This lesson, 170 from A Course in Miracles, is a continuing topic from the previous two month posts, and has several technical layers to it.
Let’s recall that Lesson 170 from A Course in Miracles says, “There is no cruelty in God and none in me.”
Essentially, the layers amount to the fact that as human beings, we tend to start with thoughts of cruelty within our own minds. Elsewhere in ACIM, it calls cruel thoughts “grievances” or “attack thoughts,” though I think it's important in this lesson to make note of the fact that the nuance is about cruelty and the lesson makes additional points about the fact that as we nurture cruelty within us, we feel then that it's coming at us from the outside world. It's almost as though we conjure up cruelty and so we have to protect ourselves against it. Even though it started in our minds, it was boomeranging back at us. We, through various sort of mental defense mechanisms through the malicious ego (not Freud's/Jung’s ego) that the course talks about have to protect ourselves. We have to defend ourselves heavily from cruelty that now looks as if it's coming at us from the outside world. At the same time, we begin to develop notions of cruelty about God and we have an elaborate - kind of almost worshipful - stance that we take towards God as being cruel and this we use to justify further cruelty in ourselves.
Most people are aware of the unsavory history of most religions in which there's been a lot of cruelty from people to people throughout history in the name of religion. So as a review, the first discussion on this lesson was about coming to an understanding of all these different layers that this lesson is trying to teach us about so that we can begin to dismantle any justifications we have for being cruel that we ultimately also source an illusory conclusion: God is cruel, therefore we can be cruel.
In the second discussion, last month we raised a series of questions that came to me through one of my A Course of Miracles groups that I facilitate where the question came up there in regards to this lesson about what we do with the hard cases we face in life where people are being really cruel in our own personal lives, either personally or professionally. We may have experience of people being cruel or where we have cruel behaviors and patterns. So that whole show was about different ways to think through how to become more resilient either as a professional helper with people in situations that seem cruel or with our own cruelty and then also applying all of that within the executive coaching framework with clients who have a lot of responsibility on their shoulders. A lot of the clients I work with, CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, and other leaders may fall victim of feeling justified in being tyrannical or borderline aggressive at work, given all of the responsibility that they have on their shoulders and they have to discover a way to let that go because there is more power in a release of this type of negative energy. Again, love is behind all of this. So we must harness the ability to tap into love rather than justifying cruelty and staying stuck in cruel behavior.
Today, I would like to take a more global approach to this idea of cruelty and what the solution to it is. So the course, again at a very global level, says that it does not aim at teaching the meaning of love. The course and the curriculum it lays out does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. That in itself is an interesting concept, but that's not the section I would like to necessarily highlight. The course does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all encompassing can have no opposite. So this is a statement of non-dualistic thinking, which is the forte of the course. The course is basically announcing that the whole purpose of these lessons in the text is all about removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence. It is something that the course is committed to removing in our own thinking about ourselves and also in our thinking about God. The course also says elsewhere that the sole responsibility of a miracle worker is to accept atonement for themselves.
Atonement, as we've mentioned previously, is a mechanism or a device or a process that the course teaches which comes from God or higher power, and comes from a source of love in the Divine Being that removes our mistakes and errors. It restores us to a pristine state in which we are free from our errors and the consequences of our errors. So that's a way to undo the blocks to love. The main ways, in practical terms, are to have a meditation practice starting at the beginning of the day and then going all the way through the day, five minutes of every hour if possible, to the end of the day in which we turn our hearts and minds towards the love of God within us. That comes from Lesson 50: “I am sustained by the love of God.” This has been deemed the “anchor lesson” for the theme this year. Additionally, there's a paraphrase in lesson 50 that says, “Through the love of God within me, I can resolve all seeming difficulties without effort and ensure confidence are connecting to the source of love.”
The bottom line of what this lesson is looking at is something we talk about almost every month, which is a practice for undoing negative programming. We commonly mention ho’opono’pono in regard to that, and then a process for tapping into divine love regularly. So it doesn't seem that profound, but when you go through from lesson to lesson, from month to month, the basic ideas behind our path to success with tapping into love gets more and more exposed and revealed and reinforced. From a full circle approach, it’s more than developing a the process that works for you to undo your negative programming and having that meditation practice, and what's also really helpful is to really understand the source of your cruelty and the source of God’s love. The method by which we can undoing negative programming from the past is really important moving forward, but also to creating new habits where we are more automatically tapped into that love and we're not automatically tapped into these habits of cruelty and being aware of what type of energy we want to tap into and what source can provide for us.
The benefit of this lesson is that it really approaches the particular blockage interested in the love of God within us. It approaches it through that use of the word cruelty and that it alerts us to the fact that if we engage in cruel behavior, personally or professionally, there's something that really has to change about that. It goes on to help us work out some of the convoluted justifications we might have for why we're cruel. For instance, if we get pivot now to application in executive coaching, I can see different forms of justification of cruel behavior with regard to work teams. If you're leading a team, and it can be something as seemingly inconsequential as passive aggressive behavior or even negative thoughts surrounding your team members which can lead to subconsciously - or consciously - making life a little bit harder for them. That's obviously a form of cruelty.
My work is to support all of my clients, and help them to fall in love with the idea that you don't have to lead that way, that you can let that go, and you can tap into love as a way of leading. One of the powerful ways in which I hear clients apply it and where I try to apply it myself is when the lightbulb goes off and the client will say, “So you mean if my life is in turmoil and I'm emotionally up and down and volatile and angry and upset, then somehow I disperse that to my team telepathically or practically. So you mean to say that if I reduce all of that or even eliminate that, my team becomes more high performing?”
Absolutely. That's exactly what we're saying.
It seems obvious but it's not that obvious to a lot of very high powered leaders. Plus, it's not that easy to transform it once you become committed to changing and letting cruelty go in this way that we're talking about. It's one of my deepest joys and pleasures to be able to think, teach, and coaching this way of thinking.
In order to accomplish this, there is a whole process of nurturing a relationship. I first learned in my first pastoral counseling class at Yale Divinity School in what you're trying to do as a counselor, as a pastoral counselor and that's an early stage of my training before I went into pastoral psychotherapy, which has been a precursor to doing executive coaching. What I learned there was that the initial relationship with the client is best depicted metaphorically, as you're trying to get on somebody's island and that you are like a seafaring vessel that could have pirates on it that are going to plunder the island. Or you could be a Carnival cruise ship that's just going to overrun the island with tourist stuff, or you could be a submarine that's going to try and plant nukes on the island.
In other words, the person whose island, whose mind you're trying to enter doesn't really know what your intentions are, even though you're a preferred helper. And you have to demonstrate in how you talk and how you ask questions and how you conduct yourself that you're trustworthy. So they'll take you all over the island, showing you things to see how you behave. They'll tell you a story here. They'll tell you about this milder thing that there's a trauma for them, but they won't take you to their real treasure for a while. With each encounter, build more trust and more safety in how you're respectful of what they share with you. So if you're critical or judgmental or give too much advice or talk too much, they're not going to open up where the real treasure is, the real buried treasure that they'll eventually take you to, where all the cruelty is stored.
After all of our conversation about cruelty or trauma or pain or toxicity, that treasure will be shared with you in degrees as you become more safe and trustworthy. So that's my basic mo into the work with clients is to start out without a lot of judgments or too much advice, unless they ask for specific types of advice. But the goal is always to say, “I really want the real treasure and I'm going to be as patient and as respectful, genuinely so, so that you know that when you take me to the treasure, I'm not going to turn on you.”
Step two then is I have to be really grounded in a place of love that we've been talking about. I also have to be relatively clean. I'm not perfect, but in both dimensions, I have to be good enough, which isn't perfect. The goal is to really just focus on building a lot of trust with my clients so that they'll take me to where their deepest experiences of cruelty lay. In other words, that's the treasure that I'm working for, where a client, without me pressing them or forcing them. There may be a variety of tough, painful, toxic, traumatic things that people have carried. So in addition to them being receptive to the input I'm going to give, they're giving me the gift of telling me where the cruelty exists in their lives and pasts.
We must continuously do inventories of where we can catch ourselves being cruel to ourselves, to other people assumptions we have about God being cruel or unfair. That's another code word for cruelty. God is unfair, life is unfair. Any places we feel about that, that will surface for us elements of the cruelty that I think this lesson is getting at. So we want to undo those, be very intentional about wanting to release all of that as opposed to justifying holding on to cruelty. Undoing blocks to love and then tapping into the divine source of love, those two things go hand in hand. The more we tap in, the easier it is to let go of cruelty. The more intentional we are about letting go of cruelty, the more we're able to tap it. So that concludes the 30,000 foot approach to this topic for today and concludes our discussion Lesson 170 from ACIM on how cruelty can create barriers from God’s love and how to remove them.
