On our theme of “Love” for 2022, we raise an interesting question of whether or not God’s love can ever be cruel or have cruelty in its expressions. Many people compare a relationship with God to the relationship between a parent and a child, and many people at one time or another may feel as though their parents’ choices of discipline were cruel.
We can find the answer to this question in Lesson 170 from A Course In Miracles, which says, “There is no cruelty in God and none in me.” That’s a perfectly simple answer, but let’s dive deeper into why there is no cruelty in God, God’s love, nor in ourselves.
We talk commonly about how God is love and “the love of God is within me.” One opposite form of cruelty could be Love, so therefore, God doesn't have is cruelty. This lesson mostly focuses on what love is not. In paragraph five it says, “Love is shorn of what belongs to it and eat alone. Love is endowed with attributes of fear. This is when we bring cruelty into love, because love asks you to lay down all defense or attempts to protect oneself as merely foolish. And your arms, your weapons, would indeed crumble into dust.” The course is engaging in a direct sort of accounting of love: what love is and what love does.
In practical terms, you can see the implications of love, and in contrast, cruelty, in our personal lives and our work as leaders. I also want to draw a link to a previous lesson we’ve discussed in the past about attack thoughts, Lesson 23 says, “I can escape from the world. I see by giving up attack thoughts.” In addition to past discussion about grievances as part of the forgiveness process in Lesson 78 which says, “Let miracles replace all grievances.” This lesson in the headline read, “There is no cruelty in God and none in me” and is a bit of an attention-grabber. So let's see how this first paragraph ties all this together.
It says, “No one attacks without intent to hurt. This can have no exception. When you think that you attack in self defense, you mean that to be cruel is protection. You are safe because of cruelty. You mean that you believe to hurt another brings you freedom and you mean that to attack is to exchange the state in which you are for something better, safer, more secure from dangerous invasion and from fear how thoroughly insane is the idea that to defend from fear is to attack.”
The basic point here is that we justify defensiveness by saying that as human beings, cruelty is justified because I’ve got to protect myself. Consider the common practice of using home alarm systems. Shouldn't we lock our doors because we're protecting ourselves from home invasions, burglars, thieves and other kinds of dangers? In a strict literal way, this is saying that you don't need to protect yourself from anything.
In paragraph six it says, “You make what you defend against and by your own defense against it is it real and inescapable lay down your arms and only then do you perceive it as false.” Somewhere in the psychology of all of this, we actually make the things mentally that we think we have to protect ourselves from, defend against, or attack so that those things don't attack us first.
Even as a deep, committed, and engaged student of the Course, it wouldn’t be surprising for us to utilize commonplace protection items of this world. There are more common items such as household security systems, and then more extreme protection items such as pepper spray or even firearms. In my experience, if you carry a gun, then chances are that subconsciously you expect a chance to use the gun and therefore it becomes a bit of a chicken and an egg situation on a spiritual level. This is not a moral or political stance, but just in the vein of this conversation, we have something like 600 million guns circulating amongst a population of 300 million people which amounts to two guns per person. And if this premise here is true, that what you focus on snowballs into your experience, then as a country, it just seems like with all those guns, we are expecting situations in which we will be required to protect ourselves or situations in which we are under attack.
The lesson draws a connection between the incessant need to self-defend and an unnecessary fear of God. The end result of our own cruelty, attack, and grievances is that we actually form an image of God in which we project all of that onto God. This creates an experience God which can be perceived as cruel, hostile, or malicious towards us. When we think of law of attraction, which is that deep inside of us as human beings, we project all of our hostility and vengeance onto God and then believe or higher power and then believe higher power is vengeful towards us. We protect ourselves in our lives from the fear of the attack from an all powerful God. This can take the form of health attacks, financial attacks, just all kinds of attacks on our mental health, sexual attacks, any number of things. We walk around primed through our lives because of this deeply internalized programming about God is vengeful or cruel in the expectation of being attacked.
An application to business and leadership, for instance, is that some business leaders are very preoccupied with a kind of siege mentality. So, for instance, I saw a documentary about Travis Kalaneck, a major stakeholder of Uber. He took it over at a very early stage in the company and then began to expand it around the world. It is ver effective in demonstrating what we're talking about because he had subconsciously adopted this ’siege mentality’ in which everyone is his enemy. Everyone deserves to be obliterated attacked by any means necessary to defend his company. He used a lot of underhanded tactics and over the course of his career at Uber, even though he's achieved phenomenal successes, you can see how he's neglecting to do the right thing as a leader. And the program does a very good job of showing how he's actually sabotaging himself to the place where the board wants him out. The employees want him out. All of the people he thinks he can turn to for protection, are not interested in protecting him because he's been such a toxic person. So that's a very specific case study of the type of leadership I'm talking about in my work, executive coaching, where you don't have to be non strategic, but you really don't want to have the ‘siege mentality’ where everybody out there is somebody you want to attack and protect yourself from. Even internally in this case, you recruit people to attack others on your behalf. It's very palpable how counterproductive and anti-miraculous that method is.
Another example in the corporate world is the Elizabeth Holmes case in which she had nothing to show for her millions of dollars of investment and fraudulent business practices. It's a significant projection of this deeper, hidden, cruel mindset that we all have the potential to carry on. And finally, the company WeWork, which has a similar story. It seemed like the service was working, but then their culture became reckless and careless in a way, just spending an abundance of money combined with gross over-reporting valuation numbers. One of the major downturns was around compensation, promising people the moon, but not having any substance behind it; the CEO and his wife, in a sense, feathering their nest at the expense of everyone else and you get the feeling like they could jump ship at any moment, taking all the money with them, without much concern for their team. So again, there are all these different, just real amazing learning experiences from these actual examples in the business world today.
Moving onto the idea of parenting, I think, helps us to land the overall point of this lesson and, of course, In Miracles more broadly. One of the ways in which we justify a perception of God's “cruelty’ is through our notion of parenting. When parents use non-gentle parenting techniques or physical parental discipline, which is punitive in some way to the child, and is an expression of cruelty to the child. The parent might even say something along the lines of, “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” as an example. That kind of thinking is really just a disguised way of justifying one's cruelty and projecting it and rationalizing it. That this is often done by borrowing from theology, the belief that God is justified in punishing us and being cruel to us. The idea that we deviate, we do bad things, we don't pay attention to God, we're sinners, therefore God is justified in punishing us for our sins and that we're also justified in punishing our kids or in society more broadly. There are various forms of parenting: cruelty-based or fear-based versus reward-based or love-based.
There's no requirement that you have to struggle and suffer in order for your learning experience to have been worth it but it is a deeply embedded thinking in a lot of areas of life. In summation, it's not just the chemicals we're spewing, but the thing that drives all the things we're spewing into the environment, causing problems is this inner cruelty that we can get the better of us unless we tap into the unlimited wellspring of God’s love, which never involves cruelty.
