Would that I had something fascinating to say—some revelation that would rock the world or a funny little anecdote, at least. Alas, I come up lacking anything remotely noteworthy, but rather felt that I should type up a post lest I trod the path of spiritual oblivion. I haven't done a whole lot of soul-searching over the past few weeks. Instead it's been hard work at a rough but interesting job, a smidge of cold labor outside, far too much Internet trolling, partially self-induced and awful sleep deprivation, and a stressful and frustrating and miserable New Year. Blah. The lethargy of a stalling winter.
I've been reading, and have almost finished, a book I was given awhile back by a boss, my flatterer and the source of so much of this current malcontentment. The gift, however, was in earnest, and the book is M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. There are good parts and bad; interesting and mind-numbingly boring; true nuggets of wisdom and obnoxious psychobabble about the unconscious. I've skimmed a lot of it, mostly due to reading while tired and bored. Maybe I'm missing something extremely valuable.
But the part that has most jumped out at me is the author's assessment of evil and human nature. People, he says, are inherently lazy, and this is the root of all problems. An excerpt:
Why this failure? Why was no step taken between the temptation and the action? It is this missing step that is the essence of sin. The step missing is the step of debate….Our failure to conduct—or to conduct fully and wholeheartedly—this internal debate between good and evil is the cause of those evil actions that constitute sin. In debating the wisdom of a proposed course of action, human beings routinely fail to obtain God's side of the issue. They fail to consult or listen to the God within them, the knowledge of rightness which inherently resides within the minds of all mankind. We make this failure because we are lazy. It is work to hold these internal debates. They require time and energy just to conduct them. And if we take them seriously—if we seriously listen to this "God within us"—we usually find ourselves being urged to take the more difficult path, the path of more effort rather than less. To conduct the debate is to open ourselves to suffering and struggle. Each and every one of us, more or less frequently, will hold back from this work, will also seek to avoid this painful step. Like Adam and Eve, and every one of our ancestors before us, we are all lazy.
So original sin does exist; it is our laziness. It is very real. It exists in each and every one of us—infants, children, adolescents, mature adults, the elderly; the wise or the stupid; the lame or the whole. Some of us may be less lazy than others, but we are all lazy to some extent. No matter how energetic, ambitious, or even wise we may be, if we truly look into ourselves we will find laziness lurking at some level. It is the force of entropy within us, pushing us down and holding us all back from our spiritual evolution.
Wow. The above passage, I must admit, really resonates with me. And it's not even that it's all that original or profound, as I came to the same conclusion myself a long time ago. It's just a hard thing to admit, though I'm guilty as charged.
The goal, naturally, is to confront and control this tendency; to circumvent the knee-jerk reflex of apathy, indifference, and cowardly comfortable laziness, so that, as Dr. Peck says, we can assimilate and assume the role of the benevolent and omnipotent godhead within ourselves. But as Dr. Peck also says, it's a lifelong struggle. So much easier to simply give in to temptation.
Good things are never come cheap, and they're never easy….
Just some thoughts to ponder, and maybe an additional resolution for the New Year. Or maybe "resolution" isn't the right work. A new mindset, perhaps, to slowly adopt and hopefully foster….
