Lesson 22: What I see is a form of vengeance.
Living as a cynical and angry person, sparked by my father’s perceived betrayal of our family and the pain left in the wake of the divorce, left me seeing the world as a form of vengeance. I projected my pain outward onto the world and saw it as a nasty, cruel place filled with people who said they loved me, who said they would stay with me and take care of me and then betrayed me in the most painful way possible.
I brought that state of mind into every moment and every relationship after adopting this terrible view of the world as my central identity and purpose in life. Everything I did pushed people away, but it felt like it offered me some form of “protection” from ever being hurt again.
Of course, it didn’t. All I was doing was inflicting the pain I had felt from my father’s leaving on myself over and over again in an attempt to what? Get revenge? That’s what I told myself. If my hatred for him was pure enough, I believed, he’d feel it across the miles he had put between me and himself.
Thoughts of attack and counter-attack plagued me. I wanted so much for him to hurt as much as I did. I continued this cycle even after he was dead and couldn’t even feel the pain that I intended to inflict on him. It was a cycle of insanity, to say the least.
“You made what you would destroy;” this lesson reminds us, “everything that you hate and would attack and kill. All that you fear does not exist.”
I created my own private hell by believing that becoming a hateful and cynical person that I could somehow inflict the same pain on my father that I felt he inflicted on me. In Reality, none of it was true. There was nothing that existed for me to fear except the false ideas I had generated in my own mind and projected out onto the world as my reality.
“Is this the world I really want to see?” the lesson invites us to ask.
There was a point when I said a resounding: “No.”
I wanted to see a world of peace. I wanted to see a world of joy. I wanted to see a world of Love and not fear and hatred.
If you’re at the point, welcome home. This lesson provides the step you need to end your thoughts of attack and vengeance – to relinquish them for healing thoughts of love and joy. Accept the Atonement for yourself – accept that forgiveness for yourself, for the “sins” you think you – and others – have committed – and understand that on the level of spirit, they have never happened.
I may have tried to attack my father in the physical world by becoming angry and cynical, but on the level of spirit, he never knew any of it – and neither did I. We were both simply unified in the mind of God where all we knew was Love for self, each other and God.
We can achieve this state of being here by accepting the Atonement that restores us to our right-mind and heals all thoughts and beliefs in vengeance and fear. It is that desire to heal, that desire to see the world differently – as a classroom for healing and not for vengeance – that restores us to our right mind.
When we reach that state, the Course says in Chapter 2, our right-mindedness “can correct in a way that has [a] real effect.”
I could not correct my error in thinking about my father by the ego’s means of justification, blame and projection. I could only correct that error when I experienced the miracle of a shift in perception that allowed me to see that my father’s real identity was that of an innocent child of God. His spirit is pure.
If we believe Wayne Dyer’s assessment that we choose our parents before we arrive here because we seek to learn a specific lesson – then I chose to be my father’s daughter so that I could learn forgiveness. I needed to heal this area of my being and he agreed to come into this place with me and play the role of a man who would so anger his little girl with his actions that she must either learn to forgive him or destroy herself in anger and fear.
In that right-minded state, the correction had a real effect – and brought me a sense of peace about my father that passed all understanding.
Hafiz asks in today’s poem:
“How many times do you need to hear who you
are
before you begin to cash some of that in and stop
acting like a beggar … for any kind of attention
from people who do not really love you?
“Sweeping the streets the way that
some do, with
eyes that might covet, is no longer fitting to us.
For we are everything’s lord.”
The entire message of A Course in Miracles is that you are everything’s lord. You choose how to think and believe in this world. One way – the ego’s way – will bring you nothing but pain and miscreation. The other way – accepting the Atonement – will bring you peace, joy, happiness and connection to the only thing that is real – Love.
Hafiz continues:
“I don’t want you to leave me and go
back into any
world that can frighten. What can I do? I bet we
can figure something out.”
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