, but it wasn’t an unmitigated disaster either.

To me, as an adult, jealousy felt like a reasonable expression of my fundamental unworthiness. Why wouldn’t people want a better partner, friend, teacher than me? I was broken and unfixable. Who wouldn’t be better without me? I didn’t even want to be with me.

So you can see how at one level the jealousy dynamic was a frame in which I could more or less constantly perceive myself as a victim. I understood it in this light for years. And I worked hard on it in that light! Prayer, therapy, dialogue. Jealousy never went away but at least it was manageable.

I called that a “win.”

And I was wrong.

About a year ago, following a particularly challenging series of conversations with Chrisoula, I woke up from a dream I have since forgotten. There in the darkness, I saw three things with crystalline clarity:

1. Jealousy was about perceiving myself as victim BECAUSE
2. It allowed me to percieve others as victimizers WHICH
3. Allowed me to punish them.

The punishment part was very important. I was worthless, yes, but you were worse – you were actually evil. You saw my worthlessness and betrayed me by choosing – by just being willing to choose – another to take my place.

And for that you deserved to be punished. And since I was the victim, then I was the one in charge of choosing and administering your punishment.

And I loved that. Loved it.

Is that clear? Under the “woe is me” narrative of the victim was the “off with his head” narrative of the cruel, unjust and all-powerful tyrant.

It was awful to see this. I could handle being a victim. In fact, I kind of liked it. Lots of sympathy, other people were reponsible for taking care of you, easy to lay claim to special treatment, et cetera.

But being the victimizer? The one who made victims of others?

I did not want to see that. In you I could see it, sure. But in me? No thank you.

However, in that moment, it was no longer possible to see it anywhere else but in me. In that way, the Holy Spirit brought a grim and twisted charade to its close. It taught me that I am not allowed to judge my brothers and sisters, and I am not allowed to punish them.

So I had to let the whole jealousy schebang go, right? I couldn’t hold onto it at all because I saw it was just a front the ego was using to cover an even more vile and destructive objective: it hated you and wanted to make you suffer before destroying you.

Seeing ego in that light – and knowing it was operative in me and all my relationships – was nauseating. It drove me to my knees in an old-school prayer – hands clasped, rocking back and forth, pleading with God to forgive me for hurting you and to make it so that I would never do so again.

To which God gently replied, “okay.”

God hears our prayer because our prayer is God praying in us. We’re already saved; salvation is remembering what is, not creating something new. It’s not about replacement but recollection.

To truly see the ego is always to initiate its undoing. When you really see ego, you will not like it, and not liking it means you will no longer value it, and what you do not value you will not protect or otherwise invest in (e.g., T-2.II.1:5-6). You will beg God to remove it from you.

And absent your care and nurture – absent your mindless blessing – ego will disappear. And what will remain is the quiet peace and joy which the Holy Spirit offers us in order to allow us to remember our home in Creation.

The moral of this story is: do not be afraid of how ugly your interior appears. Do not be scared to really assess your motives and biases, to look at ego in all its viciousness. Let it speak – hear its case.

Let all of it be revealed, so that all of it may at last be undone.

Do you like monster stories? Monsters are often stand-ins for ego – Mister Hyde, the witch in Hansel and Gretel, Grendel coming up from the swamp to threaten our meager fire . . . ACIM students looking at ego are not doing anything new. But we are maybe doing it in a way that aims to create new stories – stories about happiness and the end of conflict.

Those monster stories are our ancestor’s version of the work to which A Course in Miracles calls us: to face what is scary. But we do not have to destroy the monster. We merely need to see the monster/ego clearly where and as it is – inside of us and unbearably cruel. When we see it this way, then we will see also that we are what makes this monster possible.

Therefore, because we are doing it, we can do something else. This is the whole promise of salvation in A Course in Miracles!

In every difficulty all distress, and each perplexity Christ calls to you and gently says, ‘My brother, choose again.’ He would not leave one source of pain unhealed, nor any image left to veil the truth. He would remove all misery from you whom God created altar unto joy (T-31.VIII.3:2-4).

From the bottom of my heart – which is cleansed and brought to the light in your heart by the light in which both our hearts are brought forth – thank you for sharing the way.

Once when I was a young lawyer another lawyer – a guy maybe twenty years older than me, a skillful attorney I admired a lot – humiliated me publicly. During a meeting before about two hundred other lawyers, he spoke from the podium about how he hated working with “dumb young lawyers” and – pointing me out in the audience – used a recent interaction with me as an example. It was devastating and remained so for years. Over a quarter century later it still burned.

One day the memory of that moment came up but didn’t burn. It was the strangest thing. Same memory but no pain. No anxiety or bitterness at all. Instead, I saw with complete and perfect clarity that when that lawyer had spoken, it wasn’t about me. It was about him. It had nothing to do with me at all. Not then and not now.

When I saw this I cried. I literally cried because I realized that by making that incident about me, I had hurt my brother. I had turned him into a cruel and sadistic attacker, a torturer even, and I had locked him into that role for over twenty-five years. I had held my brother – who was innocent, who could only attack me because he believed he was guilty – in the worst possible light.

He cried out for love and I responded with fear and hate. And we both suffered.

What would a loving – an ACIM-style, say – response have looked like?

This: in that moment, as he speaks, I realize that his behavior reflects his belief that his feelings of guilt and fear are real. Therefore, his behavior is a projection of that guilt and fear; it has nothing whatsoever to do with me. Seeing the projection as a projection means recognizing that my brother is calling out for love and then responding accordingly. Had I realized all that, my response would have been clear and helpful in the moment, and it would have healed both of us. I might have laughed, tried gently to redirect, gone up to him after to say that he’d embarrassed me. Who knows.

But it would not have been a twenty-five year resentment and pity party.

Here is how A Course in Miracles puts it.

When you become disturbed and lose your peace of mind because another is attempting to solve his problems through fantasy, you are refusing to forgive yourself for just this same attempt. And you are holding both of you away from the truth and from salvation. As you forgive him, you restore to truth what was denied by both of you. And you will see forgiveness where you have given it (T-17.I.6:5-8).

When we feel victimized, healing means noticing that we are accepting the projection of another’s guilt, and also that we don’t have to. There is another way. We can see their “bad behavior” as a symbol of fear – a cry for love – and we can respond with our own “good behavior” as a symbol of friendship and forgiveness.

Whenever we are hurt by another it is because we are confused. We think somebody is doing something to us. But really, love is just crying out to be remembered in us. By refusing to listen, we enter fully into the illusion that somebody else can hurt us, and when we see our brother or sister as capable of hurting us, then we do not see our brother or sister. We see, instead, our own projection of fear and hate.

Thus, our work has to do not with managing our feelings but rather with noticing and updating how we are looking at the world.

In the situation I described, the work was to look at my brother not as a bad guy doing a mean thing to me but as a good guy who had forgotten he was love itself and needed my help to remember. What he did was not an attack on me but a cry for an extension of love from me.

My failure to do this for him was a failure of love, no different than the failure I noticed and condemned in him.

This clarity was profoundly healing. It turned out that it could be applied to literally every painful memory I’d ever had. Little ones, big ones. In-between ones. It was like I’d been given a balm that undid all grievances and painful memories in seconds.

I also discovered that no matter how far back the incident was, no matter how far removed I was from the other or others involved, it wasn’t too late to offer the love that I’d thought they were depriving me of in the first instance. So that lawyer I’d failed to help all those years ago? I just loved him. It wasn’t hard. I was grateful to him for being so helpful, for bringing to light such a simple principle of peace.

In this way, I learned yet again that I am not separate from any of my brothers and sisters. Love does not require bodies; it doesn’t even require time and space.

So this is healing and, like all healing, it is welcome and exciting.

But what’s even more welcome and exciting is when the lesson begins to generalize, which begins when you realize that it’s never too late to respond to a call for love, and that this is true because you are not separate from your brothers and sisters.

You stop applying it to specific instances and it still works. It’s like you had a medicine you could take for an infection but now you can’t be even be infected any more. You don’t need healing; you are healed and you heal. You have no problems.

Healing works not because it’s magic or supernatural but because it reflects a fundamental truth: there is only love. You are only love. Your brothers and sisters, too.

And when you realize this, then all the painful memories just stop coming up because the grounds which supported them have evaporated. They’re gone. And as far as your life in the day-to-day world goes . . . behavior from others that would ordinarily hurt you is seen for what it is: a cry for love, and so you respond with love. And when you cry for love?

Your brother or sister answers with love.

To response or answer with love more than anything means not taking things personally. Not allowing your brother or sister to hurt you is an enormous gift to them. The more nondramatically and gently you can give this gift, the more likely you are to experience the dramatic healing love offers all of us who yet believe we are separate from creation.

This healing appears behavioral but is in fact the abstract recognition of love by love for love. When you live only in awareness of love and love’s endless longing to be with itself, your function changes. What you value changes. It is easier to be happy because happiness is what you value, and your happiness is no longer separate from anybody else’s. It is a natural effect of knowing what you are in truth.

Special relationships reflect a decision to avoid looking at guilt and hate within by renaming them “love” and projecting them onto a partner. This only exacerbates the underlying problem, which is our refusal to be responsible for the decision to be separate from both Creator and Creation.

Separation is only a decision not to know yourself. This whole thought system is a carefully contrived learning experience, designed to lead away from truth and into fantasy (T-16.V.15:3-4).

Having a partner in the deception entailed by specialness really helps to sustain the separation thought system. It doesn’t actually help us, but it does help keep the illusion of separation going.

In a sense, all the special relationship actually does is shift our focus away from love and towards the form we would have love take. We isolate an individual – we like how they think, talk, look, walk, kiss, share, work, whatever. They get us, they complete us. It can’t be explained. It’s holy, helpful, healthy, magical, mystical, marvelous . . .

The thing is, our focus is on the other, not on love. A Course in Miracles suggests that this is because we are trying to replace God (rather than examine the illusion that we are separated from God). “The special relationship is a ritual of form, aimed at raising the form to take the place of God at the expense of content” (T-16.V.12:2).

In other words, the special relationship makes an idol of the other, suggesting that it, not God or love, will complete us.

But because its starting point is separation – why else would we need “completion” – it ends up reinforcing the very illusion that it aims to undo.

Love cannot be found in a relationship between partners who still see themselves as bodies. Hate masquerading as love? Yes. Sex masquerading as unity? Sure. Endless 1:1 dialogues masquerading as communication? You bet.

Love? No. Not at all.

Thus, if we perceive the other as a soulmate then we are buying all the way into the ego’s lie that what we are in truth is incomplete.

Critically, to turn away from form is to neither accept nor reject the “other” based on form. It’s not about the body at all.

If it is still about the body, then that is simply a gentle reminder that we are still relying on the ego’s thought system to organize our living and there is a better way.

The better way is always an invitation to re-dedicate the given relationship to holiness, which we accomplish by looking at the separation and hate and illusions underlying it. Those illusions are undone by looking at them, and what remains when they are gone is love.

Our whole job is to see the blocks to love’s inheritance. To have a partner in this work is a gift, orders of magnitude more valuable than anything a body-based relationship can offer, even at its purest.

It’s important to remember that when we say we are focused on content rather than form, we are explicitly recognizing that the form love takes in another’s life will almost certainly be different than it does in ours. This is why it’s basically impossible to lecture one another about holy relationships or special relationships. We have no idea what they are for ourself, much less for others.

Thus, I am speaking here to my own experience of studying and practicing A Course in Miracles, which has included almost continuous nontrivial lessons in special relationships. I am very much a beginner. Yet these relationships are also gifts because each moment becomes a site of learning how to discern between fear and love and, on that basis, choosing love. What else is there to learn?