When strikingly bad things happen in the world, particularly at the agency of an ostensibly unprovoked perpetrator, the reaction in the media and in social media follows a well-trodden pattern: a combination of sympathy and rage. At the level of the material world, this is perfectly normal and understandable. Just because we're 'doing' the Course does not mean that we do not assess what is going on in the world and take appropriate action; we do not stop living; the Course, does, however, suggest that we look at why we are 'involving ourselves' psychologically, individually and collectively, in what we see around us.
In scenarios where the splitting between good and evil is very clearly demarcated, where the innocence of the victim is most unassailable, there is widespread, instinctive, visceral identification with the victim and activation of demonstrative signalling of that identification, plus mobilisation of vast personal and other resources in response. Now, at the level of the world, causes are just; aid is required; action leading to change is necessary; we're not interested, in this discussion, in the material justness of the cause or the necessity of action, at the individual, society, or civilisation level. We're interested in the psychology of the response.
This identification response can vary: badges on social media, flying flags, co-opting the words of the victim, hashtags; this is accompanied by appropriation of the status of the aggrieved as a launch pad for retaliation. At a practical level, a mobilised response might be appropriate, but note the vitriol, the hatred, and the symbolic exclusion, excommunication, and destruction in areas and at levels not related to the matter at hand, way beyond actual measures to provide assistance, right wrongs, or reconfigure the system going forward.
The suffering of another is a prerequisite for this psychological activation, but suffering alone is insufficient. Murder by authority, invasion, and violent rampages are only particular examples of death and suffering in extreme circumstances. The shooting dead of a murderer on the run; complex wars; shoot-outs between rival gangs: these can activate the identification and backlash, but if this occurs at all, it occurs on a small scale, and on the part of a particular grouping. Note also how this identification and backlash can, itself, generate incredulity, horror, and a round of identification and backlash in the opposite direction. Note the competing narratives in complex wars with legitimate grievances and unequivocal wrongs on both sides. The war is replicated in every detail in a proxy setting of private and public discourse.
So what's the activator? Innocence. Just innocence? No. People are actually repelled by pure innocence. People are bored by it, perceiving it as facile, or even dangerously 'blind' to the 'realities' of the world. 'Grow up!' No, what is needed is innocence facing evil. Why does this attract the ego's attention, as opposed, say, to a complex situation where innocence and evil are all mashed up together?
Because it reflects the journey of the Self as it mistakenly descends from Heaven into the world and then constructs a series of defences against the reverse journey.
Heaven, the brilliant white light, universal, unblemished, without an opposite, real innocence itself, is rejected, in favour of the assertion of the self. I exist. I am an individual. I am not merely the product of the Higher Power, the extension of its Creative Force. I created myself. The Child of the Higher Power banishes itself from Eden by shattering the oneness (at least in its own mind), and then, in the first act of projection, projects this self-banishment onto the Higher Power, perceiving itself to be exiled to the earth, to toil, sweat, and die.
The return (actually: awakening) is possible at any time, since the Child has never really left, but, in the Child's eyes, the way back into Eden is barred by angels, and the Child becomes the hunted, with God as the vengeful pursuer. Cue the world: the hiding place of the body. The Child is wracked with a sense of 'sin' (the 'knowledge' that He Who threw the stone at the crystal palace 'shattered it': though, note, again, nothing has really happened); guilt, which is the natural response to sin; and finally fear, which is the natural response to guilt.
The Child is now temporarily 'safe' from the Higher Power in the world to which it fled, with the ego as its guide. The world constantly threatens to assail this fragile self, so the self goes on the attack to wrest security and prominence in the short time it is here. This intensifies the existing, internal sense of sin, guilt, and fear, which are intolerable and are repressed out of consciousness, but cannot be eliminated entirely out of awareness. Like food stuck down behind the cooker, the smell will out, and the sin is seen, but outside.
Now the scene is set: I, the Child says, am innocent, and all evil is located outside, in the other.
This fabrication will not stay put. The fiction is constantly trying to dissolve itself. The power of the Holy Spirit to undo the original error is so quietly forceful, and the pull of Heaven is so strong, in the memory of the Child, that constant effort is required to uphold the image of innocence battling in a world where all sin is exterior. Why is this best achieved through projection of the entire dynamic onto an external scenario? One's own setting requires significant work to construe holy innocence in a sea of projected evil. Sometimes this is quite effective, but it is much easier to recruit an external situation where the basic facts, especially divorced from the endlessly complex context, lend themselves most readily to the basic plotline of good versus evil. The innocence of the victim is donned to reinforce the ever-crumbling projection of one's own guilt.
The calls, however, are coming from within the house. Actual events of violence and cruelty, if portrayed in a fictional setting, are found entertaining. People (and I have done this!) actively choose to watch extraordinary brutality, and note that the identification in these cases is not just with the victim. There is glee in seeing death, in fact the more, the quite literally the merrier. In horror, in disaster movies, in series set in an actual or mythical 'medieval' settings, the more gruesome, the higher the ratings. Deaths averted disappoint. Massacres are the high point. The tower block collapsing, the flood that engulfs the entire world: there is identification with the agent of suffering, and consummation requires death to roll over the world like an implacable wave. Ken Wapnick points out that viewers can be 'disappointed' that 'only' X people die in a particular disaster: large-scale catastrophes mesmerise.
In another setting, noble ambition, to be the best, requires others not to be the best. They must exist, however; no competitors, no victory. 'Worldly success' requires the actual defeat of others. Getting the job requires others not to get the job. No one wants a job that no one else wants. The whole set-up is one where survival and prosperity actually require others' failure and destruction, albeit with death looming to ultimately overtake the successful as well as the unsuccessful. The consummation of this ambition is a moment in the light before eternal darkness descends. The picture is framed with a white picket fence, which is the distraction from the darkness concealed within the picture itself.
The ego is terrified that the Child will, at some point, find the suffering of the mindset of exile so intolerable it will return to the decision-making point, decide against the ego's proffered assertion of the small-s self, the self-created clay golem brought to temporary life by a fragile, temporary magic, and march back into Eden, realising that the cherubim 'guarding' its gates are actually beckoning, dissolving the mirage of the world forever.
What is its solution? Projection: if the battle is entirely within, the Child will soon wish to resolve the battle. If the battle is between the Child and the world, or if the battle is entirely out there, the Child can pick a side, deny its own darkness, and relish the holy innocence of a righteous crusade, even invoking 'God' as being on its side (but naturally the God of Sodom and Gomorrah, raining down retribution, rather than the God of Jonah, who spares Nineveh because the poor souls do not know their right hand from their left). This relieves guilt by splitting it off, denying it, and projecting it out so it is still seen, but at a 'safe' distance. The battle continues forever (this is why the world's battles merely shift venue; their nature does not change), and the ego is sitting pretty, with the Child unable to resolve its internal conflict, since its attention is on the problem out there. The Child's continuing reliance on the ego is guaranteed.
This splitting is particularly evident in the following example. For work, I once had to watch and process footage shot by fighters at the site of battle they had won, surrounded by the corpses of their opponents. One of the fighters said, 'We ask [God] never to never unite us with these filthy […] in [hell]. We ask [God] to put them in the lowest level of [hell]. We ask [God] to put us in the highest level of [heaven].' The fighters, who were (literally) guilty of murder, projected out the sin onto those they had murdered, themselves were sufficiently righteous, aka 'innocent', to merit the highest level of paradise, and were to be kept as far apart as possible from their opponents ('lowest level ... highest level'), even in the afterlife, where the splitting and projection must be maintained, lest sin boomerang and snap back to its source.
Whatever is seen outside and identified with at any level is therefore merely the vehicle for seeing what is inside. What is inside is seen outside, falsely appearing to originate there.
How, with the Course, can we work with this?
The answer is, in principle, simple: take whatever dynamic is perceived outside to actually be occurring inside, and work with that. No spiritual bypasses, here: to return to Oneness, I have to look at the parts of myself, including the murderous and vengeful, that I do not want to look at, and discern their origin in the ego. Only then can I, with the Holy Spirit's help, unwind the system back to its starting point.
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