Our class yesterday was on specialness, an engrossing and challenging topic. At the end of the class (which I think could have carried on for quite a while), I was asked to post the seven points I had shared for how to give up specialness. Here they are:
1. Need to look at our desire for it, honestly
I said that for not-so-nice people, this tends to be easy, but for nice people, this is the really hard part. The nicer you are, chances are the more dishonest you are with yourself about this.
2. Need to be willing to look at the guilt over it
Better put: Have to realize you are disgusted with yourself about this, that your desire for specialness makes you sick, causes self-loathing. To the extent we can face the revulsion it causes in us and make that conscious, to that same extent, specialness will seem unattractive.
3. Realize it’s not a sin, just a mistake
Despite the guilt we feel over it, it’s not a sin. It’s not a big deal. It’s just a confusion about what we really want. It’s not “bad but delicious.” Labeling something “deliciously bad” ends up keeping us tied to it. We stop and start and stop and start, ad infinitum. Instead, we need to realize that it doesn’t taste good. We’ve been putting it in our mouth by mistake.
4. Need to be willing to look at the aloneness it entails
As the old saying goes, it’s lonely at the top. Specialness means “set apart,” and to be set apart is to be alone. The Text makes this point:
To “single out” is to “make alone,” and thus make lonely. God did not do this to you. Could He set you apart, knowing that your peace lies in His Oneness? He denied you only your request for pain, for suffering is not of His creation. (T-13.III.12)
5. Need to appreciate the vulnerability it involves
As we all know from experience, specialness is incredibly fragile and precarious. It’s not only lonely at the top, it’s fleeting. The Text points out that identifying with specialness makes us feel extremely vulnerable:
It is not you who are so vulnerable and open to attack that just a word, a little whisper that you do not like, a circumstance that suits you not, or an event that you did not anticipate upsets your world, and hurls it into chaos. Truth is not frail. Illusions leave it perfectly unmoved and undisturbed. But specialness is not the truth in you. It can be thrown off balance by anything. What rests on nothing never can be stable. However large and overblown it seems to be, it still must rock and turn and whirl about with every breeze. (T-24.III.3)
6. Need to break the equation of specialness and worth.
We have every right to want worth, but specialness is not worth. Real worth is not based on comparisons. A worth based on comparisons with someone else cannot be a worth that is an innate part of you.
7. Realize the worth that comes from specialness is a diminishment of our real worth, which is limitless and invulnerable
Specialness seems like the royal road to true self-worth. But God gave us “inestimable worth” in our creation. No form of specialness can come close to that. Specialness, therefore, is always a choice against that inestimable worth and thus a choice to diminish our worth.
Exercise
Here is the exercise we concluded with, which is drawn from this powerful passage in the Text:
What is in him is changeless, and your changelessness is recognized in its acknowledgment. The holiness in you belongs to him. And by your seeing it in him, returns to you. All of the tribute you have given specialness belongs to him, and thus returns to you. All of the love and care, the strong protection, the thought by day and night, the deep concern, the powerful conviction this is you, belong to him. Nothing you gave to specialness but is his due. And nothing due him is not due to you. (T-24.VII.2)
Choose someone in your life you think has been slighted by your desire for specialness and repeat to yourself—slowly—the following lines:
All of the tribute I have given my specialness belongs to [name].
All of the love and care I have given my specialness belongs to [name].
All of the strong protection I have given my specialness belongs to [name].
All of the thought by day and night that I have given my specialness belongs to [name].
All of the deep concern that I have given my specialness belongs to [name].
All of the powerful conviction that this is me that I have given my specialness belongs to [name].
There is nothing I have given to specialness that is not [name’s] due.
And everything that I give to [name] returns to me.
[Please note: ACIM passages quoted in this article reference the Foundation for Inner Peace (FIP) Edition.]
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