“We’re just plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner. I can’t think what anybody sees in them.”
Bilbo Baggins
In the previous chapter I said that some people will ignore the Call or downright refuse to hear it. Why would anyone refuse a call to adventure? Especially if that adventure might lead to something wonderful?
Because adventures are unpredictable and that means that at least part of the time, we (our egos) are not in control of what’s going on. While we might like a little bit of spice and excitement in our lives, we want to feel that we’re in control of, at the minimum, all crucial aspects. A refusal of adventure reflects the fear of the ego that it will lose control of things. Egos take a long time to learn, if they ever do, that they’re not really in control of anything, anyway. The only thing they have any degree of control over is whether or not they’ll release their illusion of control. Remember my story of the horse show?
For an ego bound by fear of loss of control there is no such thing as “something wonderful” unless it’s a guaranteed pleasant result. Obviously, such a guarantee removes the wonderfulness. It’s the surprise, the marvel of encountering something unknown or unexpected, even if it’s difficult, that makes an adventure “wonder full.”
The ego doesn’t see any self-interest by having an adventure. Adventure will make you late for dinner. It could keep you apart from your loved ones in one way or another, physically or psychologically, at least for a while. It might be wonderful or it may very well be frightening, maybe dangerous. It could, at the minimum, make you uncomfortable (if not cause actual pain) at some point or other. The ego doesn’t like to be uncomfortable, much less in danger. That emphasizes its mortality and it doesn’t want to think about that.
Paradoxically, busyness, even to the point of severe pain and distress, allows the ego to avoid thinking about its impermanence. Not thinking about its finiteness allows it to convince itself that nothing will ever change and that it will therefore exist indefinitely.
This refusal to grow means the ego actually sounds its own death knell. The absence of change or growth is “death” and yet the ego is blind to this. Without growth the only option is for the bud to rot on the stem. Stockpiling more money and things and status, even living a long time, doesn’t equate to growth.
This refusal isn’t usually a conscious and deliberate choice. It’s generally a result of being deeply invested in material success as a measure of who we are. If we believe that what we do and what we have, even what and how well we think, is what makes us who we are, we get attached to our possessions and abilities. When that happens, our belongings and aptitudes rule our lives. They make us decide how we’ll live to protect them rather than decide how we’ll use them to live. All of our efforts go into keeping what we have, making sure it doesn’t get taken away from us, and trying to get more. If we lose any of that paraphernalia, we worry, who will we become? Maybe a bag lady? Horrors!
What really gives meaning to our lives? Our things? What we do? How we live, how we behave? I don’t have to tell you the answers. We’ve all heard them preached to us. Still, we avoid answering by getting involved in busyness to distract our thoughts from them or in amassing distractions such as status, possessions, good times, or even difficult times that keep us too busy to think.
What we’re really avoiding, though, is the answer to only one question: Who am I? When we begin the Journey prompted by that question we begin the journey to wisdom. This Journey isn’t straightforward. It will lead us into a labyrinth in which it is first necessary to become lost, to lose our selves so we can find our Selves.
The ego finds it very difficult to trust that, just as a sparrow or a lily of the field, it will always have its needs taken care of. I know, I know, there really are bag ladies and homeless people, and cats catch sparrows, and lilies wilt and die, but maybe our needs are different than our egos think they are. The ego trusts only what it can accumulate to keep it as comfortable, as safe and secure, as possible. This attitude can lead the ego, all unknowingly, into behaviors and activities that are actually antithetical to its desires.
Like me, laboring under the illusion of control by “doing all the right things,” adding more and more until I was juggling way too many of them and my life was out of control. My egoic anxiety about my group health insurance was a legitimate concern but I made my decision on the basis of a vague and illegitimate fear, not on the reality of the situation. That anxiety led me to live with an eye to the distant future and commit to actions that simply led me to more and more commitments until I was so over-committed that I should have been committed. I was so concerned for my future that I didn’t notice how unlivable it was making my life in the present. What a tremendous lack of awareness! It didn’t occur to me until nearly too late that if I continued living that way I might not have a future in which I’d need health care.
Our Authentic Self is immortal and, having all the time imaginable, it’s quite happy to go slowly and savor life’s various events as well as desiring a variety of experiences. This doesn’t just mean to take vacations in exotic places, though that can be a part of it. It simply means to notice where we are right now, the small things in our lives, like birds at a feeder or the color of the new grass in spring or the bubbles in the dishwater as they create miniature prisms for the sunlight coming through the window.
By being aware of these small glories and making a conscious decision to share them with our Higher Self (termed by my friend Alice as our Divine Guest) we become more open to the wonders of the real world as well as satisfying our soul at the deepest level. We become more aware. An attitude of gratitude is what it takes. Be grateful for the small stuff; the big stuff will take care of itself.
My ten years in the navy reserve gave me assignments on all three coasts at one time or another. Stress aside, I generally enjoyed them even when they were very demanding; they were adventures and I appreciated that so maybe my Authentic Self got something out of those experiences. I hope so. I (ego) paid a dear price for them, though I can’t say I’m sorry for them. Most of all, though, the Self wants and needs encounters that help it grow in wisdom.
Wisdom is more than just experience and knowledge; it’s both of those, tempered by heart, by compassion. My busyness wasn’t the best way to go about learning wisdom but it did teach me that it was a most difficult way to begin. However, it took all of this busyness and exhaustion to wear down my ego defenses, to break through my popcorn shell, so that I could finally have the opportunity to expand and learn.
The Higher Self has ways of guiding us onto the path we’re meant to travel, our destiny. If we (our egos) are too stubborn or too strong or too dense to figure that out, or if we try to do it all ourselves, or if we use the “deliberate unconsciousness” that Caroline Myss describes, the Higher Self must use whatever means necessary to nudge us in the right direction. If that nudge has the size and power of a 2×4, then that’s what it takes.
In other instances, though, the Higher Self may not resort to such forceful nudges. In some cases it may be that the ego is so spellbound by what appears to be the “real” world that it can’t be rescued by nudges or sharp pokes or even crashes. In these cases the ego will – maybe – continue living but the élan in its life will be reduced or even eliminated as the ego/self’s separation from the influence of its Self becomes nearly unbridgeable. It might even lead to an early demise from workaholism or some other similar “ism” or a physical illness. I came very close to this.
Just because the ego hesitates or resists doesn’t mean that the Higher Self gives up. I think my own experience shows that. Campbell says, “Not all who hesitate are lost;” similarly, J. R. R. Tolkien says in Lord of the Rings, “Not all who wander are lost.” The Higher Self may harass and niggle and provide all sorts of impassable barricades in our egoic life, as my dream presaged, as well as use other implements to ensure that the ego is guided, even if unknowingly, into the necessary byways of the labyrinth. The path of the labyrinth, while it might seem to wander aimlessly like a maze, actually has as its sole purpose to guide us inward to the center, our own interior, where dwells the Self. The same path inward then leads us back out again with the knowledge and wisdom we’ve gained from that meeting, now a more integrated being.
Consider Jonah in the Bible. He was told to preach and prophesy to the city of Nineveh that it must give up its evil ways or be destroyed. In his effort to avoid this spiritual mission, his destiny, he attempted to run away by boarding a ship to a place as far away as it was possible to get from his mission. However, he was not able to avoid his fate (which is what our destiny turns into when we try to avoid it).
His ship was struck by a storm at sea (symbolic of the chaos of the watery unconscious?) and the terrified sailors threw him overboard to appease the unruly waters. The storm abated but then a giant fish swallowed Jonah. As in the story of Inanna, this was indeed a very deep, dark world. Jonah prayed, “The waters swirled about me, threatening my life; the abyss enveloped me…. Down I went to the roots of the mountains; the bars of the nether world were closing behind me forever.” Essentially he said, “I can’t do this anymore!” He had to acknowledge he was not in control. His prayer was heard and the fish spat him out. Yet did he really learn from his experience or was he simply coerced by it? Let’s see.
Jonah was given a second chance to fulfill his mission and this time, preaching and prophesying as he was bidden, he was successful. The people of Nineveh, a city that Jonah would have preferred to see destroyed for its sinful decadence, listened to him. They changed their ways, and the city was saved from destruction.
Then Jonah got angry. Can’t you just see him throwing down his walking staff and stalking off in a pout? He hadn’t wanted this mission in the first place and now, after being pressured into doing it, and after preaching that Nineveh would be destroyed, it wasn’t. That really burned him up! Not least because it made him look like a fool because he’d preached destruction that didn’t happen. And besides, the people who’d listened to him weren’t even Hebrews and he hadn’t really wanted to save them.
Now is it apparent how much of his ego was involved in this mission? If he couldn’t avoid it and just had to do it, then he wanted to be in charge of the results, to have it to go off according to his desires and plans. Is this much different than how our egos might feel? They might have had some scrapes with their own interior depths and come out of them feeling fortunate and maybe a bit cocky because they hadn’t been trapped down there with that “stuff.” Egos would probably like to take a lot of credit for that.
So Jonah is reproved by God for his anger over something that was really none of his business. He’d been given a job to do and he was not to concern himself with the outcome. Again, like me at the horse show. My job was to ride, not worry about winning.
Similarly in our own lives, the ego can resist and yet still accomplish the job it has to do, the work of spirit, even while not having a complete understanding of the entire process. Jonah apparently didn’t learn much and for sure he didn’t have a very good time because of his resistance. Just think what a great adventure he could have related if he’d had a different outlook. After all, how many people can survive a storm at sea, then be swallowed by a fish and live to tell about it? While his ego’s attitude didn’t prevent him from ultimately achieving his mission to save Nineveh, it did make a big difference in his experience of it.
As Seneca aptly and humorously reminds us, "The fates [or God or Higher Self] lead him who will – him who won’t, they drag." Much better to learn to go with the flow than to ignore the Call and end up doing it the hard way, being dragged kicking and scratching and maybe screaming all the way. I took a lot of dragging though I didn’t have much energy for kicking and screaming.
There is another way for the ego to answer the Call or, rather, to not answer the Call and yet to accomplish its mission without all the angst. Campbell calls it “willful introversion,” the opposite of Myss’s “deliberate unconsciousness.” The ego can make a choice, perhaps unconscious at the time of what it means, but a deliberate choice all the same, to have an adventure, to drive or push or in some way cause itself to discover an inner life, to enter into the psychic depths, to seek something greater than the egoic self even if it’s not sure just what that might be. Now that’s real willingness to have an adventure.
Some egos, not quite clear about the call, attempt this union with a greater Something by enrolling in the military or becoming an activist or joining a church or even a cult or a gang. These methods have the potential to lead to something worthy, something greater than the group of which we’ve become a part. But too often they are only egoic ventures that proceed no further. The ego only sort of accomplishes the mission.
Some suggest using drugs to facilitate the willful introversion route, to rapidly expose the ego to the contents of the unconscious, but psychoactive substances, whether LSD or peyote or alcohol or marijuana or whatever, can be dangerous. Using these sorts of things simply for a recreational high is even more dangerous. The unconscious is very powerful and no matter how we’re exposed to it, opening to it before we understand what can be called forth is playing with spiritual and psychological fire, not to mention physical pitfalls.
It’s safer to use a slower method that will enable the ego to become gradually strengthened and psychologically inured so as to not be overwhelmed by the experiences. Forms of meditation and activities like depth psychology, active imagination, dream incubation and interpretation, etc, can accomplish this acclimatization. Even these measures can be potentially dangerous or at least uncomfortable for the unprepared or weak ego so they should be undertaken with proper guidance and training.
Campbell addresses this, “Willful introversion … is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within…” He goes on, “The result, of course, may be a disintegration of consciousness more or less complete…but on the other hand if the personality [ego] is able to absorb and integrate the new forces there will be an almost superhuman degree of self-consciousness and masterful control.”
It’s no accident that great creativity and madness are so often linked in common lore. The ego makes a conscious decision to enter the depths and to train itself to work with the energies arising from those depths even if they’re uncomfortable or frightening. It then attempts to direct and construct those energies into expressions in the conscious world. Although this method of willful introversion isn’t common in our culture, it’s similar to the process used by some artists for many kinds of creative endeavor from painting and sculpture to writing and dance, thus the creativity/madness connection.
Those who make this willful choice are sometimes described as neurotic but like depression, neurosis can actually be a constructive state. Neurosis is a psychological sense that the ego/self and the Higher Self are not in complete harmony, although at early stages of the Journey the ego doesn’t actually have much sense of the existence of the Self. It just experiences a sense of disjointedness, a neurosis, that often propels the ego to enter upon this difficult path. The pain of staying disconnected, wrapped up in its tight little bud, is worse than the fear of what it may find in its own depths. With the ego’s conscious choice and deliberate willingness to undergo this discomfort, the disharmony can be eliminated. It’s not easy and it may take quite some time.
If the ego refuses to respond to the Call and invests more and more of its energy in accumulating “stuff,” it has less energy to commit toward the opportunity to grow into a partnership with the Self. In one way or the other the ego has crippled itself by refusing to partake in the adventure available to it.
Of course, from the egoic viewpoint, if it can even understand or think about it at all, it thinks it’s saved itself from a great deal of discomfort at least and from death at best. It hopes not to be late for dinner, either. Thus, we sometimes see people who may have very comfortable physical lives but who seem to feel empty and lost. A bud rotting on the stem is not the way to exist in comfort and/or to keep death at bay. It may take the ego some time to realize this. It might never get the message.
One way to avoid this dismal end is to teach our children, through myth or religion or initiatory rites or even fairy tales or movies, that there is a Call that we can expect to receive at some point in our lives, what this Call signifies and what it might entail, and what symptoms and emotions might be involved. If we don’t refuse it or overlook it, if we are taught that it’s a normal part of life, we can make our passage an exciting adventure instead of a miserable experience. If we’re not afraid to heed the Call we needn’t look for ways to avoid it.
Sam, this is so profound. I can feel your connection to this wisdom, that you have “earned” it. I especially liked your example of Jonah.
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Thanks, Sharon. Yeah, that Jonah was a pip, wasn’t he? LOL I got a whole new perspective on that story as I was writing this. Not what I’d grown up believing, that’s fershure. *G*
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Ah, Sam, you raise probably life’s most important question: “Who am I?” The journey, similar to the caterpillar’s morphing into the chrysalis and emerging metamorphosed into a butterfly, to find its answer unravels life’s mystery and reveals its real meaning – as I perceive it. Good blog!
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Hi, Mary. That’s what the real nitty gritty boils down to, doesn’t it? Who am I? Well, keep reading. I did discover an answer to that, though it wasn’t apparent at first. Took me a while. Sam
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