There is no such thing, Freud states, as ‘eradicating’ evil. The impulses that constitute the ‘deepest essence’ of human nature are ‘neither good nor bad’ in themselves. He will condemn actions but never the drives from which they stem. It is a central tenet of psychoananlysis that if we can tolerate what is most disorientating– disillusioning– about our own unconscious, we will be less likely to act on it, less inclined to strike out in a desperate attempt to assign the horrors of the world to someone or somewhere else. It is not, therefore, the impulse that is dangerous but the ruthlessness of our attempts to be rid of it.
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“Thank you God” (iv)
All of the “shortcuts” that I mentioned above most certainly possess their own merits—- I’m sure that most anyone who happens to read this can claim to feel some amount of value garnered through using one or more of those techniques. However, what more fundamental path is there other than acceptance and surrender to God’s will? What is more of a shortcut to breaking down the ego’s sense of self-importance and righteousness and self-serving-ness?
Without a basic sense of surrender to how things are, any spiritual longings will become sidetracked by one’s own egoic ambitions—- by misguided, fruitless, and ultimately frustrating attempts to be in control and to realize one’s poisonous perfectionistic ambitions. The stage then becomes set for one’s internal fascist to leap in. Overearnestness, grimness, and humorlessness set in and corrode our approaches to life and our relationship to ourselves and those around us.
In the past few months, there have been situations in my life which have confounded me to a degree that it seems at times that events are simply conspiring to fuck with my mind, big-time. I have felt here and again that I have no real alternatives other than to surrender. At times I need to surrender everything that I associate with my spiritual longings. Everything…and this seems threatening, and frustrating and painful.
At times I need to give up hope of things ever working out according to my vision of how they might be. In doing so, the entire dynamic of my mind’s operative ambitions and frustrations begin to cave in, almost all at once. The result is that my shoulders begin to release from their task of holding up the world, of holding up the infrastructure of all of my personal projects. The life-or-death seriousness of my desires and ambitions are revealed in all of their foolish anti-glory. Again I see that in no way is the world about the small me, as much as I operate from the mistaken conviction at times that I exist in some way apart from the world.
Without an approach of surrender and letting go of everything associated with the ever-so-important-seeming “me” and my desires, my mind becomes wound up ever tighter, contracted and constricted around a sad little domain which leaves scant room for surprise, for humor, for grace. My approach to life becomes greedy, mechanistic, controlling. There isn’t really any light-hearted, humorous way of grasping at things. It is certainly funny, though…
“…being a loser most of the time is part of life…”
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“Thank you God” (iii)
The whole thing is so terrifically vast in its scope of misapprehension and confusion. My opinion of and ideas concerning you are based on the degree to which I sense that you happen to validate the confused ideas that I have concerning myself. My confused ideas of myself, in turn, are based upon other confused ideas that I have gotten from various parts of what I have projected onto the Other, said notions all resulting in turn from confused projections of mine…confused projections upon confused projections, argh.
Basically, we’re all more than just a little confused. After all, how many jnanis do you know, how many sages, how many enlightened beings, etc.? Making our way in this world, by necessity we work everyday with and navigate via our confused ideas about self and other. The fact remains, though—- there is suffering, constant suffering permeating our experience of life, and we are constantly causing others suffering through this very confusion that we are mired in and perpetuating. If I get mad and yell at you, causing you grief, it’s generally because you are doing something that I find threatening to my confused sense of “me”.
In seeking to relieve suffering, we may attempt to embark on a spiritual quest of one sort or another. Even if our motivation in this direction stems from experiencing a “spritual high”, our ultimate motivation is still based on a desire to eliminate or lessen suffering—- else we would not find the experience of the high so seductive and compelling when viewed against the background of our usual experience of life.
Attempting to follow a spiritual path is certainly a noble idea—- seeking to realize God or to become enlightened is probably a more worthy pursuit than pursuing a life of crime or pursuing a food addiction or trying to become famous, or whatever combination of survival strategies plus pleasure-seeking our lives usually entail. One problem with spiritual pursuits, though, is that they are so often corrupted by “spiritual materialism“. In other words, we aren’t actually interested in knowing God, or knowing truth, or cutting through the sources of suffering in our lives, but rather merely seek to feel better about our sense of self. For example, we don’t wish to know God, but rather to feel secure in the knowledge that others know that we know God and in addition, that we know God better than they do. We don’t wish to know truth, but rather to know that our latest pet sense of identity is somehow safe and secure. We don’t wish to cut through the source of suffering in our life, but rather to create a cocoon for our egos, so that we may no longer worry about the threat of being proven wrong, or being vulnerable to any sort of pain…
Instead of seeing through the illusion of ego, we attempt to solidify it through spiritualizing it, through painting a spiritual veneer over our confusion. The very motivations which have been attempting to maintain a solid sense of self now purport to take on the role of spiritual aspirant. Instead of being willing to let go of our confused sense of self, we try to build it up further, and create the identity of self as spiritual seeker. We are unwilling to become nothing, or to give up the struggle of having to be something or worrying about being nothing. Instead we are trying to fashion ourselves into a bigger and better and holier something. We are uninterested in the truth, but only seeking to defend our ego and to erect some sort of inviolable fortress to protect it. If the truth threatens the ego, then we lose interest in the truth. If knowing God threatens the ego, if it involves genuinely humbling the self, then we lose interest in knowing God.
It’s a catch-22 of sorts. If we so strongly identify with ego, then how exactly are we to step outside of ego and engage in genuine spiritual practice? Isn’t our practice corrupted as long as it is about ego seeking enlightenment? On the other hand, if we are able somehow to step outside of egoic activity, then wouldn’t that indicate enlightenment, and make all of our effort redundant? Hmmm.
I suppose that this is why all spiritual practices worth their salt are actually tricks in one sense or another, shortcuts to aid in overcoming this dilemma. Prayer is directly petitioning God and requesting his grace so that we might overcome this dilemma. Various psycho-physical yogic techniques manipulate our internal energies so that we can get past some of our mindstuff, and leap ahead to better perspectives afforded by, say, having our heart chakras opened up more expansively. Various meditation techniques involve observing our passing thoughts and emotions which create the illusion of ego, but without indulging or suppressing them and thus feeding into the mechanisms that perpetuate the egoic process. Visualization techniques bypass our thought processes and go to deeper emotional levels and healing archetypes deep in our psyches.
And then there is the method of acceptance, surrender to God’s will, which is a way of directly letting go of egoic motivations.
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“Thank you God” (ii)
However, from ego’s perspective, these ideas are definitely radical. “I am ego, I’m cool; I just want the best and furthermore have always only wanted the best for my man here. I dig democratic ideas. Why are you threatening to force some sort of theocracy onto this poor guy??”
Dualistic projections, dualistic projections, dualistic projections. Conceptual fixations, conceptual fixations, conceptual fixations. We’ve got this tendency born of habit, this particular activity of thought, “ego”, which (at least in instances when it is convenient for extending the illusion of its perpetuation) claims to speak for us, to represent us, to be the real “me”. One problem with this setup is, no such entity actually exists in any solid, reliable form, and so this ego is forever engaged in a desperate attempt to secure its existence. It may do this through self-aggrandizing or self-condemnation or any combinations thereof or shades in-between; it doesn’t really matter—- to the ego it’s all the same, as long as there seems to be some feedback confirming that it is real.
Through the apparent situation of dualism, and these shaky, insecure, unreliable representations of how things are, how we are, how others are, we have the notion of “me”, which must constantly be perpetuated at all costs—- hence bringing into being the sense of a constant need to defend itself from the “not-me”, the “other”. No wonder, then, that ideas of “God” are viewed with such suspicion and fear. If one cannot even rely on one’s own representation of one’s self, or definitely confirm one’s sense of the solidity of one’s existence once and for all, then how is one to trust one’s perception of the other, and especially the ultimate other, God?
Instead of being recognized as the ultimate ground of reality and hence of our own very Being, God becomes in our minds a separate entity to whom we constantly relate to as a threat. On good days, the threat is apparently minimized and we seem to find some temporary respite in relating to God in ways that we think will find favor with him. On bad days, the sense of “me” vs. God becomes so strong that we feel ourselves threatened with total extinction or eternal condemnation. It’s really not much fun, even on the good days.
The situation is the same with any of the Other. On good days, you are my friend, you are a standup guy, the best. On bad days, you are a jerk, an asshole, a creep. Of course, the “you” that I am celebrating or condemning in my mind doesn’t really exist. In some sense, my railings against you are like shadow boxing, as they are directed at an essentially unreal, imaginary target. By the same token, my passionate good feelings for you are a form of masturbation, directed as they are towards my projection of you, as opposed to the reality of your Being. Due to shaky egoic confusion, my insecurity is so profound that I cannot accept the fluid nature of your being. Rather, I feel that I am only safe when I relate to some stale conception that I have of you in my mind, the parameters of which (said conception) I have created. I define you, therefore you exist. In relating to myself, the situation is no better; I only feel safe when I know that I am such-and-such a person. “I am a good person!” “I am a baaad person, shame on me!” I am a smart person. I am a spiritual person. I am a success. I am a loser. Etc.
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“Thank you God”
My previous post here, cryptic as it may read, runs germane to something that I have been mulling over lately, and indeed experimenting with, as well, as of late: acceptance. Acceptance and surrender, are of course, the themes of voluminous treatises on religion and spirituality. In fact, many would have it that the main teaching to be gotten in this life is that of acceptance of how things are, or to put it in theistic terms, surrendering to God’s will.
Those ideas have always struck me as being not only of a decidedly paradoxical and counter-intuitive bent, but also as seeming distinctly unpalatable (as, from ego’s perspective, anyhow, much or most of the spiritual path inevitably appears to be). What kind of “teachings” are those, anyways? DUH, things suck, all around, terribly… of course I want to CHANGE them, and lickety-split, in as many ways as possible! And please don’t talk to me about surrendering to God’s will. Why on earth should I surrender to that cosmic asshole who sits back as children starve to death and countless other variants and multiplicities of abominations of suffering take place under his fucking watch? In that sense, worshiping or even merely respecting God is something like trusting a babysitter who gets high on PCP while you leave your kids with him/her.
All of that bile aside, over the past year or so, the ideas of acceptance and surrender have increasingly come to occupy prominent places in my mind and in my approach to spirituality. I suppose this began in part while reading an interview with David Godman which can be found on his website (here, towards the bottom of the page). At one point he mentions that he had read a book written by a Christian woman entitled “Thank You God”. The book concerns a woman whose husband was an alcoholic. For years the woman prayed to God to help her husband stop drinking, but her prayers seemed to go unanswered. Upon hearing of the approach of thanking God for whatever dispensations come one‘s way, she actually began to thank God for making her husband an alcoholic, until she eventually felt a genuine sense of inner gratitude for the situation. Following this change in her approach, lo and behold, her husband actually stopped drinking on his own. In the interview, Godman follows up this story by recounting instances in his life in which seemingly insurmountable problems spontaneously resolved themselves after he took a similar tack, in, as he puts it, “an astonishing testimonial to the power of loving acceptance”.
Anyhow, I highly recommend reading that portion of the interview and perhaps experimenting with that technique, if one hasn’t already done so…
Now, as I stated above, I recognize of course that this sort of idea is certainly nothing new, and although it may seem radical to the ego, it isn’t particularly a radical idea within even the most mainstream of religious traditions. “Not my will but Thine”; “let go and let God”; surrendering to Allah*; the idea of all things happening or not happening purely as a result of God’s grace; always accepting His dispensation which stems from his infinite wisdom and mercy, etc.– these are all fairly fundamental ideas which I suppose are familiar to most of us.
*The word Islam is derived from an Arabic word whose meaning is “to accept, surrender, or submit”.
[to be continued!]
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Nectar
You look upon me with great, unfathomable compassion; please bless me with deep love and healing in my life. May I be open to your blessing nectar which melts the armor around my heart and reminds me of my true nature.
You look upon all beings with great, unfathomable compassion; please bless them all with deep love and healing in their lives. May they be open to your blessing nectar which melts the armor around their hearts and reminds them of their true nature.
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