In looking at the special relationship, it is necessary first to realize that it involves a great amount of pain.

all enter into it, broken into by periods in which they seem to be gone. All these must be understood for what they are.

Whatever form they take, they are always an attack on the self to make the other guilty. We have spoken of this before, but there are some aspects of what is really being attempted that we have not touched upon.

Very simply, the attempt to make guilty is always directed against God. For the ego would have you see Him, and Him alone, as guilty, leaving the Sonship open to attack, and unprotected from it. The special love relationship is the ego’s chief weapon for keeping you from Heaven. It does not appear to be a weapon, but if you consider how you value it and why, you will realize what it must be. The special love relationship is the ego’s most boasted gift, and one which has the most appeal to those unwilling to relinquish guilt. The “dynamics” of the ego are clearest here, for counting on the attraction of this offering, the fantasies which center around it are often quite open. Here they are usually judged to be acceptable, and even natural. No one considers it bizarre to love and hate together, and even those who believe that hate is sin merely feel guilty, and do not correct it.

This is the “natural” condition of the separation, and those who learn that it is not natural at all seem to be the unnatural ones. For this world is the opposite of Heaven, being made to be its opposite, and everything here takes a direction exactly opposite of what is true. In Heaven, where the meaning of love is known, love is the same as union. Here, where the illusion of love is accepted in love’s place, love is perceived as separation and exclusion.

It is in the special relationship, born of the hidden wish for special love from God, that the ego’s hatred triumphs. For the special relationship is the renunciation of the love of God, and the attempt to secure for the self the specialness which He denied. It is essential to the preservation of the ego that you believe this specialness is not hell, but Heaven. For the ego would never have you see that separation can only be loss, being the one condition in which Heaven cannot be.

To everyone Heaven is completion. There can be no disagreement on this, because both the ego and the Holy Spirit accept it. They are, however, in complete disagreement on what completion is, and how it is accomplished. The Holy Spirit knows that completion lies first in union, and then in the extension of union. To the ego, completion lies in triumph, and in the extension of the “victory” even to the final triumph over God. In this it sees the ultimate freedom of the self, for nothing would remain to interfere with it. This isits idea of Heaven. From this it follows that union, which is a condition in which the ego cannot interfere, must be hell.

The special relationship is a strange and unnatural ego device for joining hell and Heaven, and making them indistinguishable. And the attempt to find the imagined “best” of both worlds has merely led to fantasies of both, and to the inability to perceive either one as it is. The special relationship is the triumph of this confusion. It is a kind of union from which union is excluded, and the basis for the attempt at union rests on exclusion. What better example could there be of the ego’s maxim, “Seek but do not find?”

Most curious of all is the concept of the self which the ego fosters in the special relationship. This “self” seeks the relationship to make itself complete. Yet when it finds the special relationship in which it thinks it can accomplish this, it gives itself away, and tries to “trade” itself for the self of another. This is not union, for there is no increase and no extension. Each partner tries to sacrifice the self he does not want for one he thinks he would prefer. And he feels guilty for the “sin” of taking, and of giving nothing of value in return. For how much value can he place upon a self that he would give away to get a better one?

The “better” self the ego seeks is always one that is more special. And whoever seems to posses a special self is “loved” for what can be taken from him. Where both partners see this special self in each other, the ego sees “a union made in Heaven.” For neither one will recognize that he has asked for hell, and so he will not interfere with the ego’s illusion of Heaven, which it offered him to interfere with Heaven. Yet if all illusions are of fear, and they can be of nothing else, the illusion of Heaven is nothing more than an “attractive” form of fear, in which the guilt is buried deep, and rises in the form of “love.”

The appeal of hell lies only in the terrible attraction of guilt, which the ego holds out to those who place their faith in littleness. The conviction of littleness lies in every special relationship, for only the deprived could value specialness. The demand for specialness, and the perception of the giving of specialness as an act of love, would make love hateful. And the real purpose of the special relationship, in strict accordance with the ego’s goals, is to destroy reality and substitute illusion. For the ego is itself an illusion, and only illusions can be the witnesses to its “reality.”

If you perceived the special relationship as a triumph over God, would you want it? Let us not think of its fearful nature, nor of the guilt it must entail, nor of the sadness and the loneliness. For these are only attributes of the whole religion of the separation, and of the total context in which it is thought to occur. The central theme in its litany to sacrifice is that God must die so you can live. And it is this theme which is acted out in the special relationship. Through the death of your self, you think you can attack another self, and snatch it from the other to replace the self which you despise. And you despise it because you do not think it offers the specialness which you demand. And hating it, you have made it little and unworthy because you are afraid of it.

How can you grant unlimited power to what you think you have attacked? So fearful has the truth become to you that unless it is weak and little, you would not dare to look upon it. You think it safer to endow the little self which you have made with power you wrested from truth, triumphing over it and leaving it helpless.

See how exactly is this ritual enacted in the special relationship. ..

Over and over and over this ritual is enacted. And it is never completed, nor ever will be completed. For the ritual of completion cannot complete, and life arises not from death, nor Heaven from hell.