Cyber Spirit Cafe

The media is full of stories about people in distress anticipating the results of today’s elections. Some can’t sleep or can’t get out of bed. Others are upping their meds. One doctor’s post I read said he had never seen so many patients with anxiety over this year’s election. Some act out in their driving or with other antisocial behavior.

Of course, our political rhetoric promotes this. Opposing candidates are demonized so that we are encouraged to imagine the worst possible outcomes if they are elected. Calamities of all sorts are feared if the candidate we support doesn’t win. And then there are fears about the electoral process itself—technical breakdowns, violence, endless recounts, lawsuits.

From anticipation and imagination come anxiety and fear. And so, the blessing and curse of the human mind appears again. One of the great advantages of our brains is that it allows us to predict the future with some degree of accuracy. This allows us to make plans to take advantage of good circumstances (rain and sun means plant crops) and prepare for difficult ones (cold and snow means grow enough crops to store for the winter).

But our ability to predict the future is actually very limited, often much more so than we realize. We can never anticipate all that the natural world will send us, including weather, disease, earthquakes, and the stray comet collision every few hundred million years. For a variety of personal reasons, including past experience, our imaginations can conjure of wildly unrealistic expectations about the future.

The primary factor in our distress about the unpredictable and uncontrollable future is, of course, our ego. This is the self we imagine our self to be. It lives somewhere inside of us, peering out through our eyes and registering neural inputs through our other senses. It talks to itself incessantly in our minds with our thoughts. A popular and simple definition of this self is our body-mind. It comes into existence at our birth, evolves and changes over time, and comes to an end at our death.

But let me just drop here a very different understanding of all this. It’s from the Anglo-American, 20^th century philosopher, teacher, and entertainer (his word), Alan Watts.

You don’t really exist. That is, as an ego, a soul, a separate will. When you realize this, you’re liberated. Ego is an abstraction…. So is one’s self. There’s a happening, but that’s not you. By dying to yourself, finding you don’t exist, you’re reborn. Forgetting yourself, the universe flows on.

Watts is usually thought of as a Western interpreter of East Asian philosophy and religion. But he grew up an Anglican and was ordained in the US as an Episcopal priest. While what he says here may sound Hindu or Buddhist, in fact, it also reflects one of the most profound but usually forgotten (or ignored) teaching of Jesus. In all four gospels, Jesus tells his disciples enigmatically that they must lose their life in order to find it. He says in Luke, for instance:

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.

Watts also echoes the famous dialog between Jesus and Nicodemus in John.

Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born anew.

By implication, in order to be born again, whatever was born the first time must come to an end. It’s in Paul, however, where this notion is expressed most explicitly. For Paul, this is the meaning of the cross, as he says in Galatians.

I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.

Paul’s experience of the risen Christ meant the death of his “I”, his ego, so that now Christ, the Spirit of God incarnate, was recognized as his true self.

But wait—didn’t we start all this talking about election anxiety? How did we get sidetracked by Bible and theology? It’s a sign of the sad state of religion today that this is seen as taking a sidetrack. For at their core, all of the great religions are concerned with this question: Who am I, really? And they all seek to expose the imposter in this quest, the ego.

There may be no other place where egos are more on display than in an election campaign. Modern campaigns promote the person of the candidate far more than their position on issues, and denigrate the person of their opponent. And this clash of egos then drags in the egos of the candidate’s supporters.

Our egos are inherently insecure because they really don’t exist! One consequence is that we easily attach ourselves to other egos we admire, seeking to somehow claim their attributes as our own. This is the force behind the celebrity culture that has exploded in modern times. And politicians are now, essentially, celebrities, along with TV and movie stars, musicians, athletes, social media personalities, influencers, the “royals”, and anyone media outlets think can be used to attract “eyeballs” to their productions.

It’s not today’s political egos that concern us, however, but our own. Our anxiety over the results of today’s elections needs to be seen for what it is: fearing the defeat of our candidate as our own personal “defeat.” Because our ego is a product of our imagination, it easily spins fantasy worlds in which to exist, 99% of which are in the past or in the future (living in a fantasy present is usually called psychosis).

Our increasing dependence on the media with its inevitably artificial view of reality, and our growing frustration with our circumstances and fears about the world in which we think we live, leave us increasingly susceptible to manipulation by leaders of all sorts. They play sometimes upon our hopes but mostly upon our fears, to draw us into a worldview in which they will protect us and deliver us from disaster.

The ego loves the past and future. It has great difficulty living in the present. Tomorrow and each day that follows, and whenever the election results are known, we will wake up and go about living our lives. Much of it will go “according to plan” but often it will not, as has always been the case. We may rejoice over or bewail the election results, but their consequences for our lives will also be largely unpredictable and almost certainly not what we have imagined.

These days I keep coming back to Jesus’ simple teaching in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6.

Which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? … Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

Our anxious ego spins out countless fantasies of doom and disaster in our minds, which keep us unendingly entangled. Living in these fantasies, however, blinds us to the reality of the here and now, including the beauty of the lilies and countless other attributes of the world around us.

The world isn’t all lilies, of course. But as Jesus goes on to say, by ignoring the “troubles” of our fantasies, we will be able to handle much better the problems we actually encounter in the here and now. Because then we can respond out of “the peace that surpasses all understanding” of our true self, which only exists in the present moment, rather than out of the obsessions and anxieties of our imaginary ego.

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