Divinity Original Sin 2 Adult Mod
Ania Cozzolino
A few years ago, my wife and I started working with a therapist named Bruce, a self-effacing Buddhist master who is shinily bald and has wrinkled jowls that evoke the sleeves of a wizard. His eyes are clear and his gaze penetrating. When he laughs, there is nothing but laughter. He gets to the heart of the matter with the kindness of a bodhisattva and the fierceness of a samurai.
We are born completely vulnerable to the conditions of mortality. And to the extent that our needs are not perfectly satisfied each time one arises, especially in early life, we will feel a disproportionate level of disturbance as we move into adulthood.
When our foundational biological needs feel threatened in any way, when we experience privation of any kind, the body has evolved to respond with a certain measure of panic. It sends us highly intense signals that our very survival might be threatened. We feel disturbed to our core.
From early life, the natural man (i.e., instinctual self) forms memories of a world of lack. These are unconscious memories that are coded at the cellular level of the body. In our adulthood, these somatic impressions give rise to mental-emotional patterning that is primed for the experience of not enough. We see through the eyes of mortal scarcity, and everywhere we look we see deficit.
In any event, we have basic biological needs that are simultaneously our deepest vulnerabilities. We often react ineffectively to these mortal vulnerabilities in an attempt to escape our own suffering. Given this predicament, it would be convenient to have a language for this distinctly human psychology.
Father Keating describes this territory in terms of energy centers, a term he adopted from the work of the author Ken Keyes Jr. The original metaphor is vivid. In physics, the center of gravity is the point in a body where the mass is concentrated. This mass generates a gravitational pull. Gravitational fields can be weak or strong, depending on the mass of the body doing the pulling. We know from modern astronomy that gravitational fields can become so intense in the case of black holes that not even light can escape their field.
So it is with our core vulnerabilities. The signals of the body can be so intense when these vulnerabilities are triggered, it is as if they exert a gravitational pull on our higher nature. When the signals are intense enough, they completely consume our attention and energy in the vortex. We become fixated on the apparent emergency and routinely lose our capacity to make freer, wiser choices.
In his formulation of original sin, St. Augustine duly notes our tendency to miss the mark, to act out. But he then goes a step too far in my opinion by imputing something corrupt about our humanity itself. With our new understanding of sin as a natural tendency to avoid vulnerability, we can easily imagine a new telling.
There is relative happiness, and there is happiness beyond conditions; the pleasure of having agreeable life circumstances versus the joy independent of circumstances altogether. Jesus is clear which master he serves and overcomes the first temptation.
In the second temptation, the Devil takes Christ up to the top of the temple and says what amounts to, "If you're such a big shot, throw yourself off from this temple, and all of the angels, all of your pals will show up and they won't so much as let you stub your toe."
By overcoming each temptation, by confronting each core vulnerability of our humanity, Jesus chooses the only true happiness there is. How appropriate that His ministry should start right here in His moment of victory over the Devil:
In fact, the Kingdom is closer than close. When we are no longer afraid of our own vulnerability, when we are at-one with the joy and sorrow of our embodied humanity, we find an entirely new center of gravity in Divine Reality.
Though perhaps not as dramatic as the scriptural account, we are faced with similar temptations every day of our lives. To view the modern desert of temptation, look no further than the string of billboards lining the freeways. Almost without exception the messaging is designed to amplify our innate sense of lack. The ads tell us we would be happier if we made more money working from home, looked more beautiful by getting plastic surgery, had a drink while surrounded by beautiful people of influence, or went to the Bahamas to unplug.
Remember that in a sense, sin is a wrong view that denies Divine Reality and the abundance that is already right here. Sin is what feeds the energy centers and our chronic sense of lack. More than a punishable act, sin is a lost opportunity. Think of the last time you did something you would consider to be sinful, whether big or small. Were you not avoiding some uncomfortable experience in the body, doing something that you thought would bring you a little bit of relief in the moment, only to realize that acting out made things even worse than they were before?
When we relate to the energy centers from a new place, however, they become a passageway into Grace. Every time we crash, every time we fall apart, we can stop and realize that this is an opportunity to be tender and fully embodied with this disturbance, with the most vulnerable parts of our humanity. As we do this, we discover exactly where we stand in need of healing. We feel our wounded humanity being redeemed.
Thomas Wirthlin McConkie is an author, developmental researcher and meditation teacher. He is the founder of Lower Lights School of Wisdom. He has been practicing for over 25 years in the traditions of Sufism, Buddhism and Christian contemplation, among others.
Thank you, Thomas. This has lead me to a much deeper understanding of and access to the repentance process. Seeing myself through these inborn vulnerabilities allows me to put down my defensive walls and embrace every chance that comes to learn from things that disturb me or that rob me of living in my peaceful (boring... growth-defying) status quo. This just makes so much sense to me!
Gloria and I realized that there were some issues coming up in our marriage that we weren\u2019t easily going to resolve on our own. Personally, I felt relief that I could share some of my frustrations with a third party. Hopefully, I thought, my wife would be willing to listen to me better if a trained professional assured her that what I was saying was important.
In our first session, after pleasantries and introductions, Bruce asked us the therapist\u2019s equivalent to \u201Cwhat seems to be the problem?\u201D I generously volunteered to explain that there was a real sore spot in our marriage. \u201CThere are times when I\u2019m really passionate about something, and I want to share, but I notice my wife gets distracted a lot when I\u2019m sharing. Sometimes it feels like she doesn\u2019t really care.\u201D
Bruce listened deeply, then reflected back, \u201CI hear you saying that when you\u2019re sharing something that\u2019s really important to you, but then feel like your wife isn\u2019t fully present with you, it\u2019s a very disturbing experience.\u201D
\u201CYes, exactly,\u201D I said. \u201CIf I can\u2019t share my excitement about life with my wife, then who can I share it with?\u201D At this point, only ten minutes or so into the session, I felt a whole-body sense of self-satisfaction. I\u2019d articulated my frustration fully and someone had finally understood it. Now for checkmate\u2014Bruce will explain to Glo how important it is for a spouse to be a good listener, especially when your spouse is sharing something that means a lot to them.
My jaw must have involuntarily swung wide open like the overhead storage bin on an airplane during severe turbulence. A dead silence followed. I was stupefied. After I returned to my senses, a profound clarity hit me with no further explanation needed: I realized I had unconsciously made it my wife\u2019s responsibility to protect me from any disturbing experience in our relationship. I had told myself the fiction that if I was feeling disturbed, surely it meant that someone had done this to me, and that it was their job to make me feel better. In a single deft stroke, Bruce had cut through my drama and revealed a completely different way to be in my marriage: My wounds, my disturbances were my own, and nobody else was responsible for them. (Of course he wasn\u2019t saying that when my vulnerabilities are triggered I can\u2019t ask my loved ones for help. I can and I should. But if my go-to instinct is to blame people when I feel threatened, then I\u2019m doomed to a life of constantly trying to control other people\u2019s behavior.) I was never the same after that moment. My wife assures me our marriage hasn\u2019t been the same either.
With the help of a highly skilled therapist, I was able to see that the everyday disturbance of not feeling valued didn\u2019t start with my wife and therefore wasn\u2019t likely to end with her either. That pain goes back to the foundations of human vulnerability itself.
From that moment on, I had an intention to stay curious each time I felt devalued. Rather than fixating on the story I had about how my wife needs to be a better listener, or how my friends ought to appreciate how helpful I am, I practiced staying in my body, staying with the very uncomfortable sensations that came up whenever I didn\u2019t feel esteemed and valued. In doing this, I\u2019ve learned at least two important lessons. First, when I feel disturbed, the temptation to avoid responsibility and blame my discomfort on others is almost overwhelming. Second, with practice I can actually learn to rest in my vulnerability, letting intense experiences rise and pass through my body like waves. After the intensity of the disturbance passes, I\u2019m in a better position than ever to act with intelligent love, to do the most loving thing I can possibly do in the next moment.
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