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
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
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
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
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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
Extras
While Shakespeare and Donne would inevitably have had in mind the political and religious upheavals of the age, it is surely something far greater than that, a different sort of power game, that they have intuited. They lament the loss of the relation of part to whole, of individual to community, of the context, the cosmos, to which each single soul belongs – each now standing alone. There is a loss of harmony (‘each thing meets in mere oppugnancy’, in Ulysses’ phrase), the whole has become a heap of bits and pieces (‘crumbled out again to its atoms’). And, as Ulysses reminds us, this can have only one ending:
Then every thing include itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf
(So doubly seconded with will and power),
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
Iain McGilchrist in his book on the brain, The Master and HIs Emissary
As we traverse this life in the context of the Information Age, we have an inherent tendency to reduce what we experience into facts and figures that can be analyzed. This quality of attention is second nature. To reduce everything into its smallest component parts seems normal to us. After all, our end goal is to understand. And our understanding of understanding is that gathering more and more information is the best method of pursuit.
And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, our end goal is deeper than mere understanding. Our end goal is to understand in order to take advantage. Information is currency, and with it we may purchase that which benefits us.
And yet, as McGilchrist and Shakespeare and Ulysses and the core of our own souls would observe, such a pursuit cannot help but see everything and everyone as utilitarian. Nature becomes a heap of resources to exploit. People become a grid of traits and resources with which to judge as useful, irrelevant, or in need of cancellation.
This reductionist mindset, this reduced quality of attention, has infiltrated not just society at large, but, in a bit of irony, all of its component parts – including the church. The Church, as we will see in today’s episode, is called to a much higher quality of attention. One that sees Nature as the glory of God and people as his image-bearers, even the least of all people as Jesus himself.
Today we will review the last six episodes of Awestruck and how each of their individual themes collectively make the whole message we marvel at today more than just the sum of its parts.
The time has come for the Church – for all followers of Jesus – to lay down our weapons of mass reduction and return to living lives of wonder, reverence, and love for all.
Source Scripture
Through the Roof: Matthew 9:1-8; Mark 2:1-12; Luke 5:17-26
Party Time: Matthew 9:9-13; Mark 2:13-17; Luke 5:27-32
I Have a Proposal Matthew 9:14-17; Mark 2:18-22; Luke 5:33-39
Everyone Out of the Pool: John 5:1-16
Good Work! John 5:17-18
You Look Marvelous: John 5:19-30
All That is Required: Micah 6:8
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The state of wonder….is itself a higher form of knowing than the explanations one subsequently seeks in the absence of that state…. If one steps out on a starry night and observes one’s inner state, one asks if one could hate or be overwhelmed by envy or resentment. … Is it not true that no man or woman has ever committed a crime while in a state of wonder? – Jacob Needleman
The reason we cannot seem to find ourselves in a state of wonder anymore is that we must lose ourselves to be in a state of wonder. The gateway into wonder has no room for the self, which is precisely what makes walking through it so wondrous.
Think back to a time to a moment when you were awestruck. Captivated. Swept away by wonder. In that moment – time ceases to exist. There is no past. No future. No desire. No ego. Anxiety does not exist here, because there is no you to feel it. The only thing that exists is the captivating subject of your attention that pulls you completely out of yourself. You are incapable of judging it. Evaluating it. Reducing it. All those forms of analysis require you to perform them. And in wonder, there is no you.
How can there be no you? No self? If there’s no you, then who is the observer? Who is the entity caught up in wonder if not you?
The answer is a paradox. The entity caught up in wonder is you. The real you. It is your naked soul, free of the ego and all of its entrapments. It is the being you long to be. That you were intended to be. That you are if you will just shed everything that attaches itself to you. To find yourself, you must lose yourself.
To be and not to be. That is the answer.
The question is how? How do we shed ourselves to enter through the gates of wonder and live in this state of being?
How can we marvel if we do not know how?
We follow the one who does.
Source Scripture
You Look Marvelous: John 5:19-30
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Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
When you think of the word work, what comes to mind? For most of us, it is the time and effort required to accomplish a goal. The energy required to move an object over a distance. The physical exertion, unwanted but endured, to obtain reward.
Cast in this light, work becomes something to avoid. Escape. Evade. True happiness, we begin to believe, comes only when work is absent and leisure is present. Paradise and work become mutually exclusive.
And yet, if we go back to the beginning of time, the divine God of the Universe engaged in work to create the earth. To create mankind. To create the Garden of Eden – paradise itself. And he placed man in the garden to work it – to continue the divine act of creation by cultivating the garden to produce fruit.
God rested on the seventh day from his work of creating paradise. He rested because his work was good. Complete. Perfect.
One thing was missing, though. Adam was alone, and God said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” So he caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep – to rest from his work – while God continued to work one more time in creating Eve. Only then was paradise complete.
Adam and Eve then began life in paradise with the work of tending the garden. They worked during the day, and they walked with their creator in the cool of the evening.
Work and paradise coexisted in harmony. Work, it seems, is divine.
Until that fateful day when the serpent interrupted their work. When he slithered around the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and convinced Adam and Eve that they should ignore God’s warning and sample its fruit for themselves.
And in that moment, when Adam & Eve stopped working the garden to entertain the idea that they knew better than God and could take action contrary to his desires and direction, paradise was lost.
And so we arrive at today, where we live under the shadow of the serpent coiled around the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, gloating over us as we work under the curse of thorns and sweat and toil.
And yet, where there is a shadow, there is light. The divine God of creation is not done with his work. He is at it again. He is creating. He is re-creating. He is restoring paradise.
How, you ask? Let’s find out.
Source Scripture
Good Work! John 5:17-18
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Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
Once you experience being loved when you are unworthy, being forgiven when you did something wrong, that moves you into non-dual thinking. You move from what I call meritocracy, quid pro quo thinking, to the huge ocean of grace, where you stop counting or calculating. Richard Rohr
We live in an age that philosopher Charles Taylor describes as an immanent frame, or, a state of disenchantment that eliminates the spiritual realm and reduces us to biological beings with five senses and no more. In such a context, it is only reasonable that our motivations and goals – indeed our very lives – become preoccupied with the manipulation of objects and people into an optimal order that maximizes our sensual pleasures.
In such a state of attention, then, we inevitably slip into the dualistic mindset of meritocracy. Because there’s nothing in this world for me to do other than seek sensual pleasures, and I am aware that you, too, are engaged in the same pursuit, then the only way for us to move forward is to agree that if I do something for you, you do something for me.
If I work for you, you pay me. If I do you a favor, you owe me. If you harm me, I will take revenge.
This mindset is so pervasive that even those of us who would reach beyond the eminent frame to seek the God of the universe who exists both beyond and within it allow us to be caught up in a spiritual meritocracy. If I do a good deed, God smiles on me and must bless me. If I suffer, God must be disappointed in me. If something bad happened to that poor chap over there, he most assuredly deserves it for something he has done.
There is no escape from this dualistic mindset without the divine, a new dimension of being, that exists apart from the immanent frame of disenchantment at worst and spiritual meritocracy at best. We need metanoia or repentance that leads to a new quality of attention, an entirely new way of thinking, that rises from the ashes of sensual orientation and seeks presence with the divine God of the universe and those around us that he has created in his image.
In our story today, Jesus confronts this immanent frame and invites us to live beyond it in the realms of love and enchantment and joy and peace.
How Jesus does this is the subject of today’s episode. He uses three metaphors that initially seem separate. Isolated. But when you allow them to coalesce, the result is a startling, overarching metaphor hidden in plain sight that stretches as far back as Genesis 1 and as far forward as Revelation 22.
Come and see for yourself.
Source Scripture
I Have a Proposal Matthew 9:14-17; Mark 2:18-22; Luke 5:33-39
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God’s love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God. Thomas Merton
The Ark of the Covenant. It is the subject of much of the Old Testament Scriptures. It is the central object of desire for Indiana Jones and Adolph Hitler in the Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is the ultimate boon for many treasure hunters who still seek it.
The Old Testament Scriptures tell us that God spoke to Moses from between the two cherubim – or angels – that rose above the lid of the ark. Inside the ark were the two tablets of stone on which God etched the Ten Commandments with his finger. The ark was so holy it was never to be touched, but instead covered with cloth and carried with staves that allowed the men moving it to maintain adequate distance.
The Ark made its way from its birth at Mount Sinai through 40 years of wandering in the desert, and then to the Jordan River where it split the waters and allowed the Israelites to cross into the Promised Land on dry ground.
It eventually made its way to its final home – the Jewish temple built by King Solomon in Jerusalem. It was placed in a room of the temple called the Holy of Holies, where only the great high priest could enter once per year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, to seek forgiveness for the people of Israel.
The Ark of the Covenant, the most holy object of all time, resting in the Holy of Holies, had itself a most holy place – the lid atop it that covered the Ten Commandments. The place where the great high priest would sprinkle the blood of sacrifice once per year.
It is here, between the two angels atop the lid, that God said his presence permeated this world from the heavens beyond. And this lid was known as the mercy seat.
Of all of the ways that God could choose to present himself and make himself known. It was not through the tablets of law that were hidden inside the ark, which represented the requirements of the people to remain in good favor with God. It was not through the magnificent structure of the temple that encased it. It was not through the gleaming gold that covered every inch of it. It was not through the blood sacrifices that occurred just feet way outside in the inner court of the temple and got most of the attention.
No, the portal between heaven and earth where the divine God of the Universe presented himself to mankind was on the mercy seat.
Mercy. This is God’s posture toward us. This is his intent with us. And this – this unfathomable mercy of God – is the subject of today’s episode.
Source Scripture
Party Time: Matthew 9:9-13; Mark 2:13-17; Luke 5:27-32
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras