Special

To be special means to be self-created (so there is no God) and to be distinct from others (preferably better, but worse will do).

Specialness requires denial of unity (with God and God's other children), denial of God as Creator, and the establishment of a hierarchy, with me at the top, or as the rebel defined by his rebellion against the hierarchy.

This destruction of unity, this denial of God, and this establishment of a competitive environment (because specialness requires me to have something that you don't) comes at a price: a sense of wrongdoing (sin), guilt for that wrongdoing, and fear of retribution.

What's the solution?

Well, one could realise the price isn't worth paying, laugh at the tiny mad idea that giving up everything for a tiny speck of specialness is worth it, and forget the whole affair even arose.

Or one could plough on.

To plough on, a remarkable solution presents itself:

The making of the physical world.

The physical world is a world of separation. What makes an avocado an avocado is its difference from borax, herring, Uranus, and Justin Trudeau. Entities are separate in time and space. Each entity is valued differently. It's the perfect forum for competition for specialness.

Secondly, it's a perfect place to get rid of wrongdoing, guilt, and fear. How is that accomplished?

Easy. Construct a list of impossible objectives for the laws of nature, the world, and its people to fulfil, state that I can be happy only if these impossible objectives are met, then sit back and watch. One by one, my rules are broken, and with each broken rule, I now relocate the wrongdoing outside of myself. Bit by bit, a new picture emerges: I'm not the problem, you're the problem, they're the problem, it's the problem.

Not me, not my decision to be special. You. Them. It. If the wrongdoing is out there, that is where the guilt belongs, and that is where divine retribution will strike.

I accept the cost—resentment, fear, turmoil, anxiety—as the price worth paying to keep the dream alive and for the occasional bones that the world throws my way but most of all to keep the underlying existential fear at bay: the fear of retribution for having 'destroyed' the unity of God's creation, rebelling, and establishing myself as the top dog, the author of my own indomitable specialness.

Unless this is unpicked back to the beginning and I recognise the real problem is my decision to be special and therefore separate, nothing will ever change. I will 'get over' things slowly, through elaborate processes of 'feeling my feelings', 'grief', 'acceptance', 'processing', and 'learning coping strategies', but only to prepare me for the next onslaught and to gird myself to stride more deeply into the world I have made to act out my specialness fantasy.

Stop.

Stop.

Stop.

Unwind back to the beginning.

Nothing, nothing has happened. The separation has not occurred. There is no problem, nor can a problem exist. The holy instant—the right now—is the permanent state of OK-ness I need never leave, if what I want above all else, and all I want, is peace, which is the peace of God.