Arguments are Soldiers

There's a primal urge embedded within everyone: the need to be right. More specifically, a desire for righteous indignation. The pursuit of which drives much of our thinking and most of the news.

At its deepest level, such a mental construct pits a me versus something. The something being an idea, a position, a person, a group of people. The antagonist is essentially irrelevant. It's the me that matters.

All conflict strengthens the sense of self. That's its purpose. The perception that "things are not as they ought to be" is enmeshed within the framework of identity. Which invariably, and inevitably, leads to hierarchy. A gradient of positions within the poles of polarity. The hallmark of duality. Conflict makes me me. And the more potent the pain, the more pronounced the me.

And so each moment of the day is spent addressing apparent incompatibilities between what is and what should be. Reason not an aid to rationality but rather ruthlessness. Arguments are soldiers we righteously send into battle. The better trained the soldier, the more cogent the argument.

From an infant's first cry to deathbed laments, sorrow proves beyond all doubt that I am, but it's not my fault. Yet suffering also betrays the primordial guilt reverberating from the construction of selfhood at the expense of oneness. From which we desperately seek an innocence by transposing culpability onto others.

Your wrong-ness, your insincerity, your shamefulness, your errors, in fact every one of your sins contribute to my goodness. All the wrong we see in others witnesses their guilt, not our's.

But as A Course in Miracles poignantly posits: "Can innocence be purchased by the giving of your guilt to someone else?" An honest assessment of this question opens the gate to freedom. The pathway to peace is paved with gentle, judgment-free looking at all our minions of menace, the "hungry dogs of fear" we send out to pounce on any sense of injustice.

However, we're not asked to deny our rightness nor even attempt to diminish its alluring insistence. Instead, merely looking with gentleness at the certainty of me instantly shifts consciousness. A most extraordinary sense of bliss envelops all experience. War transformed to peace, our soldiers of submission reshaped into sentinels of serenity.

Join me in Thursday's class where we'll explore the nature of righteousness and how we can use its tempting tendrils of dissent to lead us to the promised land of unconditional joy. I look forward to seeing you then.