Part 1 re Monogamy.

If you are not ready for your most cherished beliefs to be challenged, please don’t bother reading this article. I’m not interested in hearing how offended you are, because that’s just your ego.

If you are one of these people who spend your time on websites, torturing yourself in the endless and ultimately futile search for the “special” relationship with the “special” partner who is going to make all your problems go away, you are probably not ready to read this article. Likewise, if you are one of these people who spend your time on websites, torturing yourself in the endless and ultimately futile attempt to make yourself happy by having lots of emotionally disconnected sex, you probably are also not ready to read this article. Those two searches are the same thing, despite their superficial differences … the attempt to find happiness outside of yourself in the symbols of separation. Which, try as you might, is never going to work, because all you are doing is belittling your True Self.

Haven’t you noticed that all these months and even years later, you’re still on that same website, with the same problems you had before, seemingly going nowhere? The same anger, the same frustration, the same bitterness … the same judgments … going round and round in circles. Aren’t you ready to try something that will actually work?

Then you must be willing to let go of the symbols of separation. Because as long as you are seeking after impossible and petty ego goals, you are never going to find what you really want, which can be boiled down to this: HAPPINESS, EMPOWERMENT, AND PEACE.

Some people just starting out with Emotional Freedom Technique or tapping report that they feel frustrated with the haphazard results they get. Why is it not working consistently?

You are not going deep enough. Tapping starts working consistently when you know how to use it in the context of the BIG PICTURE. Your ego self is never going to see the big picture. The ego fragments off little bits and pieces, hoping to find happiness in separation. And that is never going to work. Just like sitting there on websites getting angry over and over again about what this guy did or that guy said is NEVER GOING TO MAKE YOU HAPPY. Because you are missing the boat completely.

If you want Happiness, you must get yourself ALIGNED with the WHOLE PICTURE. If you are only seeking happiness for your little tiny isolated self … good luck. If you think you’re going to find happiness in a white picket fence prison where you have “separated off” your “perfect” partnership and ignored the rest of the world and how you fit into it … good luck. If you think you’re going to find happiness in a bunch of unconscious sex with partners you despise deep down … good luck. The Universe is set up in such a way that if you do not honor and love every single person on this planet and understand how your life fits in to the salvation of the entire world, and if you are not sharing yourself fully with that world, you are going to suffer. Guaranteed.

You are also going to grow sick, old, and die, because you have separated yourself from the Source of Everlasting Life.

Let’s get very clear here about what the “ego” is. It is the idea of separation, and it expresses itself through the symbols of separation. Every symbol of separation is the same, because it means you have separated yourself from God. And you cannot separate yourself from your fellow humans without separating yourself from God because every person on this planet is an extension of your Higher Self and God.

And this is how you can see that Monogamy and Death are both the same thing: symbols of the ego and the separation from Oneness.

Oh, the ego is very clever, because it wants to convince you that it is “saving” you from exactly the fate it is actually imposing on you. The ego would like you to believe that monogamy offers some sort of “protection” from death. Many people choose monogamy because they are terrified of sexually transmitted diseases. Or they choose it as a “protection” from sickness, old age, and dying alone.

Can this seriously be viewed as a “protection”? Who would ever choose this protection if they knew what they were giving up … connection to all that is and the Source of Everlasting Life? Do you not realize that by allowing yourself to continue to fear something you are giving reality to the thing you fear?

So let’s look deeper at what monogamy is … a promise of sexual exclusivity to one person … often indefinitely. Sexual energy is one of the most powerful forces we have in this world … and you are going to limit that energy to ONE PERSON for the REST OF YOUR LIFE while there is an entire world out there that you have symbolically disconnected from by making this ridiculous promise? Puh-leeeeeeze.

A Course in Miracles makes no bones about this, although it appears that even many ACIM devotees want to “rationalize” why the text “doesn’t mean what it says.” I assure you, the text means what it says, and this is what it says:

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.

And if you think I’m overstating it to say that monogamy = death, I invite you to read this passage from the Course a few times, and really let it sink in:

The ego is alert to threat, and the part of your mind into which the ego was accepted is very anxious to preserve its reason, as it sees it. It does not realize that it is totally insane. And you must realize just what this means if you would be restored to sanity. The insane protect their thought systems, but they do so insanely. And all their defenses are as insane as what they are supposed to protect. The separation has nothing in it, no part, no “reason,” and no attribute that is not insane. And its “protection” is part of it, as insane as the whole. The special relationship, which is its chief defense, must therefore be insane.

You have but little difficulty now in realizing that the thought system the special relationship protects is but a system of delusions. You recognize, at least in general terms, that the ego is insane. Yet the special relationship still seems to you somehow to be “different.” Yet we have looked at it far closer than we have at many other aspects of the ego’s thought system that you have been willing to let go. While this one remains, you will not let the others go. For this one is not different. Retain this one, and you have retained the whole.

It is essential to realize that all defenses do what they would defend. The underlying basis for their effectiveness is that they offer what they defend. What they defend is placed in them for safe-keeping, and as they operate they bring it to you. Every defense operates by giving gifts, and the gift is always a miniature of the thought system the defense protects, set in a golden frame. The frame is very elaborate, all set with jewels, and deeply carved and polished. Its purpose is to be of value in itself, and to divert your attention from what it encloses. But the frame without the picture you cannot have. Defenses operate to make you think you can.

The special relationship has the most imposing and deceptive frame of all the defenses the ego uses. Its thought system is offered here, surrounded by a frame so heavy and so elaborate that the picture is almost obliterated by its imposing structure. Into the frame are woven all sorts of fanciful and fragmented illusions of love, set with dreams of sacrifice and self-aggrandizement, and interlaced with gilded threads of self-destruction. The glitter of blood shines like rubies, and the tears are faceted like diamonds and gleam in the dim light in which the offering is made.

Look at the picture. Do not let the frame distract you. This gift is given you for your damnation, and if you take it you will believe that you are damned. You cannot have the frame without the picture. What you value is the frame, for there you see no conflict. Yet the frame is only the wrapping for the gift of conflict. The frame is not the gift. Be not deceived by the most superficial aspects of this thought system, for these aspects enclose the whole, complete in every aspect. Death lies in this glittering gift. Let not your gaze dwell on the hypnotic gleaming of the frame. Look at the picture, and realize that death is offered you.

If you want happiness and immortality, you must relinquish the “special” relationship. And you cannot promise sexual exclusivity to another person without making that person “special.” You have blocked the flow of Universal Love and Healing Energy by doing that, and it will lead to suffering.

Is this what you want?

Is death what you want?

Is death what you want?

Is death what you want?

If death is not what you want, you must let it go in every form it takes. Choose “special” love, and you have chosen death and unhappiness. Open yourself to sharing love and communion with everyone, and the door has been opened to Reunion with the Source of All Power, Life, Love, and Happiness.