By Cathy Eck

Creating Our Opponent

The ancient masters taught that any opponent is always our own mental projection.  If we realized that we only fight our own false self’s projections, we’d stop fighting.  We’d laugh at our own stupidity.  But our projections look so damn real, and we keep finding people to play opponent roles; so it is understandable that no one sees through the illusion.

As humans became civilized, we began to see ourselves in different roles creating an illusion of separation.  Suddenly we focused more on our differences than our unity.  God became male and moved from inside of us to outside of us; then he started barking orders.

Seeing humans as separate entities had its benefits.  We could now compete against each other based on skill.  We could focus on a specific role and perfect it.  We could offer different perspectives and pretend to discover things about each other.  We could entertain each other.

But, the experiment went too far.  We didn’t just use separation for fun and creation; we used to create a feared or hated opponent.  We created opposition (good and evil), which became the main course in our illusory dinner of life.  God even got an opponent, Satan.

Our Illusory Opponent

The ancient masters explained that our True Self is singular and unified.  Likewise, the True God has no opponent.  But that united God is not the one that people worship.  They worship the false God that is projected from their own mind because they fear that God.  The True God doesn’t need worshipping; s/he gives without demanding something in return.

We can understand the mind of any person by understanding their view of God.  Some see God as jealous.  Others see him as judgmental, punishing, or angry.  Some see him as supportive but having the potential to become unsupportive if they disobey.  Some see God as supporting them and hating others creating false elevation and success.  You might notice that all of these God views are very human-like.  We’d expect a divine God to be a bit more mature if we thought about it and didn’t just blindly listen to what others taught us.

The goal of initiation was to transform our notion of God.  When initiation was complete, God was back inside of our mind and heart as our all loving True Self with no opponent.  Our world then reflected that love by showing us peace, freedom, and joy.

Our projected God is usually much like our dominant parent, often our father.  My father was critical; so I believed that God criticized everything I did.  The opponent to that God gave false praise.  My Satan sounded nice, but the compliments didn’t mean anything and often took me down the wrong path if I listened to them.

Wars, bullying, and domestic conflicts are caused by people fighting their own projected opponent.  Terrorists are the projection of inner terrorists.  September 11th was the projection of George W., and it makes sense because he is an Evangelical Christian fighting good and evil.  He thought he was the good guy; so his mind invented an opponent.  Conspiracy theorists often recognize projection, but then they make it literal and true creating a bigger mess.  They think the person is doing it on purpose; however, people really believe their opponent is real and dangerous.  They even see themselves as having noble or righteous intentions when they warn us of their own projection.

Half Truths

False minds are filled with half-truths, and half-truths are false.  Half truths aren’t problematic unless we judge them as right and wrong or good and evil.  Once we split truth into parts, we identify with one part of the split.  The other half (or other parts) are said to live in our subconscious, but that is false.  The other parts are actually completely conscious, and they shows up in our opponent or opponents.

People presume that their other half is a soul mate, the love of their life.  Our other half is actually our greatest enemy because it is the false self that is split; our True Self sees everyone as a soul mate.  The more emotional chemistry we have with someone, the more likely they are our false self’s other half.  We often marry them or go to work for them, which forces us to deal with our inner opponent.

Eliminating Our Inner Opponent

Let’s say you have a boss who criticizes you.  The way to eliminate this person from your life is to discover the belief within you that allows him or her to exist in your world.  That belief is resting in your mind, and you know when you’ve found it because thinking it triggers emotion (presuming you aren’t psychologically reversed).  We must remember that beliefs that have emotion attached to them are false, not true.  What we call emotion is actually the feeling of truth splitting into parts called beliefs (like a zipper being unzipped).

The beliefs (split truths) we hold in mind come from all of the false voices in our minds, which are the minions of our false God.  We recreate our parents, teachers, clergy, and  other authority figures in different bodies over the course of our life unless we eliminate our beliefs.

To eliminate our inner opponent, the ancients said that we must examine our own mind and let go of each false belief like we are cutting through a mountain creating a tunnel to the other side.  Eventually, we break through, but while we are cutting away we have no idea how close or far away we are from the destination.  We don’t see the light until we are done.

I also discuss the shadow in The Good Shadow of Bad Pirates.