:: Edgeliving: Master Jim and slave marsha ::

:: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 ::

You Can’t Go Home Again -- Or Can you?

Thomas Wolfe’s critically acclaimed novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, was published in 1940. The novel chronicles a man’s search for himself and centers on the theme that you cannot recover the past. This novel came to my mind when I began reading a book entitled Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally Really Grow Up by James Hollis (2005).

Wolfe’s novel and Hollis’ book are similar in that both refer to the fetters of the past and, in different ways, ask a person to confront that which defines him from the past in order to find his personal path through the dark wood. Hollis frames the confrontation by listing a series of questions under the heading: “Your Life is Addressing These Questions to You.” Some of the questions Hollis asks us are:

*What had brought you to this place in your journey, this moment in your life?

*What gods, what forces, what family, what social environment, has framed your reality, perhaps supported, perhaps constricted it?

*Whose life have you been living?

*Why do you believe that you have to hide so much, from others, from yourself?

*Why does the idea of your soul trouble you, and feel familiar at the same time?

*Why is the life you are living too small for the soul’s desire?

*Why is now the time, if ever it is to happen, for you to answer the summons of the soul, the invitation to the second, larger life?

In these two books, two very different authors raise in different ways the ultimate question for Masters and slaves: who are we? In fact, it is my belief that we must devote a significant part of our Master and slave journey to the discovery of who we really are. For most of us, becoming a Master or a slave requires that we spend a great deal of time both confronting our pasts and learning to leave behind much of what those pasts taught us.

A while back I wrote that the only constant in life was change. A response to that post by a reader suggested that in addition to change, one’s “I am” is also a constant. I agree. That nevertheless leaves significant room for disagreement on what the “I am” is and how or if the “I am” is related to how we identify as Master or slave.

The “I am” -- what Carl Jung refers to as The Self -- is what we, including Wolfe and Hollis, are all searching for whether we acknowledge that search or not. While I am not an expert on Jungian philosophy, I believe that Carl Jung’s Self is a representation of the “I am.” The Self is that force within us that “seeks the state of being that is the apparent purpose of our incarnation in the first place.” (Hollis, p 5) Others postulate that the “I am” is the divine part of all of us, the part that connects all of us, and/or the part that is behind who and what we are and thus cannot be defined by secular identities such as Master or slave.

At the risk of exposing my training as a applied scientist and offending those whose philosophical theses I am greatly oversimplifying, I choose to abandon the philosophical debate on the differences between the “I am” and one’s identity as Master or slave and instead focus on a view that I believe we might more effectively use as earth-bound Masters and slaves.

I believe that our identities can be so strongly felt, can so call to us, that the “I am” essentially merges with and become ones with our identities, at least while we are on this earth. That means that for all practical purposes, my “I am” and my identity are one and the same. (What may happen after we leave this earth is, of course, the topic of another discussion.)

For me, the identity that defines who I am is Master. That identity, that concept, has merged for this life with what resides within me as the “I am.” The same, I believe is true of slave marsha and her identity as a slave, as well as for some others who feel the call of their identities as strongly as we do.

In this view, Wolfe was both right and wrong. While we may not be able to go home to our past as defined by parents, education, and religion, we can indeed go home to who we really are and always have been, even if we have hidden it from ourselves. Home in this case is that inner core of you that is your “I am”, your Self, your identity, your connection to the divine.

I often say you cannot make someone into something they are not. You cannot make a person into a Master or a slave if that is not who they are, if Master or slave is not their “I am.” It is a primary part of our journey to discover who we are and then to live that life. To find answers to the questions posed by Hollis, to be true to our divine Self. Yes, to finally and ultimately go home.

And with that, I promise to go home to a more "practical" topic with my next post.

In leather,

Master Jim

:: 10:14 AM [+] ::
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