Working Assumptions

I saw a play once… It was essentially about a group of people who were looking for the answer - to everything. There was a bad guy who was rich, and a young girl who was helpless. And the heroes kept wandering from place to place, yearning for meaning, and some kind of happiness that was, throughout the play, very vague, and very elusive.

Last night, I watched a speech online with my wife. It was very well-spoken. It was about fear, and love, and the powers that be, and how we each have to fight our own way to freedom.

Listening to the speech, and remembering the play, I felt like a lot of popular views these days follow similar threads: There is good, and there is bad. Salvation is possible, though I don’t tend to see a clear picture of what it would look like. Fear is a common character, and love is a common character. Power is a common theme, as well, and often associated with evil; while helplessness and victimhood are often lined up with good, or in the very least, those who exhibit them are assumed to be innocent. And a common message is that in all this, it’s up to us. 

But I am fascinated by two working assumptions that seem to hide between the lines of these streams of thought. Am I right about these assumptions? Here they are, and please, judge me.

The first working assumption: We had it, but we lost it. 

I feel like there is a common unspoken belief that at some point in the past, we must have Lived the Truth, but somehow we don’t anymore. We have lost our primordial happiness, our intrinsic nature, our wisdom or our understanding or our heaven in some way. It’s like the classic Garden of Eden story: We were in paradise, at some point in the past, but we’re not there anymore. We fell. We screwed up. And now we have to find our way back.

Perhaps meditation will bring us back to ourselves.

Or maybe prayer will remind us of our higher selves.

In my experience, there are indeed some things that we lose as we get older. Stress causes us to lose our natural joy and love, and to lose touch with ourselves. But if we have those things when we are babies, there are other things that we do not have at all at that stage. Small children are not angels; they fight over everything. So do animals. Both lack awareness, which is what develops as we grow. And we have grown as a species. There is far more awareness now, collectively, than there ever was before. And there was no point in human history when we all got along and everything was fine - certainly not as far as I can tell.

Maybe we did all come from some Garden of Eden. But in my experience, our journey is more one of growth than of returning. Even in the creation story, God moves from the mundane to the more spiritual from day to day, finally arriving at humans. Humans, of all the beings of creation, are capable of more complex thought, and higher states of consciousness - and that is regardless of whether we believe in creation or evolution. And from the moment we came on the scene, we have been learning. We mature throughout time, and we become better people as we grow. The journey is forward, not back. Our consciousness grows, and it has been growing for eons - however many eons you believe in, whether we began as cells or as soil. To be aware is an evolutionary achievement, and awareness is forever continuing to evolve. That is a place that you can go to if you so choose. But you never did anything wrong in the beginning. We did not screw up; we are just learning. If there is a God, then this was all God’s plan. As some Jews like to say: God put that tree in the Garden for a reason. You are on your way, and you always have been.

And you do not make mistakes because you are a bad person. We make mistakes because we don’t know any better. We are all exploring, we are all learning, and we all make mistakes.

There is, however, one aspect in which we should judge ourselves more stringently, and that is when our inner voice tells us that something is wrong. So we may not know what is right; but it is, in those moments, very much our job and responsibility to find out. And it is also our job to build our awareness in such a way that we can notice those moments more often.

So your job, if you ask me, is not to know the answer, or to rediscover the truth. You never had it in the first place. Let it go.

Your job is to build your self-awareness. Growth will come from there.

The second working assumption: Someone is holding us back, and they are doing it on purpose. 

Some one, some force, some system, some organized crime, some obstacle, some Evil Being, some social norm, someone who knows that salvation is possible is consciously and deliberately preventing us from getting there. Power. Money. Greed. Corporations. Organized religions. Government. Whatever It Is. I don’t know if we give it all that much thought, but I feel like we assume that this Obstacle knows what we would need to do to be happy, and it keeps us from doing that.

But what can I say…

I am fully confident that the “evil oligarchs” who “control the world” - let’s assume they’re out there - are at least as miserable as anyone else. They are at least as clueless and desperate as anyone else. They are at least as out of touch as anyone else. They are not holding us back because they can; they are groping in the dark just like anyone else. I think Jesus said it nicely when he described the most powerful force in his time: “They know not what they do”. The Roman Empire may have controlled the roads back then; they may have controlled the economy; they may have controlled the physical world; but they had no power over the human soul, and could never prevent Jesus from reaching Heaven. And the same applies today: People in power might control the market, or the weapons, or the price of gas; but they do not hold the door to happiness, and they are certainly not consciously keeping it locked so you cannot go through. If you think that “the system” is keeping you from being happy, you are giving it way too much power, and actually copping out of your own potential - because you have everything you need to be free. The things that they control are entirely beside the point.

It might be disappointing that we cannot hold someone else responsible for the fact that we are not realizing our full potential; but there is tremendous power in knowing that, at the same time. Because in all these streams of thought that are so popular these days, there is at least one common thread that cannot be overstated:

It really is up to you. 

And on a side note, you are not doing it for anyone else.

You are doing it for yourself.

Happy Passover :)

Photo by Stephane Tendon, Pexels.com