Drop your defenses

Filed under Notes on 8. March 2007 »

Sometimes I read a few pages in A Course in Miracles with my morning coffee, and today I came upon an interesting truth about the nature of future projection. Nothing new, perhaps, but then there is nothing ever really new in this anyway. What it talked about was how our compulsion to try and control everything, especially the future, is really a defense mechanism. And it did seem fairly obvious in hindsight: when we attempt to control the future we are always trying to secure our safety and comfort, or in other words we are trying to figure out ways of defending ourselves against a future threat. Here is what it said:

“Who would defend himself unless he thought he were attacked, that the attack were real, and that his own defense could save himself? And herein lies the folly of defense; it gives illusions full reality, and then attempts to handle them as real. It adds illusions to illusions, thus making correction doubly difficult. And it is this you do when you attempt to plan the future, activate the past, or organize the present as you wish.”

Being afraid of what might happen in the future, and thinking that you need to make plans and figure everything out to ensure your safety, you are acting as if you were being threatened, as if you were under attack. With whatever action you take to defend yourself, you strengthen the illusion that you are being threatened and that there is something to defend. This could be as little as needing to be right in an argument, defending your position — and it also comes in when we attempt to inflate our sense of self in some way. Like trying to look good in the eyes of others, whether by showing off in a nice car or casually dropping names at a dinner party. These attempts at ego inflation are, under the surface, nothing more than desperate acts of defense against an illusory threat.

Of course, the belief that there is something to defend stems first and foremost from identification with form. All forms are inherently subject to impermanence — things change, crumble, disappear, move around — and ultimately all of it is beyond your control. Which is why the illusion that you can control it, and need to for your survival, is so frightening. A human being who is completely identified with form is like someone having a nightmare: resting in the safety of a warm and comfortable bed but shaking with terror, believing that he is in the middle of a battle field, dodging bullets and running for his life.

The reason why we are so desperate to control things is because we think we are in that battle field, and that we need to keep thinking and figuring things out to stay alive. And the threat is part of a story we tell ourselves, a story that has its roots in the illusion that we are something. When we see that we are not something, but rather nothing, in the sense that what we are is not a worldly object or a collection of thought forms, we can see that there is nothing to defend. And in seeing that, we can drop our defenses and relax.