The intoxicated person inside a building who, in his extremely incapacitated state, does not even realize the whole building is on fire, will never understand the urgency of his sober neighbor who is hustling to find directions to exit the building. Unless sobriety inspires him, he will likely interpret the vigorous exertion of his neighbor as either unnecessary or a disturbance to his stupor. His ears are blocked with the wax of his own imaginings, and his mind is hypnotized by his own drunkenness…so he feels safe. Meanwhile, the sober neighbor just continues toiling forward and trying to battle past the growing flames entering the staircase, assiduously with the exit in mind. He has no time to “convince” or “debate”, for the flames will soon enough convince the drunken one who rebuffs all counsel.
There is fire today and a lot of drunkenness.
Amid this spiritual danger confronting the human spirit today, why do most choose the allegorical drunkenness of spiritual lethargy?
The proclivity toward drunkenness (spiritual slumber) is rooted in the quadrature of indolence, hopelessness, fear, and pleasure. The presence of the flames prompts the soul that is indolent and devoid of victorious knowledge to accept it as an unchangeable fact. This resignation breeds a subconscious hopelessness that settles in the soul. The hopelessness to avert or change the ostensibly unpredictable and autonomous unrolling events causes a restlessness and peacelessness that strips the soul of all protection from pain. And so, this anticipation of being exposed to possible pain and suffering through unpredictable experiences that a person feels powerless to stop, introduces fear. Fear being the persecuting ghost of hopelessness and powerlessness.
But in the absence of peace, which is the soul’s normal state and a natural protection from the fiercest storms, the person reaches for the cheaper intellectual substitute: pleasure. Pleasure has countless manifestations, but we start seeking it to anesthetize the pain in the absence of peace and joy. Pleasure and its conceptual delusions become the golden calf we swarm around to distract and numb the true sense of inner loss. Ergo, pleasure becomes our anesthesia to numb the sense of fear that anticipates or experiences pain. The fear that reflects our hopelessness to change conditions that is rooted in indolence. Indolence that stems from lack of knowledge and often an unwillingness to make incisive inner changes. Ergo, the increasing pleasure indulgence in all departments of life will reveal to the watchful one that, within the human spirit in society today, there is an increasing sense of powerlessness, hopelessness, fear, and peacelessness that seeks to employ clumsy intellectual shields to protect from psychic pain and suffering.
But to no avail! For only victorious willingness to face the flames, undergirded by a triumphant comprehensive knowledge of Life-Truth today will help the person escape the flames. Nothing else. And so, the rejection of true knowledge is a statement of favoritism to one’s drunkenness and thus complete resignation to flames.
~Ikenna Q Ezealah
Foundation for Ascent 