Specialness, attack, victimhood, and fragility

From A Course In Miracles

T-24.I.4. What God created cannot be attacked, for there is nothing in the universe unlike itself. 2 But what is different calls for judgment, and this must come from someone "better," someone incapable of being like what he condemns, "above" it, sinless by comparison with it. 3 And thus does specialness become a means and end at once. 4 For specialness not only sets apart, but serves as grounds from which attack on those who seem "beneath" the special one is "natural" and "just." 5 The special ones feel weak and frail because of differences, for what would make them special is their enemy. 6 Yet they protect its enmity and call it "friend." 7 On its behalf they fight against the universe, for nothing in the world they value more.

- There is only consciousness
- We are all dissociated fragments of an actual whole
- We believe we are separate: we are wrong
- Identity is separation
- The more identity, the more separation
- The more identity, the more specialness
- The more labels attached to identity, the more boundary-lines of separation
- Across these boundary lines, attacks are launched downhill
- Attacks are launched at the 'other'
- The other, by existing, is an attack, an affront
- The attack is from the higher to the lower
- The specialness is the means by which attack is possible
- But the attack further cements the specialness in place
- The attacker is the holy innocent, the religious martyr
- Attackers see themselves as pure, right, just
- The purity, rightness, justice justify the attack and elevate it above reproach
- The irony of identity, of separation, of specialness is that it creates fragility
- The fragile are hypervigilant
- They eternally look for signs of attack, counterattack, transgression
- This hypervigilance is the filter through which reality is perceived
- Everything is either provisionally safe ...
- ... or it is categorically dangerous, called out, and expunged
- Safe spaces are havens in a world of attacks and triggers
- As specialness amplifies, the fragility increases, the safe spaces shrink
- Former friends become enemies
- Purges purify the ranks
- Until there is no one left but me and my ego-protector
- The ego is the specialness-making device
- It creates the assortment of identity components
- The assortment is a selection of 'thises' vs 'thats'
- I'm 'this' not 'that'; I'm from 'here' not there'; I believe 'this' not 'that'
- The identity becomes the pearl of great price
- The ego is the wizard behind the curtain
- Is the prince for whom I fight
- But I am the one who suffers, in a universe of perpetual war
- A war fought for the offer of perpetual peace
- When I am the last man standing, I will have all of God's love
- The world is no more than a case of sibling-rivalry

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