Coping Mechanisms and Spiritual Dissonance

 "Y'all are in this trance," continues Brett, "and you come here askin ' me to help snap you out of it. I can't help you, though. You gotta get to where you want it enough to do it yourselves, but that ain't easy cuz you got yourselves lulled into this damn complacency which sucks all the urgency out of your plight. It's like a coping mechanism. Y'all know what a coping mechanism is?

It's like a tranquilizer. We keep ourselves strung out on tranquilizers all the time, but if you come here you're sayin' you want to kick that habit. We're all in the hands of a loving God, that's one kind of tranquilizer we like to swallow. Means you can just sit back and pass the time. Be nice and say you're sorry when you done wrong and your lovin' God won't cook your ass. Reincarnation is another pill that goes down easy. We're coming back again and again so we got all the time in the world.

We're subject to a bunch of karma-dharma dipsy-doodle and we just gotta be good little sheep: no pressure, no urgency, nothing to do but lay low and ride it out. Or maybe we're all divine beings of light and all we gotta do is sparkle and shine and live a pretty life, play nice and not kick up a fuss.

She kicks up a spray of sand, pacing.

"Y'all startin' to see a theme emergin' here? Be nice, be quiet, be good, don't ask questions, don't use your minds, don't make a ruckus - sound familiar? That's what all this satsang talk sounds like to me, like you start feelin' a little agitated so you need a fix, got to get some more tranquility, like that's the purpose of these teachers and gurus you keep talkin' about, they keep you mellow, keep you doped up so you don't gotta face your situation.

Sounds like the exact opposite of wakin' up to me."

Now, just replace all the specific comments above with YOUR beloved beliefs, YOUR coping mechanism such as alcohol, drugs, Christianity, Buddhism, Zen, Hinduism, Nagualism, all New Age whatever and…what do you have? Eyes wide shut.

If you opt out of the coping mechanism, open your eyes just a bit, spiritual dissonance may occur.

Spiritual dissonance is what occurs where our inner world meets our outer world: where what we think is true butts up against what appears to be true: where internal belief collides with external reality. It's the discomfort that occurs where self and not-self come into contact.

Self importance and ego are like the thin sheath of atmosphere between the earth of self and the infinite space of not-self, holding one in and the other out. We live out our lives in this narrow band, never digging too far down or testing our upper limits. This is where our emotional energy is spent, pumped into this gap between two incompatible surfaces, keeping them from grinding against each other and jolting us out of our slumber.

That grinding, when it does occur, is Spiritual dissonance.

Spiritual dissonance is the mental/emotional counterpart of negative physical drives like hunger and pain. We experience physical discontent because we are hungry, so we eat. We experience physical pain because our finger is in a flame, so we pull it out. Similarly, when we experience the discomfort of Spiritual dissonance, we seek relief, though it's not likely to be as simple and direct as pulling a finger out of a flame.

Spiritual dissonance is a necessary and vital function of the human condition. It's how we operate. It can, like anything, go haywire, but for most of the people most of the time, it's nothing more than the meeting of two slightly imperfect surfaces: the outermost inner and the innermost outer.

A common example of Spiritual dissonance would be: If God loves us, why does He allow so much suffering? The certainty of God's love is the internal belief. The obviousness of human suffering is the external reality. Is God unable to end suffering?

No, we must answer, because He can do whatever He wants. Therefore, He must allow or even cause suffering. But how can that be if He loves us? Something somewhere has to give or, preferably, we avoid asking the question in the first place.

An ad hoc hypothesis is one way of dealing with messy problems such as this. We come up with a new belief to stuff into the gap between two existing beliefs, like plugging a $#*@% in the wall of our prison cell where a discomforting light is getting through and disturbing our repose. Such a hypothesis in this situation might be, "Because God loves us, He gave us free will and we use it to create our own suffering." This is like a belief patch: we discover a bug in our belief programming, so we install a belief patch and all is well. The walls that enclose us are made of belief, so a belief patch is likely to blend in well and last as long as the wall does, if we don't tamper with it.

Another way we can respond to this problem is to recuse ourselves from such weighty deliberations altogether. "The Lord works in mysterious ways." we can say, and be happily done with it. Similarly, we might relieve our discomfort by deferring to specialists. "It's the job of the clergy to grapple with such imponderable issues, we might tell ourselves, "it's for the shepherds to worry about such things, not the flock."

Or, we might redouble our emotional investment in God and simply dismiss logical inconsistencies with haughty contempt or mocking disdain.

Or, we might go the other way and dismiss God altogether, citing conundrums such as this to bolster our case. Or, best and most common, we can go the ignorance-is-bliss route. We can ignore the question altogether, or deny it, or simply stay occupied and distracted so this question and countless others like it can never gain a foothold in our awareness.

Or any number of other scenarios. The main thing is to stop the discomfort, like removing the battery from a blaring smoke detector so we can go back to sleep.

Meanwhile, somewhere, a fire burns, the little bastard in you churns, just waiting for you to look inward, not outward.

Jed McKenna