(Part One)
Now there arose a new King over Egypt, which knew not Joseph. (Exodus 1:8)
As strange as it sounds most revolutions start because we don’t like change. It may seem funny and oxymoronic to protest in favor of keeping everything the same (“What do we want?” “Status Quo!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”), but when shopkeepers take to the streets it’s usually because change has been experienced as painful. We dislike change because we prefer the comforting continuity of repetition and its illusion of permanence, and some changes shake us to the core and leave cracks the light shines through revealing our fear, unease, and discontent, and we know we cannot carry on the way we are. We come to the end of our rope and can no longer cope. Our days and nights have been made bitter with hard bondage. We realize our life has become unmanageable.
I have never won an argument with reality. I’ve picked fights with reality but failed to win a single round and always felt sad afterwards. Accepting reality doesn’t mean allowing cruelty and injustice to continue unchallenged but it does require that we admit the truth about the way things are in the present moment. What is so hard about that? Well, nothing really except that we prefer our own version of the truth to the real thing, especially the version in which we are still in control and able to handle our own business in our own way. In this preferred reality we believe we can return to the way life used to be, only better, because things are going to be different this time. When this doesn’t work we blame others for being unhelpful, hyper-critical, controlling, overbearing, and otherwise failing to support us and our internalized anger is directed outward, aimed at the very people who love us and want to help us but don’t know how. Rather than admitting we are powerless we insist we can manage if we just get a little help, take the right pill, find the right job, and meet the right person. We still think we can do something to fix ourselves not yet realizing that the ‘us’ who seeks to save the day is the problem. Speaking metaphorically, we believe there is no need of handing over life’s car keys because we’re okay to drive. This version of reality fails to include real surrender.
Ego fearfully crouches at the door of consciousness upon the first hint of surrender. As a primitive survival mechanism the ego endeavors to keep us safe by establishing control through the passive and aggressive manipulation of our environment. It greets the unfolding of life not with a loving spirit of joyful wonder but as a frightened, anxious entity; some body alone in a hostile world of endless dualities either for or against us. To our ego surrender equals death. It means well enough on its own terms. It is, after all, trying to protect us, but it has no idea who or what we really are. Its version of us is like a quilt made up of various patterns. It did not create the patterns. The ego isn’t creative because that isn’t its function. Protecting us is its function and one of the chief ways it does this is by noticing patterns. It constructs its version of ‘us’ from these patterns. This version of us cannot surrender because it isn’t real; we must simply let go of it and put it away as we do with childish things.
Sometimes events occur which we find so devastating our self-image is shattered. It is like being beheaded from our own life and from everything that we once allowed to define us. When the image of ourselves we cannot live without is destroyed so that not one stone is left upon another, we discover in the midst of our pain that images shatter because they’re imaginary, fragile and fleeting, requiring our flesh and blood to sustain them and give them the appearance of life. And we know something else as well. We know we are not that image. There is a self which is conscious of that image but cannot be reduced to it. This self abides in the depths of awareness. It is here that surrender is possible; only here and now. We will not surrender, though, as long as we think we can escape. We will never admit we are powerless as long as we believe we can go back to the way things were while remaining in control this time. Admitting we are powerless means admitting we have no control. Without power we cannot go backward or get ahead. The past has thrust us out into this moment but still pursues us and threatens to catch up with us. The future appears as an impassible barrier, a turbulent sea threatening to drown any hope of moving forward. What is required of the powerless is not an act of will but simple recognition, knowing the truth at a level where the image we’ve struggled to maintain is left behind the way shoes are discarded before standing on holy ground. In accepting the present moment in consent we surrender to a power higher than the level of ego.
In ancient Greece sailors returning from a perilous voyage or soldiers grateful to be alive following a battle would offer a sacrifice to Soteria, the goddess to whom one prays for safety from danger. The writers of the Christian Gospels used the word ‘soteria’ to indicate salvation, rescue and recovery from harm and oppression. ‘Soteriology’ is the study of deliverance.
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
(‘The Waste Land,’ T.S. Eliot)
Living free of bondage is to walk in newness of life and so liberation is always a springtime affair, exhilarating and frightening, as all that was cozily and hazily familiar is experienced soberly and sanely in our rightful mind. It’s as if we know the place for the first time. This path of liberation is always a narrow way because it is lived only in the present. It is therefore not all that helpful to encourage someone in recovery to focus on the future. The ego lives in the past and the future, the latter being a projection of the former. Ego views the future through a lens of scarcity as a cruel place of breeding, mixing, and stirring desire. When you’re living in recovery the problem with the future is it holds too many memories.
Living free in newness of life beyond bondage does not require that we accumulate new knowledge, memorize facts, or read any book of any kind. Mostly it involves ‘unlearning’ our programming and our ego-driven ways of responding to life. As Socrates points out to Alcibiades, mistakes in life and practice are “to be attributed to the ignorance which has the conceit of knowledge.” It is not simple ignorance which perplexes us for we can always learn what we need to learn or else entrust what we don’t know to experts. Our perplexity is that of those “who do not know and think they know.” (Plato, Alcibiades 1, Benjamin Jowett) We think we know how to live free. We think we know how life works. On the other hand, being taken over by a tyrant and turned into a slave in a land of bondage has a way of showing us the limits of our supposed knowledge and self-reliance.
Children in Kindergarten are taught to hold hands while crossing the street. Lovers of wisdom have always understood that we are social beings and so liberation means a call to a new kind of fellowship. We belong together, and we best express our happiness when we support each another in the fullness and newness of life.
