V. B. To Have Peace, Teach Peace to Learn It, P 1
1 All who believe in separation have a basic fear of retaliation and abandonment. They believe in attack and rejection, so that is what they perceive and teach and learn. These insane ideas are clearly the result of dissociation and projection. What you teach you are, but it is quite apparent that you can teach wrongly, and can therefore teach yourself wrong. Many thought I was attacking them, even though it was apparent I was not. An insane learner learns strange lessons. What you must recognize is that when you do not share a thought system, you are weakening it. Those who believe in it therefore perceive this as an attack on them. This is because everyone identifies himself with his thought system, and every thought system centers on what you believe you are. If the center of the thought system is true, only truth extends from it. But if a lie is at its center, only deception proceeds from it.
Journal
Because I believe in separation I have a basic fear of relation and abandonment. I see that this is true and as long as I continue to believe in this I will teach it through my behavior and through my thoughts. This will reinforce the belief for myself and for others. However, knowing that this belief is in my mind, and knowing that I want my mind to be healed is helpful. I can watch my mind for thoughts that reflect these beliefs and ask for healing.
The whole point of this life is to use it to wake up from the belief in separation, so I don’t want to teach separation through teaching retaliation and abandonment. In order to stop teaching it, I must first realize when I am doing it. So I stay vigilant for this kind of thinking and its projections.
One example I can think of is the belief I sometimes have that someone I care about does not love me. For instance, I will start to miss my daughter and realize I haven’t heard from her in a while. I will text or call and maybe she won’t answer her phone or the text. Then I might start to worry that she is mad at me about something I said or failed to do. I start to think that she is too sensitive and it’s easy to offend her. If I stay with this long enough I will begin to resent her.
If I question this, I see that the only thing that happened is that I miss my daughter and she did not return my call. Everything else is something that I thought based on the belief in abandonment. I believe I can be abandoned and so I project a story of abandonment. I don’t even need the abandonment to actually happen; I can simply perceive that it happened. If I stay with the story soon I am projecting guilt onto her and if I don’t stop my crazy thinking I might start to plan my retaliation. “Fine, if she doesn’t want to talk to me, I don’t want to talk to her.”
Fortunately, I am not that insane anymore, but I can still torture myself with unquestioned beliefs for a long time before I come to my senses. If I don’t allow my thinking to be corrected, I am probably going to teach abandonment and retaliation in some way even if it is subtle. My mom used to be really fond of doing this through martyring herself and expecting us to accept the guilt for her suffering. I catch myself doing this sometimes, too, just mentioning casually that I had been concerned when I didn’t hear back from her right away.
When I hear myself say that kind of thing, I know that I have fallen for the ego again. I don’t want to teach this, but I will do so until I accept healing for the belief driving it. I cannot be abandoned, and therefore I never need to retaliate. There is a lot of ego resistance to this lesson. I cannot break this ugly cycle from within the belief system, but I can accept help from outside it. That is why I have the Holy Spirit, and I call on Him to correct my thinking and to undo what I have done.