Our Wish to Separate
This week we have seen again how at the heart of every issue or every problem we have is our desire to separate. We see ourselves as different, we take things personally and so we reinforce our feeling of being isolated, misunderstood and generally poles apart from others. At some level we all know we do this, and that it is the cause of so much that does not work in our lives. And yet we seem so invested in maintaining it as a strategy. It is a bit like people who are feuding saying they know that any meaningful solution will only come from dialogue and yet they insist on continuing to fight.
How come we always do this? It seems that being right is more important to us than being happy. Being right about something seems the best tool for holding the ace in the hole that we can always play when it suits us. Immediately that we start to make another person or situation wrong (which therefore naturally means we are right), then we are fully justified to leave either physically or emotionally; in other words, to separate.
A Course in Miracles talks about how once we have one untruth then we are going down a slippery slope as we base everything else on that; any self-concept or belief system, any position we take will be flawed. We all believe in separation, that to be here in this experience we fell, we left the Garden, we separated from Love. However The Course teaches that it is impossible, we have never left, we believe we have but if, in truth, we had then we would wink out of existence.
Research has shown that if a newborn baby is given warmth and food yet has no human interaction at all she or he will die. If we could separate we would do the same.It is essential for us to do all we can to move in the direction of partnership, of friendship, of inclusion and self-inclusion and so begin to end the polarisations that are so common in our world today.
So many of us are being right and letting anyone who will listen and even those who don’t want to how right we are about something, complaining constantly about how unloved we are, when we are the ones who have invested so much in separation.
We have built an ocean of negative emotions to justify our desire to separate. Yet one choice of incredible courage to give up being right could change that as our negative emotions are not the truth any more than the ability to separate is the truth. Sure there are things we need to experience and get past and there is the power of positive denial but there is also the truth:
Jeff and Sue