20.The Holy Spirit and You
God’s answer to the separation was the Holy Spirit and His relationship with you. This holy relationship held the remembrance of your Self. This holy relationship, had it been embraced, would have immediately ended the separation and you would have been home in the arms of God. The ego, feeling threatened, made as a defense against the truth of who you really are, a tantalizing temptation, the special relationship.
In your relationship with the Holy Spirit He sees you as your Self, perfect. The ego did a great job in mimicking this aspect of your Holy Spirit relationship. Special relationships always start out with the honeymoon phase of the relationship where both parties see the other as perfect. A mother or father sees the newborn as perfect or a love partner sees the other partner as perfect. No one can do any wrong. Then what happens? The pixie dust wears off? The other person changes? Or does the real purpose of the special relationship take over?
The purpose of the special relationship is and will always be separation. This begins immediately with the initial “joining”. When you add a baby or a person to your life, you and that other person become an entity, a family or a couple. There is a “special love” that is only for the participants. You love that person more than others. It’s easier to see a rationale with a child but think about it… You have a new love interest and immediately they take precedence over family or friends you have known for years. How many have personally experienced themselves or friends “disappearing” for months at the beginning of a relationship? Within six months it’s our life, our money and our love to the exclusion of everyone else.
As the blush of seeing each other as “perfect” (the initial high) wears off, the true purpose of the relationship, separation, becomes evident. Much like our relationship with the ego, our special relationship turns adversarial. “Our friend” the ego showed us how to deal with our excruciating terror and guilt by escaping from God into the false universe. But now the ego is calling all the shots and the experience of freedom has turned into a prison sentence. In our special relationship the goodness of “we” has faded and our desire to be separate, special and independent feels thwarted. The other person no longer reflects our perfection but everything we hate about ourselves. Just as we eventually felt as if we were sacrificing something by being in this universe, as if something were missing, we begin to think that way about the special relationship. The universe, like the special relationship which was once an escape, becomes a prison. The universe which was once our savior, like our partner, now becomes a scapegoat and the cause of all our problems. If only the universe or our partner were different everything would be god. So then our choices, as defined by the ego, become; trade them in for another so we can at least experience that honeymoon sensation again or suffer.
But fortunately these are not our only choices. The Holy Spirit tells us that instead we can choose to change the purpose of our relationship. The goal of a special relationship is separation. The goal of a holy relationship is to get that the illusion is not real and to support each other in getting home to God. The holy relationship reflects our own relationship with the Holy Spirit. As we continually turn our relationship over to the Holy Spirit we will learn to see both our self and our partner as perfect. Unlike the transitory knock off version that the ego temps us with, this perfection experience will be the version that ultimately takes us home to God.