I found this very behaviour in myself. It recently occurred to me that when I shop I go with a sense of lightness and anticipation, poor deluded fool that I am. I always look forward to changing my look, finding a way to make me more attractive, more acceptable in more people’s eyes. Going home with my purchases I am always hopeful that this time I have finally done it: I’ve found what I need to make me beautiful.
But you gotta love ego. Its ability to find the trick that will get you every time is boundless. You have to give it that. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to follow the crowd, and wants to wear what I think reflects who I am. I’m not always sure these days who that person is, but I want my clothes to reflect it!
But it’s ironic. No sooner do I find that item of clothing that is not found on every magazine page or every shop rack, I wear it and then I start to feel freakish. No one else is wearing it, and then I start to wonder if the reason no one else has chosen it because it is ugly, tasteless or both. So then I become paralysed, so deeply self-conscious that I start to feel everyone is staring at me, wondering who was so crass as to choose that outfit.
Actually, if I’m totally honest, this is only a fear of yesteryear. Now I’m over fifty, I could go naked and no one would notice me.
I have to say, it’s taken me a long time to begin to understand this largely unconscious, process. I’m starting to realise that what drives the whole chain of events is a deep-seated shame – shame that I am not beautiful enough and therefore not good enough as a woman, because it is very clear in this society that a woman who is not attractive has less worth.
Thus, I now realise, I am, and always have been, doomed to failure. No amount of beautiful clothes, shoes, make-up, hairstyling, waxing, working out, dieting, or even cosmetic restructuring and reconfiguring (neither of which I have undergone - but I have lived long enough to understand the wisdom of never say never!) will ever do it for me. Nothing will ever make me feel beautiful if, inside, I carry around a deep belief in my own unattractiveness.
Not even swapping bodies with Elle Macpherson will do it. I remember when I was in my mid-thirties, I was walking through a department store with a girl I played water polo with. In addition to being a top-class athlete and a part-time model, she looked more like the famous supermodel, both facially and in her body structure, than anyone I’d ever seen. So she just stopped me in my tracks when, as we walked through the lingerie department hung with large posters of Elle, she said to me: ‘I wish I looked like her.’
That was when it started to dawn on me that no matter how supposedly beautiful a woman is, she rarely feels beautiful.
Men are also wracked with this insidious self-doubt and self-hatred. Ian was driven by a deep sense of unworthiness, but for him, as with many men, it manifested in his attitude to work. He was never able to feel okay about his work, and he could never feel that he’d worked long or hard enough, despite his 10 to 12 hour days. He was so driven to achieve, to be seen to be doing a good job, that for the 18 months before he passed on, he actually added a 20-hour weekly commute to Asia, which continued right up to the week when he was finally diagnosed with terminal cancer.
For almost six months before this diagnosis he suffered extreme lower back pain. He thought it was because of all his flying, and tried to get it treated, but never once did he think that he should reduce his work commitments in Asia. Even when his pain was 24/7 he still he worried whether he was working hard enough!
His performance assessments always confirmed that he, in fact, achieved the absolute highest levels on all performance indicators, usually in the top two to five per-cent of all employees in large multinational companies. Like my new outfits, such feedback only temporarily soothed his insatiable need for approval, and all too soon the encouraging and complimentary words would fade and he would climb right back on the corporate treadmill, striving and struggling for the next ‘achievement’ and acknowledgement.
Nothing I, or anyone else, said could change his view of himself. Throughout his successful international career spanning more than 20 years, his fears never diminished.
Our sense of separation from our Source is the cause of all guilt and shame, creating our deeply embedded feelings of inadequacy, insufficiency and worthlessness. We constantly crave something to allay our fears of deficiency. Because we don’t recognise the fears that lie deep within us, we assume the problem, as well as the remedy or antidote, must come from ‘out there.’
So we all have an enduring sense of lack, and a correlative long list of needs. The only lack that we need focus on, however, is the lack of our perception of our Oneness with each other and with our Source. In our state of duality we believe we are our own creators and that we alone made ourselves with all the power a creator possesses. But the real purpose of this life is to see through the seeming consequences of our duality to understand and demonstrate our native Oneness with the Divine.
All the things we believe to be true about this life arise from our projection, that is why there are as many beliefs and experiences of human life as there are people. It says in A Course in Miracles: ‘Belief produces the acceptance of existence. That is why you can believe what no one else thinks is true. It is true for you because it was made by you.(6)’
This is a deeply profound idea, and truly radical, going to the very core of how our human experience is created and perpetuated. Yet it is not entirely new to us. It has already been well established in the scientific world, for instance, that optimists have happier and healthier lives than pessimists (or as Ian would call them, ‘realists’). Even so, science has not taken this phenomenon to its logical extension: that our experience and life circumstances reflect our beliefs about them.
As we are invested in the beliefs that underpin the whole charade we call life, it is difficult to become detached from them because for most of us, those beliefs seem to have kept us in good stead for many years. The difficulty, therefore, lies in identifying the beliefs created with the ego part of our split mind, and learning to use the other part of our split mind, spirit, to change those beliefs. A change of perception like this, accompanied by a desire to see our Oneness through love and forgiveness, leads to miracles.
Although miracles must at times have a physical manifestation, and because they can seem spectacular, there may be a temptation to fixate on the physical. But this is a distraction that may be misleading. The physical has some play in the process because we are, for the moment, in physical bodies. But the physical is, and can only ever be, effect, not cause.
The physical is where we are now. It is a learning device, as well as the realm for the manifestation of miracles. If miracles did not happen at the level of the physical, then
it would be difficult for us to perceive them. But just because miracles are manifested in the physical realm, physical miracles should be neither our aim nor our desire. We must learn to keep in mind that the physical and material are one part of our duality experience, the effect of our beliefs. But all the work is done for Spirit, by Spirit. Spirit is the Cause, and miracles are the effect manifested in the physical.
If Spirit is the only Reality then it logically follows that the human experience is fantasy. A Course in Miracles says fantasy is ‘a distorted form of vision (7)’, and defines fantasies as ‘an attempt to control reality according to false needs’ (8), largely as a means to achieve pleasure.
One of the main functions of A Course in Miracles is to teach ‘mind training.’ It aims to help the student understand that true, lasting pleasure cannot be obtained through physical things. Rather, it must first be perceived, and then understood, that mere pleasure becomes a