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NOTE FROM NOUK: This heartfelt essay is written and audio recorded by my beloved friend and colleague, Coreen Walson 

An all too common scenario: We give our special relationship to the Holy Spirit. Our partner wants nothing to do with awakening or God or Jesus. We have seen how often we avoid communicating authentically with our partner in order to keep the “status quo”, and we don’t fully appreciate how every time we do this, we abandon our self. Each time we give in to behaviors that are unacceptable to us, like having sex when we don’t want to, or travelling when we’d prefer to stay home, we do this because we feel it would be cruel or we might lose our partner. And each time we do this, again, we abandon our self. Each time we engage in meaningless conversation, we abandon our self. Each time we compromise, we abandon our self.

We choose partners that don’t want to share the most meaningful part of our life. We choose partners who are incompatible in some major ways. We must ask ourselves, what am I getting from this relationship? If we are radically honest, we will see that we had a hand to hold, a body to cuddle with, someone to go out to eat with, someone to spend the holidays with, someone who is good in all the ways we are not. There are pay offs for our self-abandonment, yet none of them substantial. It is always form over content, and this is the ego’s most coveted special relationship. It always asks what it can get from the other, and we all know deep inside that giving to get is not Love.

“As long as you believe that to be with a body is companionship, you will be compelled to attempt to keep your brother in his body, held there by guilt. And you will see safety in guilt and danger in communication. For the ego will always teach that loneliness is solved by guilt, and that communication is the cause of loneliness.” T-15.VII.12:2-4

Special love is really hatred in disguise. It is a “love” that can be withdrawn, and requires constant sacrifice both ways. Resentment is amassed, score keeping, withholding, and heaps of judgment are all the norm. It is a certainty that “true joining” will not take place because it is the goal of the relationship to maintain separate identities and to perpetuate the need for and supply of guilt and fear. To be sure, the Love of God which is changeless, unconditional and is not here, and special love is the ego’s substitute for God’s perfect Love.

We all must further recognize that this special love is the root cause of all sickness. The body is used as the dumping ground for the ego’s constant accumulation of guilt through special relating. The body cannot help but become sick and die with guilt as its sole purpose and substance. “The special love relationship is the ego’s chief weapon for keeping you from Heaven.” T-16.V.2:3

“Minds are joined; bodies are not. Only by assigning to the mind the properties of the body does separation seem to be possible. And it is mind that seems to be fragmented and private and alone. Its guilt, which keeps it separate, is projected to the body, which suffers and dies because it is attacked to hold the separation in the mind, and let it not know its Identity.” T-18.VI.3:1-4

Because no true joining can take place via false relating, there is no Love and therefore no true communication. Nothing Real ever transpires in special relating. Both parties are wearing a mask and neither party truly sees the other one. They see only what they want to see there, and it is never the Christ but some made up persona that is being used by the false persona in the partner. It is complete fantasy and a total sham.

As one begins to see the cost of the special relationship and has come to realize their partner is in no way interested in repurposing the goal of the relationship from separation to Holy Union, an unwinding process begins. And the one who is needing to disengage inevitably asks why is there so much pain, anxiety and outright terror in relinquishing this person, even when we see that there is nothing Real within it? Could it be that it is the only “love” we know, and even if it hurts, it’s still better than nothing? Could it be that the relationship was our biggest distraction away from being still and facing the deep unworthiness and just how much we abandoned our Self for this pseudo “love”? Is the obsessing over the other person our way of avoiding our terror of God? All signs point to “yes”.

Another common experience is the reoccurring questions we face after we have separated from our partner. Why do we have this OBSESSION with needing closure, with finding out what he/she is doing, of connecting with them to find out if they are sorry, or hurting, or ever really loved us? These emotions come in like a tidal wave, taking us out, making us want to go and do something, anything, to put an end to these obsessive, raging thoughts that bring so much pain. It is the intensity of the emotions that beg us to take a closer look at what is going on beneath the surface. Why is the ego so fierce right now? The obsession is our terror of God. Yes, only something this strong could be the terror of God itself.

We come to see that without this special relationship, there is no more distraction away from meeting our Holy Self, one with God, Perfect Love. And the terror of annihilation that the ego is experiencing without its special relationship is making it ramp up on steroids, throwing all that it has (and the kitchen sink!) into having us repeat the Self abandonment by urging us to go find our partner, by insisting on tying up loose ends, or simply communicating with him or her.  It does not want us recognizing these obsessive thoughts for what they are, the ego’s massive line of defense against our returning to the Memory of God and Union with Him.

Once we can see that our pain at losing a relationship that we had to constantly sacrifice within is nothing more than ego’s defense against our waking up to our real Identity as the Son of God,  it helps to recognize the part we played in this dynamic so we don’t fall for one of ego’s favorite themes: “I was so unfairly treated!” We like to think of ourselves as the innocent one in the relationship, and that our partner was the mean, unfair, unenlightened one. This is false innocence because our so-called innocence was bought at the price of our partner’s guilt. We must see that we, too, put on a mask to begin with, molded ourselves into what we thought our partner wanted, and voluntarily abandoned ourselves for this fake substitute of “love”. The relationship consisted of two, false selves having a relationship but there never was any true relating. We were never a victim, but a consenting party to a special relationship.

“In such insane relationships, the attraction of what you do not want seems to be much stronger than the attraction of what you do want. For each one thinks that he has sacrificed something to the other, and hates him for it. Yet this is what he thinks he wants. He is not in love with the other at all. He merely believes he is in love with sacrifice. And for this sacrifice, which he demands of himself, he demands that the other accept the guilt and sacrifice himself as well. Forgiveness becomes impossible, for the ego believes that to forgive another is to lose him. It is only by attack without forgiveness that the ego can ensure the guilt that holds all its relationships together.” T-15.VII.7.

Another favorite of the ego when we seem to be going through the pain of a breakup is to have us question whether our partner ever loved us at all? Well, how could they love us when we didn’t love ourselves? We chose this particular partner specifically because we DON’T love ourselves and looked to them to supply this missing piece. And they did the same to us. Neither party had self-love so it sought to go get it elsewhere, from someone else. So no, there was no love in the relationship, no real love anyway. Any sadness we feel is at the recognition of how far we abandoned our Self  . . . how long we stayed in the relationship, how much we gave away, how hard we tried, . .  all in a massive effort to get what can never BE gotten outside of our Holy Self. We recognize the price we paid in the ego’s favorite game of “seek and don’t find”.

“For an unholy relationship is based on differences, where each one thinks the other has what he has not. They come together, each to complete himself and rob the other. They stay until they think that there is nothing left to steal, and then move on. And so they wander through a world of strangers, unlike themselves, living with their bodies perhaps under a common roof that shelters neither; in the same room and yet a world apart.” T-22.in.2:5-8

Once we have dissected the relationship for what is really IS/WAS, and owned our part in it, we are truly ready to have it forgiven and released. We forgive ourselves for having used another to play this game, and we forgive ourselves for the unworthiness we feel that had us searching for completion in another. We forgive ourselves for having believed that the separation from God was or could be real, and that we needed to compensate for the deep unworthiness we felt. And finally, we accept the Atonement, which is the final and glorious realization that the one in the relationship, the one who felt unworthy, the one who abandoned itself, the one who gave and paid dearly in return for false love, and the one who is in pain right now, is NOT our true Identity.

We are, and remain, the Christ, the child of God, spiritual, innocent, perfect, and eternally Loved with a Love that never fails. Our very identity IS the Love we believed we were seeking. Yes, the dream and the dreamer are one, both untrue. We as the One shared, Holy Self are God’s Beloved, never lacking anything but living in the Kingdom of Heaven. We can see the dream for what it is, a fantastic play where we pretended to lack the Love we are, where we tried to find it in another, and how we sacrificed to get something that is always and already within us. We can then look upon our Brother/Sister with gratitude for their willingness to play their role for us. We can thank them for agreeing to incarnate at this time in the dream to push us to this point of holy perfection, where we are on our knees and crying out, so that we would finally remember our True Identity. With this gratitude, we are free from the pain, the fear, the remorse, and the absolute perfection of it all is seen and felt.

As the author of this blog post was going through her own personal journey through healing from a painful breakup, she had this next revelation a day after she wrote the first blog and continues her sharing below:

The special relationship is a massive decoy! This is not about a relationship at ALL. It isn’t about another person, or love, or loneliness. It is a huge distraction of monumental proportions, obsessively having us look in a single direction, all the while something devastating is going on in the back room of our mind.

In any union with a brother in which you seek to lay your guilt upon him, or share it with him or perceive his own, you will feel guilty. Nor will you find satisfaction and peace with him, because your union with him is not real.  T13.X.3

Are you sick? Do you have a disease? Is the body failing you? If you TRULY forgave the partner you were in special relationship with, really saw it for its nothingness, and released it for all time, you would no longer have your guaranteed supply of guilt. This supply of the ego’s “oxygen” (guilt) is your very identity. The separate self cannot experience itself without the constant experience of guilt in all its forms. So your forgiveness/healing of the special relationship means “your ego’s” death due to lack of its means of survival. It means that the guilt and all of its ways of protecting your separation through sickness, lack, age, and ultimately death is removed once and for all. It means that you no longer have any defense against God and (gasp!) your Holy Self. Everything you have leaned upon to identify as the so-called separate “self” is gone because the core root of all seeming problems IS guilt. Without guilt, it’s game over.

The ego knows this. That is why the special relationship is its most coveted and chief weapon against our awakening. This is why breaking up feels like death, because it literally IS to the separated “self”. Even if we are to stay strong enough to not run back to our special partner, there is the drive to replace the previous special relationship with a new one. It isn’t until we really recognize what the special relationship is hiding that we will have the conviction to heal from the desire for it.

Let’s face it, we say we want healing, but we don’t want the source of the sickness gone – as our special relationship – because it literally fuels our identity. Wow! As long as we engage in the special relationship, we amass this outpouring of guilt. As long as we hoard this guilt, we keep projecting it onto the body as attack. It is very clear now that the special relationship IS attack because its results are always sin, sickness and death.

“The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, the mind heals the body because [it] has been healed. The sane mind cannot conceive of illness because it cannot conceive of attacking anyone or anything. I said before that illness is a form of magic. It might be better to say that it is a form of magical solution. The ego believes that by punishing itself it will mitigate the punishment of God. Yet even in this it is arrogant. It attributes to God a punishing intent, and then takes this intent as its own prerogative. It tries to usurp all the functions of God as it perceives them, because it recognizes that only total allegiance can be trusted.” T-5.V.5.

The obsessive thinking about the partner, the lamenting the relationship and the thoughts about it are all a cover up for the underlying truth that it is the guilt that they bring to us that we are terrified of losing, NOT the pseudo love we use as a cover up. If we are radically honest, or even just logical, we have to admit that the pain we are in does not make sense in light of the level of sacrifice we had to engage in to maintain the special relationship. It isn’t like we were truly ever seen, or Loved without judgment,. . .  no true joining ever took place and the love was fearful, intermittent, and could withdraw without notice. And for this we are falling apart? No, it is what’s behind, hidden far in the recesses of our mind that we are terrified of losing i.e. the source of our “independence” from God.

Once this dynamic is seen, it is like learning that Santa Claus isn’t real. You can never go back into believing it again. Just so, once we see that the special relationship’s sole purpose is to produce the guilt that keeps our fake identity seemingly real, we won’t ever look at the relationship the same. Every time we sacrifice in a special relationship, every time we abandon our self, we hit the button that delivers its faithful dose of the very guilt that causes our bodies to age, sicken and eventually die. And this is all in the name of “love”! The ego does NOT want us to see this, and is so invested in our playing the game that the pain of “heart break” is used to keep us in line and thereby protecting the ego’s greatest distributor of guilt.

Brothers and Sisters, take my hand, be willing at least to look at this honestly and ask yourself whether the relationships you’ve been in were of God and resulted in Love without opposite, or whether they required you to wear a mask, sacrifice yourself, and resulted in score keeping, resentment and feelings of being unfairly treated. If your answer is the latter, I invite you to join with me in this beautiful and powerful prayer to Holy Spirit.

A Prayer:

Holy Spirit, please help me to forgive myself for having believed that I separated from God, that I was unworthy, and for using (name) in an unholy relationship to compensate for these false beliefs. Please help me to forgive myself of all the ways I abandoned mySelf in the relationship, for all the ways in which I sacrificed and in all the ways I judged and condemned my Brother and therefore mySelf. Thank you that you are willing to take completely this relationship and heal my perception, and that in my healing, my Brother is healed as well. Thank you that you will undo all the effects of the seeming unholy relating as I release it all to You. Thank you that in true forgiveness, I recognize that in Truth, there is nothing to forgive, because my Brother and I are One in God. I accept the Atonement fully on our joint behalf, gratefully accepting that our shared Identity is Perfect Love, that nothing is lacking and nothing Real can be threatened. Amen.

NOTE: My bestselling book, The End of Death, is available in AUDIO BOOK, PAPERBACK & KINDLE. To download a free Chapter of the audio book and for more valuable tools and meditations, go to:

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