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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Extras
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