I apologize for being away from blogging for so long. I have been obsessed with a project that I believe is vital for the Circle and for the Course, and the truth is I’ve just lost track of time.
About a week ago I had a realization that has had a huge effect on me since and I wanted to share this with you, in the hopes that it will have a similar effect on you. I’ve found four places in the Course’s early dictation where Jesus says that concerns over lack of worth and efforts to augment one’s worth are “egocentric,” “narcissistic,” “grandiose,” and “arrogant.” The effect this has had on me is to burst the bubble of my self-concern; not completely, of course, but I feel like I have a pin in my hand, and whenever I want to burst that bubble, I can now do so.
Let me quickly review the passages in question.
In one, Jesus says that Bill’s belief that he is “vulnerable enough to be hurt”–specifically, by his parents—is “a peculiar kind of arrogance, whose narcissistic component is perfectly obvious.” So here we have two words: “arrogance” and “narcissistic.” I’ll talk about arrogance later. For now, let’s look at the narcissism. That’s pretty easy to see. In Bill’s mind, the whole situation is about him. It’s all about how his parents are damaging his worth. Bill, in other words, is all that matters in this picture. His parents and their needs aren’t really part of the equation. “Narcissism” comes from the myth of Narcissus, who spent all his time staring at his own reflection. Isn’t that exactly what Bill is doing here?
In another passage, Jesus says that Edgar Cayce was displaying “egocentricity” when he was “unable to leave the requests of others unanswered.” Jesus implies that the reason Cayce drove himself into an early grave by doing too many psychic readings (in response to a deluge of requests) was because he was unconsciously hoping that by sacrificing he would augment his insufficient worth. Why is this egocentric? Because Cayce is narrowly focused on the issue of his own worth. If he could have broadened his view, he would have realized that living longer would allow him to help far more people.
In a third passage, these same acts of self-sacrifice on the part of Cayce are labeled “a Christian form of grandiosity.” Based on the context, this looks like the thought, “I’m being like Jesus and making a rare and heroic self-sacrifice, one that makes me more divinely important than others.” It’s not hard to see the grandiosity in that.
In the fourth passage, Jesus says that Bill’s belief about his own “exclusion from universal Love” is “arrogant.” So how exactly is Bill being arrogant? To be arrogant, at root, is to take or claim for yourself something without right. I like this definition: “making undue claims in an overbearing manner.” Basically, you’re claiming a special status for yourself that you have no right to claim. Now let’s look at Bill’s belief. He believes he is excluded from universal Love. In other words, he is excluded from something universal. Isn’t that a contradiction? Doesn’t “universal” mean “applying to everything”? So Bill’s position is like a child turning in the wrong answers for a math assignment and then saying, “But the laws of mathematics don’t apply to me.” Wouldn’t you call that child arrogant? Thus, we have to call Bill arrogant, too.
This also explains how Bill’s thought that his parents had hurt him was arrogant. Jesus said, “It endows the perceiver [Bill’s father, in this case] with sufficient unreal strength to make him over, and then acknowledges the perceiver’s miscreation.” So Bill is granting his father the power to wrest Bill away from God’s creation of him and remake Bill in his dad’s image. But is that a power that Bill can grant his father? No, it’s not. It is specifically called an “unreal strength.” Bill is doling out rights that aren’t his to dole out. The only one with power over Bill’s identity is God.
So we have these four words: narcissistic, egocentric, grandiose, and arrogant. The picture they paint is really the exact opposite of how we see these activities. In our eyes, worrying about our worth, how it’s been damaged and how we can repair it, is humble. Only the arrogant think their worth is beyond question. Yet rather than humble and sincere, Jesus calls it narcissistic. We are ignoring everything else while we stare at our own reflection.
In our eyes, trying to shore up our worth again shows humility. It acknowledges that we do indeed have a problem in this department and are making sincere efforts to address it. What could be more humble than that? Yet Jesus calls it grandiose and egocentric. It is grandiose because it thinks we have the power to make ourselves better than others, more special in God’s eyes. It is egocentric because it means that we are again ignoring the bigger picture while we fixate on our precious image.
Finally, all of this is arrogant. It is arrogant to say that we are an exception to God’s universal Love. And it is arrogant to think that we, or anyone else, have power over our worth, when in fact God alone has that power. To think we can give others the power to damage that worth is arrogant. To think we can give ourselves power to improve that worth is also arrogant. Thinking that power is ours to give at all is a classic case of arrogating—seizing control of something without right.
I was talking about this whole issue the other day and the image that came to my mind was that of the egg-and-spoon race. This is a classic outdoor activity, where you carry an egg on a spoon while you try to reach the finish line first, obviously without breaking your egg.
If you think about the egg as your worth, isn’t life itself like an egg-and-spoon race? We are constantly having to carry this incredibly delicate thing around (our worth), on an unsteady platform, constantly worried we’ll drop and break it, yet having to race ahead with it as fast we can so that we finish first. In these conditions, a monumental “egg concern” seems perfectly reasonable and rational; such a concern should dominate our lives.
But now let’s switch the picture a bit. As you look down at your delicate egg, you see that in reality it is made of an absolutely indestructible material, making it literally the most invulnerable thing on this earth. An atomic bomb could blow up next to it and wouldn’t scratch it. And as you look at the spoon, you realize it is not carrying the egg at all. God’s Hand is carrying the egg, a Hand with more strength and more love than anything in this universe. How does your “egg concern” look now? In this situation, wouldn’t it seem rather arrogant of you to think that you had to protect the egg?
And now you look around you and see that your competitors in the race have fallen asleep. As the Course says, “The special ones are all asleep, surrounded by a world of loveliness they do not see.” The other contestants are lost in terrible nightmares, and are blind to all the loveliness that surrounds them. Wouldn’t your first impulse be to stop your racing and try to rouse them, so that you and they could look on this stunning loveliness together? Wouldn’t it seem narcissistic in the extreme to carry on racing, while you ignore both those caught in nightmares and the loveliness that surrounds both you and them?
Now try to take in the whole situation. Your egg is indestructible. God’s loving Hand is carrying it for you. And there are far more pressing and important things to give your attention to. Does it still seem “humble” to race ahead, worried about precariously balancing your “delicate” egg?
I would love to resign from the egg-and-spoon race, stop worrying about my worth, and start attending to all those other more important things. And these few snippets from the Course’s original dictation are giving me an ability to do that that I don’t remember having before. Like I said, I hope they have a similar effect on you.
