My Dear Wormwood,
Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip, and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character, and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing. Ensure that the patient continues to believe that the problem is “out there” in the “broken system” rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself.
Keep up the good work,
Uncle Screwtape
C.S. Lewis
Innate within us is a yearning for understanding good and evil, and to be on the side of good. And yet coupled with this desire is an equally powerful compulsion to grasp what is beneficial to us and what is not, and to seek all things beneficial.
These two primal urges are always at work within us and can, when followed in spirit and truth, lead us to wholeness.
When we stray from spirit and truth, however, fall prey to the power of the ego – which seeks to redefine what is good and what is beneficial in terms of external circumstance and stimuli. But even the ego, ever determined to please itself with the sensual, cannot deal with the cognitive and spiritual dissonance that erupts when what it perceives as beneficial conflicts with what the soul understands as evil.
The resulting inner turmoil requires us to seek relief. If what the ego desires is what the soul knows to be evil, we must either deny ourselves the pleasure and suffer outwardly, or we must reclassify the evil as good through mental machinations and suffer inwardly.
Over time, we tend to give way to the ego precisely because both its gratification and its suffering are more present and immediate to us. And so our fixation remains on the sensual, leaving us locked in a decreased quality of attention – and being.
And so it is the soul that suffers. And our solution is to deny it and attempt to convince ourselves that what we seek and obtain is actually good.
The first time we do this consciously as a child – reclassifying evil as good in order to satisfy the ego – we choose the smallest of evils. The white lie, perhaps, that protects us from punishment when the parent seeks the truth of a matter. But as we grow up, we become both more numb to what we have already done and more capable of navigating new challenges. We don’t quite grasp that every step in this direction is a descent down a spiraling staircase into darkness.
That growing darkness leaves us trapped in an ego-centric life adept at justifying whatever it seeks. When new conflicts arise between seeking pleasure and seeking good, confirmation bias becomes second nature.
But the soul will not and cannot remain silent, despite the ego’s attempts to disguise it. Remember, you don’t have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body. As the spirit cries out from within for a return to truth, the turmoil manifests itself in a maelstrom of angst, anger, sadness, deception, fear, and every other form of psychological brokenness.
William Shakespeare said it like this: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can return to the soul-centered life and get out from under the wrath of confirmation bias that cripples us.
To find out how, today we’ll look at a divine encounter that left those with confirmation bias enraged and miserable, and those seeking truth in a spirit of rapturous joy.
Which example you follow – is up to you.
Source Scripture
On the Other Hand: Matthew 12:9-14; Mark 3:1-6; Luke 6:6-11
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Twitter: @AwestruckPod
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Control and manipulation are not love; the outcome is a life of imprisonment ultimately leading to deep-rooted feelings of resentment. Ken Poirot (Poy-row)
Control. It is one of humanity’s greatest addictions. We crave it. We seek it. And we believe that if we obtain it, the high we feel will equate to happiness.
But it doesn’t. And it never will.
In our last episode, we talked about the addiction to the approval of others – a cheap imitation of divine love. Today, we will delve into the gripping addiction of control, which cloaks itself as a pathway to peace, but in reality, robs us of the very thing we seek.
Here is the addiction cycle. We feel anxiety within – something isn’t quite right. And all we can think of is quelling that gnawing sense of angst that grows within. Our normal response alleviate anxiety is to seek an outward change in scenery or circumstance or the subservience of our royal subjects. And to induce this desired change, we create a strategy.
This strategy requires rules. Rules like, “If I can just be left alone for the first 30 minutes of the morning with my coffee, then I’ll be happy.” Or maybe, “No car is allowed in the passing lane if it isn’t passing or I will be unjustifiably hindered and upset.” These are just a few, simple and almost comical rules that some of us have. But this addiction is no laughing matter. Some of us have complicated, deep-seated rules that are seldom met and leave us riddled with anxiety.
Some rules are, let’s be honest, must-haves. For example, “I must be free of abuse in order to be at peace” is a valid rule. But today we’re talking about rules that go beyond basic needs and fall into the category of entitlement.
When we feel entitled, we create rules or we appropriate existing rules that we think will get us what we desire. And we almost always tailor the rules so that they benefit us, even if it means that others are shut out from getting what they want. Control subjugates others. They become necessary slaves to our rules.
The logical conclusion of this strategy of living – this addiction to control – is increased anxiety, fleeting pleasures, never-ending stalemates between your rules and those of others, exhaustion, and unhappiness. Like a long-time addict, the pursuit of the “control” substance takes a terrible toll.
There is an alternative, though. A way that leads to freedom from addiction and the experience of true peace.
And that is the subject of today’s episode.
Source Scripture
Relinquish Control: Matthew 12:1-8; Mark 2:23-28; Luke 6:1-5
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Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
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The truth lies within you. If you’re true in what you do, you’ll meet with the truth. If you’re not, you’ll meet only with the things that are fake and imitation. Ajahn Fuang [Ah’-jun Foo’ung]
The drug addict pursues an altered state of experience through the intake of substance. Over time, the ill effects of long-term addiction take their toll on the individual. Without the intervention of loved ones or some form of rehabilitation that leads to sobriety, the addict spirals out of control. The end result is a miserable and shortened life.
This form of addiction we comprehend. But there is another addiction, just as sinister if not more so, that society and large and we ourselves may never recognize – even though the long-term effects are just the same – a miserable and shortened life.
This subtle form of addiction, like drug addiction, is an attachment to a substance that we believe will bring us positive experience, but in reality is nothing more than cheapened and dangerous imitation that fails to fulfill the experiences we seek.
The experience sought in this form of addiction is love. And by love I mean the experience of knowing that one or more others seek our presence, validate our worth, and long to know us more.
The substance of this addiction – the attachment – is approval. We make the mistake of equating love with approval based on something we do, possess, or appear to be. And once this attachment – this substance – has us in its grips, we become lost in the addiction of seeking the approval of others.
No different than the drug addict, those of us addicted to approval build our entire lives around acquiring our substance. Nothing else matters. Before long, we become inwardly grotesque – no different than the pictures we see of drug addicts at their worst. With each temporary high we get from approval, we later come down and crash. The substance of approval is fake love. Imitation love. And it leaves us only wanting more because we cannot imagine that love is anything else.
Today we are going to take a hard look at what a life built on seeking the approval of others does to the human soul. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we will also take a look at what we can do to break the cycle of addiction and experience a life filled with authentic, true, divine love.
Today won’t be easy, but it will be true. It will be real. It will expose the addiction you have, the substance you crave, and the lengths you have gone to that contort your life to have it. But it will also show you the way out. The way to break the cycle. The way to find and experience true love.
Source Scripture
Real Love Awaits: John 5:41-47
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp; it grasps us. Wonder is not an obligatory element in the search for truth. We can seek truth without wonder’s assistance. But seek is all we’ll do; there will be no finding. Unless wonder descends, unlocks us … truth is unable to enter. Wonder may be the aura of truth, the halo of it. Or something even closer. Wonder may be the caress of truth, touching our very skin. – David James Duncan
When our search for truth has an underlying aim to understand for the sake of harnessing the power of knowledge to serve the ego’s desires, then search results are poor. There are results – but they are not true. They are simply a heap of usefulfacts we place in our arsenal and protect with fierce confirmation bias.
The difference between truth and fact, for the purposes of this episode, is this: a fact is a mere neutral atom of information. The ego seizes upon the presence of these facts as leverage, studying each atom to form a periodic table of elements with which it then experiments and builds compounds that best serve its desires.
Truth, however, is not neutral. Truth is like light. It radiates. Warms. Enlightens. Heals. Captivates. It envelops the ego like a pearl does an irritant, leaving only beauty in its place.
C.S. Lewis captures the essence of the difference between fact and truth this way in his book The Abolition of Man.
For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious….. If we compare the chief trumpeter of the new era (Bacon) with Marlowe’s Faustus, the similarity is striking. You will read in some critics that Faustus has a thirst for knowledge. In reality, he hardly mentions it. It is not truth he wants from his devils, but gold and guns and girls. ‘All things that move between the quiet poles shall be at his command’ and ‘a sound magician is a mighty god’. In the same spirit Bacon condemns those who value knowledge as an end in itself: this, for him, is to use as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit. The true object is to extend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible. He rejects magic because it does not work but his goal is that of the magician.
In other words, the difference between fact and truth lies largely in the endgame of the observer. To the one seeking to subdue reality to his wishes, there are only facts. To the one seeking to align her soul with reality, there is truth.
Truth is divine. Information is human. The purpose behind the quest for truth determines the quality of the search results.
Today we will see how Jesus confronts the religious leaders of his day with this important distinction, where he reminds them – and us – that it is the Way of Truth that leads to life.
Source Scripture
Four Score: John 5:31-40
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Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
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