The tyranny of self-will

It’s difficult when we are unaware of our habitual mental states and processes, making our addictions harder to see, but due to our fallen nature we simply all have issues in the pleasure-seeking-begetting-more-suffering category. What happens, though, whether aware or unaware; intentionally or unintentionally, we are energizing our internal, instinctual drives through satiating cravings telling us we need this or that in order to survive. We must drink this, eat that, have sex with this person, ostracize that person, and so on to keep the machine running. It is like our biological imperatives are in disarray.

However, by doing we are only surviving, because we are only answering our biological instincts instead of stepping out of that behavior and mental state to broaden our lens and thinking patterns. Not only are we only surviving by (paradoxically) embracing habitual substance abuse, but we are also deadening the receptors that are attached to craving.

We are mortifying our dopamine receptors.

This takes time, of course, but eventually the dopamine receptors become so deadened over extended periods of habitual abuse that our programming fizzles out completely and we cease wanting anything. We’ve killed the instinctual make-up of our internal drives. We have given over to pleasure so much that we can no longer derive pleasure from even a small amount of what used to be what we believed kept us alive.

This is partly a cause for one addiction leading to another, where the first substance or process addiction does not trigger the same dopamine response requiring one to up the ante to trigger the same response. That and state-dependent learning contributes to a wider berth of substance use, such as drinking was fun before someone brought coke to the bar now drinking is great because coke is involved, and coke is great. And I’m not going to do coke if I’m sober, because I’m not a maniac; doing coke sober is like being depressed at the beach, What the hell am I doing here?

In any case, there is escalation involved with any addiction because of the slow degradation of dopamine receptors being basically given exactly what they want, when they want, until they do not want anything anymore.

But go ahead, Do What Thou Wilt.

So, Lent… As Christians we understand reality as unfolding from the Cross and the Incarnation of our Lord, Lent is no different, however this is a time wherein we enter into the Passion of Christ with somber awareness of what His Passion achieved on a cosmic level, “in exchange for our passions [Christ] gives us his life-giving Passion as a salutary cure which saves the world” (St. Maximus, Mystagogia 8). It is enough for now to say, theologically, the Incarnation’s birth and death have a cosmically profound effect of restoration with many precepts establishing the nature of the Incarnation as well as the means in which this cosmic-shattering event took place.

The reason for the season is Christ’s Passion, meaning His suffering and ultimately His bearing of the weight of our sins on the cross, and we enter into this time in imitation of our Lord, usually with a Lenten sacrifice of something specific during the observation of this period. We imitate Christ being led by the Spirit into the desert after His baptism, a demonstration of the second Nativity of the Spirit that takes place in the life of all Christians through the sacrament of baptism. This sacrament brings us into the life, and death, of our Lord where we die to this world and are regenerated with the Spirit of God, illumined to the mysteries and the power of the Cross.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of our yearly journey that we take with Christ, willingly venturing into the silent land of fasting, self-denial, repentance, and simple living aimed at producing a single-minded focus on Christ our Lord. Fasting during Lent is our way of liberating ourselves from the slavery of unconscious living, wherein we satisfy our appetites unaware of their consequences or our habituated approach to them.

Lent is a call to cultivating intentionality and a unified mind among Christians. The virtue of temperance here is sought through controlling our instinctual drives, mortifying them through denying their satisfaction as to create space for God to emerge through this willing surrender of self.

This kenosis, this self-emptying, practice is the method in which we imitate Christ in His love for us and the Father. We are following Christ to the Cross; we will step into the Garden of Gethsemane and redeem the Garden of Eden through our willing surrender of our will for His Will. Lent is the true spring season where love is in the air, a love embodied by our self-surrender to the Father and His Providence.

Love, and Do Thy Will.

This is a season of somber reverence for our Lord, Who gave all of Himself to us, for us, and for our eternal well-being.

Christ imbued our human nature with a different mode through His Incarnation, “after [The Fall] pleasure naturally preconditioned the births of all human beings, and no one at all was by nature free from birth subject to the passion associated with this pleasure; rather, everyone was requited with sufferings, and subsequent death, as the natural punishment… with human beings deriving the beginning of their existence from the corruption associated with pleasure, and coming to the end of their life in the corruption of death… in order for suffering human nature to be set right, it was necessary for an unjust and likewise uncaused suffering and death to be conceived–a death ‘unjust’ in the sense that it by no means followed a life given to passions, and ‘uncaused’ in the sense that it was in no way preceded by pleasure” (St. Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 133).

He was born of a virgin thereby taking on our human flesh without taking on the corruption associated with pleasure, “but in his love for humanity, he willingly appropriated the pain which is the end of human nature, the pain resulting from unrighteous pleasure. He did this in order that, by suffering unjustly, he might uproot the principles of our being conceived through unrighteous pleasure, which tyrannizes our human nature” (Ibid. 134).

He died unjustly, as it was not a death arising from the penalty of deriving our beginning from the corruption associated with pleasure, “but rather a death specifically directed against that principle, [so that] he might erase the just finality which human nature encounters in death” (Ibid.).

This season is not about giving up what we love, but about what God gave up in His love for us. We may love wine and cookies and find it difficult to get through forty days in the cookie-less desert of Lent coming out the other side having relapsed on sugar or with a newfound willpower and appreciation for barefoot wine and chips ahoy, but that is not the point of Lent. That’s nice and all, but it is not the point, because this does not inspire a transformed heart.

In a less spiritual sense, what Lent offers is a chance to remove ourselves and our unconscious awareness from the proverbial hamster wheel of craving empowered by this current culture of conspicuous consumption. Fasting enables us to survive longer with less, and to become aware of that potential within us. We do not need more, we are not programmed to want more, either. It is a product of the waters that we swim in that produces this chase for more. This is unsustainable and will only lead to us consuming more and knowing ourselves less, and by extension knowing God just as much as the self.

In a more spiritual sense, Lent offers us a unified approach to imitating Christ, with the support of His Body and His wife, the Church. We are emptying of what gets in the way of our ability to hear and walk with our Lord, what may hinder us from following our Beloved to the Cross. In this day and age, we are seeing too many people following their own will; their own code of ethics and morals; and shirking their spiritual duties which would make even Aleister Crowley roll in his grave.

There are too many avenues in which we take control of our own appetites and satisfy them as soon as they emerge. I feel that if we orient ourselves toward these flair-ups of instinct, emotions, and passions where instead of feeding them we sit and we listen then we will be taking steps to imitate Christ just as He sat with those outcasts of society in the days of His earthly ministry. If we can sit and tune into where these pleasure-seeking cravings arise from, we might, with God’s help, become aware of the suffering they are rooted in, because our sins, our passions, the things that dominate us that we might not even be aware of are rooted in suffering. It is an act of service to God to become courageous enough to confront that suffering instead of drowning, blinding, and deafening through giving in to the pleasures that mask and aggravate that suffering.

Lent is about Christ’s love for us, and we show Him our love by picking up our cross and following Him, but I would suggest because of today’s zeitgeist wherein we all follow our own path as expressed by Do What Thou Wilt, none of us can be quite sure just what our cross is… As for me and my resentments and judgement of others, I cannot be sure of what my cross is while I busy myself pointing out what I assume another person’s cross is; this is spiritual bypassing masking itself as self-righteousness (meaning it is not even hiding in plain sight well). 

Do What Thou Wilt is a motto for the modern man, the modern man who follows in the footsteps of Nietzsche: God is dead, so we all must fill the vacuum of our own life by becoming our own God. That is a cold place, as cold as the false idols that we craft in our hearts, where the only love that can be given is our love for the things we consume. This love is a vain love.

It is not the merciful love of the Father. It is not the kenotic love of the Son. It is not the obedient love of the Spirit. 

Lastly, Do What Thou Wilt is the war cry of the antichrist, because Do What Thou Wilt implies a spirit of unrepentance. We see it with the Hellfire Club and their “president” the Devil on to the goddess Babalon of Thelema, taken directly from the Book of Revelation and the whore of Babylon, who is the false church—a church of iniquity and using Christ’s Name to further the kingdom of darkness in affirming one’s sin. Do What Thou Wilt is not a problem of the larger culture, but an issue within Western Christianity where the charism now is come as you are and leave as you are. Do What Thou Wilt means to embrace that which severs our ties with God and our neighbor, to set ourselves apart in drunkenness, gluttony, lust, and greed.

But most of all, pride.

Do What Thou Wilt has found its way into parasitically surviving within the hallowed walls of Christ’s bride, His Church, and if we allow this infestation to continue spreading then eventually Christianity will simply be another worldly institution of sin and moral relativism. When we are all following the will of our hearts, darkened and confused by passion, then we are all going to different places… Ultimately, those places are spiritual stagnation whereby we cannot possibly be transformed by God, because under the tyranny of Do What Thou Wilt we are our own God. This is slavery of the tallest order.

We certainly will not be picking up our cross and following Christ to His, and our, death.  

Personally, I think that, deep down, we all have some sort of intuitive understanding of what our cross is and how we need to carry it. Like myself, though, none of us want to pick it up because then we would be responsible for it and for our lives… and for our death. When we pick up the cross, we are dying to the self. That is a scary thing.

So, for Lent this year I will try, with God’s help, to carry my own cross and mind my business regarding everyone else’s. Christ did not turn around to make sure that His friends and family were following Him when He went into the desert. Neither can we be led by the Spirit into the silent land if we count the heads of the people coming with us.

Let us awaken to who we truly are this Lenten Spring. Let us do away with Do What Thou Wilt, let it be accursed and anathema. Let us stop deafening, blinding, and drinking ourselves into a stupor far from God. Let us sit with ourselves and listen. Listen to our pain and listen to the voice of God.  

We will know it by His Love. Let us offer our passions to Him and know that He exchanged them for His Passion.

This is the Way to spiritual liberation; this is the salutary Way to heal Do What Thou Wilt.   

Love, and Thy Will Be Done.

Si comprehendis, non est Deus