It has been one of the tragic ironies of religious and spiritual movements that time and time again their proponents -- teachers, “masters,” followers, and disciples -- end up exemplifying the very opposite of the inspired teaching itself. Gentle messages of forgiveness and love very quickly metamorphose into gospels of hate and judgment, condemnation and attack. It is the purpose of the current article to discuss this phenomenon, explain how it arises, how it expands to what we can refer to as a “contagion of hate” -- for groups as well as individuals -- and finally, how it can be undone by the Christmas Cure of forgiveness.

We begin by discussing a fundamental theorem of the ego's thought system, which belies its claim for the legitimacy of special love: You cannot love those whom you see as different. And so you must hate them. This is a direct consequence of the ego's fourth law of chaos: You have what you have taken (T-23.II.9:3). According to the ego's law of scarcity, if I have something, I must have taken it from someone else, for I myself lack everything that is truly important. This establishes an adversarial situation in which, because of projection, we will believe that others are withholding from us what we secretly believe is rightfully ours and originally belonged to us. We are therefore justified, in our delusional minds, in attacking them in self-defense (literally, because we are attempting to defend and protect our special self) and seize the special something (i.e., innocence and love) that was taken from us. Again, the fourth (and fifth) law of chaos graphically depicts this insane dynamic (T-23.II.9-13).

One cannot then practice the love that is otherwise preached and taught, for the relationship between form and content, behavior and thinking, has not been understood; what in the context of sickness Jesus refers to as level confusion (T-2.IV.2). Form, in A Course in Miracles, is always associated with the body, the embodiment (pardon the pun), of the ego's thought of separation (the content). To state it another way, the content of the wrong mind is the ego's belief in separate interests (one or the other) that is projected out to the body, which by its very physical nature separates and excludes us from each other, the meaning of its special relationships. For example, our existence begins and ends with our physical (and psychological) space, which distinguishes us from everyone else. How, then, could we not experience ourselves as separated, fragmented, and different? As this reflects the ontological separation and differentiation, we cannot help but feel guilty and fearful all the time, displacing the bottom-line fear of God's wrath onto anyone and everything in our lives. Thus Jesus' words, not- so-subtly aimed at the Christian religions:

Whenever any form of special relationship tempts you to seek for love in ritual, remember love is content, and not form of any kind. The special relationship is a ritual of form, aimed at raising the form to take the place of God at the expense of content. There is no meaning in the form, and there will never be. The special relationship must be recognized for what it is; a senseless ritual in which strength is extracted from the death of God, and invested in His killer as the sign that form has triumphed over content, and love has lost its meaning (T-16.V.12:1-4).

And what we believe we did to God is what we re-enact with each of our special relationships:

Each day, and every minute in each day, and every instant that each minute holds, you but relive the single instant when the time of terror took the place of love (T-26. V.13:1).

Thus do the relationships between organisms, from the emergence of what we think of as life, mirror as shadowy fragments the ontological relationship between ourselves and our Creator when, in our insanity, we believed we took His Love and power to create and made it our own. Fear of retaliation for our sin therefore took the place of the Love that created us, and which unites us within Itself.

Religions, which thrive on differentiation from other religions or spiritualities, quickly form around separation, guilt, and hate, for thousands if not millions are attracted to their false light. This has been especially true of the various forms of Christianity, which take as their starting point the celestially differentiated and very special savior figure of Jesus. Since the content of God's Son is oneness, emphasizing the form of Jesus -- the heroically salvific figure of Christian myth, then and now -- merely shifts the focus to the more comfortable (to the ego) climate of bodies, differentiation, and specialness, referred to in A Course in Miracles as “bitter idols” (C-5.5:7). Such a shift to form is inevitable when there is a fear of love (the content). Thus does the ego “manage” Jesus' love in a special form it can accept without any threat to its own specialness. Jesus, in fact, cautioned Helen Schucman, scribe of the Course, against practicing this very dynamic in a post-Course message when he advised her about using questions (i.e., specific forms) to limit the non-specific content of his love, which readers of The Lighthouse will recall from a recent article (March 2008, p. 3):

The purpose of words is to limit, and by limiting, to make a vast area of experience more manageable. But that means manageable by you (Absence from Felicity, p. 445).

Indeed, this attempt to “manage” or limit love through the employment of specific forms, such as stories and rituals, can be seen in all the world's religions, inspiring Jesus to say in the Psychotherapy pamphlet:

Formal religion has no place in psychotherapy, but it also has no real place in religion [i.e. spirituality]. In this world, there is an astonishing tendency to join contradictory words into one term without perceiving the contradiction at all. The attempt to formalize religion is so obviously an ego attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable that it hardly requires elaboration here (P-2.II.2:1-3).

Thus, attempts to integrate, or see as the same, the Jesus of the Bible and of A Course in Miracles express the above- mentioned astonishing tendency to join contradictory words into one term without perceiving the contradiction at all. Jesus himself comments in the Course on this phenomenon as it revealed itself in the history of Christianity. He says, in the context of the traditional mis-understanding of the crucifixion:

It is unwise to accept any concept if you have to invert a whole frame of reference in order to justify it. This procedure is painful in its minor applications and genuinely tragic on a wider scale. Persecution frequently results in an attempt to “justify” the terrible misperception that God Himself persecuted His Own Son on behalf of salvation. The very words are meaningless (T-3.I.2:2-5).

Salvation's “frame of reference” is the reflected unity of God's innocent and guiltless Son. This is inverted by the ego to embrace an insane thought system wherein salvation is equated with sacrifice of an individual person -- referred to in the Course as a “little life on earth” (C-5.5:3) -- as the means of atoning for sin. This serves to reinforce the mind's guilt that, remaining unconscious and thus unnoticed, lies buried in the part of our split minds that is ruled both by fear of the truth of God's Love and the ego's belief in sin. It is a psychological axiom -- first articulated and elaborated by Freud -- that what is repressed is inevitably projected. Guilt will always find its way from the mind into the world of bodies. As the Viennese father of psychoanalysis so graphically wrote of these repressed instincts, what the Course knows as guilt:

the perpetual readiness of the inhibited instincts to break through to satisfaction at any suitable opportunity (Vol. XIV, p. 284)…; We must rather attribute to the repressed a strong upward drive, an impulsion to break though into consciousness (Vol. XXII, p. 68). (1)

And, in discussing the projection of these repressed instincts in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Vol. XVIII, p. 42), Freud quotes the Faust of his beloved Goethe, saying that the instinct “Presses ever forward unsubdued” (I,iii).

And thus it is that otherwise well-meaning spiritual seekers, unfortunately including students of A Course in Miracles, unaware of their secret belief that they “are the home of evil, darkness and sin” (W-pI.93.1:1), project out this darkness so it is now seen in someone else, thereby keeping their special identity safe:

What you project you disown, and therefore do not believe is yours. You are excluding yourself by the very judgment that you are different from the one on whom you project. Since you have also judged against what you project, you continue to attack it because you continue to keep it separated. By doing this unconsciously, you try to keep the fact that you attacked yourself out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe (T-6. II.2).

The self-attack, of course, is the problem, yet our projected attack on others keeps our original attack protected, which is the meaning of this statement from the workbook:

The [unforgiving or attack] thought protects projection, tightening its chains, so that distortions are more veiled and more obscure; less easily accessible to doubt, and further kept from reason [i.e., right-minded thinking]. What can come between a fixed projection and the aim that it has chosen as its wanted goal? (W-pII.1.2:3-4)

Translating Jesus' words on the sign of Christmas, the ego's version would read this way:

The sign of Christmas is attack, darkness masquerading as light. See it not inside yourself, but shining in your sinful brother outside, and accept it as the sign that the time of Christ has come.(2)

Thus is Christ (or Jesus) seen as the avenger, and “the time of Christ” is when His vengeance is complete. We then want to be sure that His avenging hand strikes another. In other words, deep down in their guilt-ridden psyches, Christians believe that Jesus will not really return on clouds of glory, as the gospels say (Matthew 24:30), but on clouds of judgment:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.… And these [the goats] shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous [the sheep] into life eternal (Matthew 25:31-33,46).

Despite their belief that they are sinless sheep, the secret and fearful thought of these would-be Christians is that they are, in fact, guilty goats. This repressed guilt, again, leads inevitably to attack, the ego's insidious guilt-attack cycle. This cycle directly results in the ego's contagion of hate, to which we now turn. Like an illness that easily and quickly spreads its poison, so, too, does hate infect others with its virulent venom, even unto death: “In contagion do they seek to kill” (T-27.I.4:5).

Hate is the inevitable and, to the ego, the natural result of projected guilt. It is the ego's way of magically “helping” us be rid of the pain of our searing self-hatred: “We don't have the guilt; they do!” Since the ego's reigning principle is one or the other, giving others our guilt leaves us guiltless and therefore innocent, called attention to by our anger and hate that screeches of another's sin:

Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated. In this view, you seek to find an innocence that is not Theirs (God's and Christ's] but yours alone, and at the cost of someone else's guilt. Can innocence be purchased by the giving of your guilt to someone else?… Whatever way the game of guilt is played, there must be loss. Someone must lose his innocence that someone else can take it from him, making it his own.… You think your brother is unfair to you because you think that one must be unfair to make the other innocent (T-26.X.4:1-3,7-8; 5:1; italics mine).

Indeed, hate is in fact necessary if we are to survive our guilt, for it proves that another has treated us unfairly, thereby establishing our innocence. This, then, is the ego's secret wish, “the outward picture of a wish; an image that [we] wanted to be true” (T-24.VII.8:10). This image is what later in the text is called the face of innocence (T-31.V.2:6), wherein we exist as a special, individual self, but someone else is held responsible for our misery and suffering, deserving of death as punishment for a sin that is no longer ours.

This dynamic of one or the other has its origin in the ontological one or the other: God or His Son, oneness or separation. From the belief in our sin (again, “the home of evil, darkness and sin”) arises guilt or self-hatred -- we have not only done something wrong, but are something wrong, since the very fact that we experience our separate existence means that we have indeed separated, thus justifying the self-perception of inveterate sinfulness. This guilt perforce expresses itself in teaching guilt to others, for, as we have just seen, projection is inevitable; self-hate needs to find specific expression (W-pI.161.7). And so we make attack, judgment, and condemnation real. Yet since ideas leave not their source, a primary theme of A Course in Miracles, the guilt we put outside remains within, there continually to fester and leading to continual projection and attack, the notorious guilt-attack cycle that preserves the world as we know it. Moreover, once we project our self-hatred, we will believe it is truly outside, due to a Course principle -- projection makes perception -- that is corollary to the above ideas leave not their source: what we make real in our minds we project, and therefore actually believe is outside us to be perceived and reacted to; yet all the while the projected guilt remains within the mind, out of awareness and seemingly preserved forever. This guilt, being unknown to us, means that we can never gain access to it unless we learn to recognize its dimly-lit reflection in the world we see, as we read in these two statements from the text:

Damnation is your judgment on yourself, and this you will project upon the world. See it as damned, and all you see is what you did to hurt the Son of God. If you behold disaster and catastrophe, you tried to crucify him (T-21. in.2:1-3). The certain outcome of the lesson that God's Son is guilty is the world you see. It is a world of terror and despair. Nor is there hope of happiness in it (T-31.I.7:4-6).

In this way does Jesus gently lead us from our projections back to the mind that is their source. As the Course says of the Holy Spirit:

[He] takes you gently by the hand, and retraces with you your mad journey outside yourself, leading you gently back to the truth and safety within. He brings all your insane projections and the wild substitutions that you have placed outside you to the truth. Thus He reverses the course of insanity and restores you to reason (T-18.I.8:3-5).

Returned to our minds, we can finally look, unveiled, at the ego strategy of first making guilt real, and then pretending it exists in someone else. Since this is a dynamic in which we all participate, we also participate in what the Course terms the “secret vows” (T-28.VI) we make with each other, the mutually-infecting contagion of hate that reinforces the ego's thought system of separation and specialness. And so we all teach and learn from each other:

To teach is to demonstrate. There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time. From your demonstration others learn, and so do you. The question is not whether you will teach, for in that there is no choice. The purpose of the course might be said to provide you with a means of choosing what you want to teach on the basis of what you want to learn (M-in.2:1-5).

When we are able to choose the right mind, our projected special relationship with the ego (the content), as it is manifest in our special relationships here (in form), is returned to the mind via the miracle that reverses projection: “[The world you see] is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition” (T-21.in.1:5). This “inward condition” is the mind's power of decision: choosing the ego's motto of separate interests or the Holy Spirit's healing principle of shared interests. Once our awareness is shifted to the mind, we can change its content from one or the other to together, or not at all (T-19.IV-D.12:8), which is mirrored in our experience as bodies by the recognition that we are all the same. Despite the obvious physical and psychological traits that differentiate us from all animate and inanimate objects in the world, we share the identical split mind: the ego's thought system of guilt and hate, the Holy Spirit 's thought system of innocence and forgiveness, and the decision maker that chooses between them. And so we realize that we are all in the same miserable ego boat, searching for the way out of the maelstrom of hate in which we find ourselves, yet always looking in the wrong place: the external world of special relationships instead of the internal world of forgiveness.

The choice then is ours. If we wish to learn hate, we teach it by demonstrating the reality of sin by showing how we have been hurt by the sinfulness of others. If we wish to learn forgiveness, however, we teach it by demonstrating that sin has had no effect upon love -- “not one note in Heaven's song was missed” (T-26.V.5:4). By contrasting for us the effects of attack and forgiveness, pain and joy, Jesus teaches us to choose his Christmas cure: forgiveness over hate, the answer to the problem, not the problem itself.

To counteract the ego tactic of guilt and its projection of hate, Jesus urges us in the Christmas section of the text to uncover our darkness -- “the secret sins and hidden hates” (T-31.VIII.9:2) -- and invite the Holy Spirit to shine His forgiving light on what has long been kept hidden. It is a plea to recall our projections and see no one as separate from us:

This Christmas give the Holy Spirit everything that would hurt you. Let yourself be healed completely that you may join with Him in healing, and let us celebrate our release together by releasing everyone with us. Leave nothing behind, for release is total, and when you have accepted it with me you will give it with me (T-15.XI.3: 1- 3; italics mine).

The key message here is that we cannot be freed of our guilt unless we free everyone of the guilt we projected, without exception, leaving no one behind and outside salvation's kind embrace. A number of years ago in these pages, I quoted an experience Helen Schucman had in the summer directly preceding her taking down the Course, while vacationing with her husband Louis in Atlantic City, New Jersey (long before it became the East Coast mecca for gambling casinos). Here is Helen's recollection, many years afterward:

Several times that summer I felt something like the “subway experience” of years before, [an earlier experience when most unexpectedly Helen felt an indescribable love for people on the New York City subway].… It generally took place in a crowd of people, for whom I could feel a brief but powerful affinity. One took place on a warm evening when Louis and I were walking along a crowded resort boardwalk.… A sudden sense of deep emotional closeness to everyone there swept over me, with a clear and certain recognition that we were all making the same journey together to a common goal.

However, later that summer, Helen recalled the incident more specifically in a letter to William Thetford, her partner in the Course's scribing:

One evening we were walking and Jonathan [Helen's “other” name for Louis] pointed out a brain-injured boy (about 12 or so) who was being pushed by his parents in a carriage. There were other cripples [an Anglicism for the mentally retarded] there, too. As we walked I suddenly…got a sense of everyone walking happily and very much together on the same path.…we'll all make it home eventually. Sometimes I love everybody very much (Absence from Felicity, pp. 115,140).

Helen's beatific experience emphasizes the Holy Spirit's central principle of together, or not at all. We cannot lift the ego's various veils of defense and return home at the expense of others, for such separation and attack are the foundation of the ego's thought system, as well as its means of preserving it. This is why the first lesson of the Holy Spirit is To Have, Give All to All (T-6.V-A). We learn that to remember the all- inclusive nature of God's Love we must be willing to share its earthly expression of forgiveness with all people, all the time, and in all situations. While Heaven's state of perfect unity (“a Oneness joined as One” [T-25.I.7:1]) cannot be known here, its reflection in the form of shared interests most certainly can be. That we can learn, and this lesson is the central focus of A Course in Miracles, as we read in the opening pages of the manual for teachers:

A teacher of God is anyone who chooses to be one. His qualifications consist solely in this; somehow, somewhere he has made a deliberate choice in which he did not see his interests as apart from someone else's (M- 1.1:1).

Helen's first poem, “The Gifts of Christmas,” frequently quoted in this newsletter, begins with the following relevant lines that point to this essential truth of our salvation:

Christ passes no one by. By this you know
He is God's Son. You recognize His touch
In universal gentleness. His Love
Extends to everyone. His eyes behold
The Love of God in everything He sees.
    (The Gifts of God, p. 95; italics mine)

This is paralleled in these words from the inspiring close of Lesson 160:

Not one does Christ forget. Not one He fails to give you to remember, that your home may be complete and perfect as it was established. He has not forgotten you. But you will not remember Him until you look on all as He does. Who denies his brother is denying Him, and thus refusing to accept the gift of sight by which his Self is clearly recognized, his home remembered and salvation come (W-pI.160.10; italics mine).

Can we, with Jesus standing beside our brothers, ever seek to exclude a single member of the Sonship, knowing that to exclude one is to exclude all, including ourselves? What hold can hate and judgment have on us when Heaven's gift of love and peace are in our hands, to hold and to share? In what is perhaps the most beautiful of all the sections in the Course, “For They Have Come,” Jesus sings to us his encomium to the holy relationship; the “living temple” that is Heaven's home on earth:

The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love. And They [God and Christ] come quickly to the living temple, where a home for Them has been set up. There is no place in Heaven holier. And They have come to dwell within the temple offered Them, to be Their resting place as well as yours. What hatred has released to love becomes the brightest light in Heaven's radiance. And all the lights in Heaven brighter grow, in gratitude for what has been restored (T- 26.IX.6).

And from this temple of light we look back on the journey we have taken, which began with our separation as one Son and continued through the hellish hate of our special relationships wherein our happiness and salvation rested on another's sacrifice and loss. Having retraced our steps, however, we stand now with Jesus and all our brothers on the holiest spot on earth, where the contagion of hate has been cured by the Christmas message of passing no one by. Thus do we return to Heaven as the one Son that God created one with Him, as Heaven sings its song of gratitude, to which we happily add: “And [we are] glad and thankful it is so” (W-pI.200.11:9).

FOOTNOTES:
1. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953).
2. The original, of course, reads like this: “The sign of Christmas is a star, a light in darkness. See it not outside yourself, but shining in the Heaven within, and accept it as the sign the time of Christ has come (T-15.XI.2:1-2).”