Because I am special, I am entitled and deserve and have a right to special treatment. I’ll fight for my rights!
Could entitlement be a setup for defense? Hmm, could it BE a defense?
What, how, why, and who determines entitlement?
When living inside my First-Second Degrees of Illumination bubble, I hold certain concepts as absolute truths. One of those concepts is entitlement, which seems to take on a defensive posture towards wholeness – working to keep me safely tucked into a world of competition and comparison.
I intend to use entitlement as a means to bend wholeness to my will, to accommodate my need to feel special – as if wholeness can be manipulated. I confuse the concept of equality, a main ingredient in wholeness, with fairness, a main ingredient in entitlement.
Perhaps in my topsy-turvy First Degree world I’ve confused wholeness with entitlement. Consider:
- With the entitlement defense, I demand wholeness through special treatment because I perceive separation and lack. Focus of attention is on who I am not.
- Wholeness is my native state of being – I AM complete in myself.
Entitlement is forever seeking to be wholeness by substituting internal awareness of connection with external representations of comparison. “I’ll be complete and fulfilled when I’m richer than…”
I tend to initiate the entitlement defense when I feel that I’m losing a competition. This loss may appear as a sense of lack, less-than, poverty, failure, and never good enough. When in my entitlement defense, I substitute fairness for equality to compensate for lack. Yes, it’s a thinking error to believe I can achieve something with nothing – “I’m wearing him down with every punch he delivers to my nose…
This defense has some illusory presuppositions:
- Worthiness – Nature favors me!
- Need – Lack exists and must be satisfied.
- Ownership – Possession of things proves my wholeness.
…and some manifestations:
- Deservedness – I create a story to validate my authority to be whole through my memories, experiences, time and space.
- Confusion – I deny my wholeness in an attempt to satisfy my feelings of emptiness.
- Rightness – I seek advantage through internal and external authority, personal sensory witness, pseudoscience, and (false) memory.
I can examine the nature of this defense and maybe awaken to my wholeness by asking:
- What form does my defense take to prove to me that I am what I am not?
- How do my actions to force my will prove to me that I am how I am not ?
- Why does this situation justify this defense to prove I am why I am not ?
- Who pays for the forms, the actions, and the situations to prove who I am not?
From The Ashes Of Defense, Epiphany!
I came to these epiphanies when I asked the questions above:
- Forms I choose to make me feel entitled don’t make me feel whole. I can’t get enough stuff to satisfy that kind of emptiness.
- Actions I use to convince me of my entitlement doesn’t bring me a sense of wholeness.
- Justifying my entitlement to wholeness doesn’t make me feel whole.
- When I seek to satisfy a who-I-am need, I represent it with convincing and justifying, never satisfying the need.
- When I experience these kinds of responses to lack, I become aware I’m in my entitlement defense and out of my awareness of wholeness.
Awareness is where change happens. What were your epiphanies?
