8 - 10 - 17 Life by a Thousand Deaths (4 minutes)

"Amen, amen, I say to you,

unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,

it remains just a grain of wheat;

but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”

There is no progress without pain. If we really want to become a fundamentally different person this entails and necessitates the mortification and destruction of every attribute which we currently consider our “personality.”

There’s something I’ve noticed. I remember while listening to the Carnegie book him talking about “being serious about improving your personality” and that statement really struck me. I don’t think most of the people I talk to really consider a personality something to be improved. It can be changed, but there is no conception of the value of certain traits, they are simply different ways of being.

I think part of this is the culture of self-acceptance and self-esteem. By these teachings if some trait is part of your personality then it is intrinsically valuable via its inclusion in your personhood. People cherish and treasure their personalities and the statement “you’ve changed” is almost never a positive one.

This self-acceptance culture runs so counter to mainstream philosophy of the past millennia primarily because of how little it demands. Worthwhile religions advocate some sort of self-mortification, discipline, some sort of improvement in state of being. If it is natural for animals to seek more food to become larger and more powerful, it is natural for humans to attempt to train their wills and minds in the same fashion.

Because this self-acceptance culture offers no new abilities. It will not win races or invent things! The only thing it will allow in its practitioners is a delusional sense of value that they feel others continually fail to recognize. Making them into unexceptional people inflated with their own ego.

I may be overstating the point, but the sight of wasted potential, wasted lives, irks me immeasurably.

I think there’s a reason Jesus talks about death so much. I think it is because many steps we will have to take in our journey will feel more like a death than a reformation. If someone is an alcoholic, they may not be able to simply be more moderate in their drinking and only drink socially. They may have to simply kill that part of their life. Abandoning all the pleasure and fun drinking has brought them amongst friends for many years in the pursuit of something greater.

I think that is where we often fall down. We have the desire to have our cake and eat it too. We want to become the kind of person who does not much care for the pleasure in our vices, whilst still indulging our vices. It is called “fake it till you make it” not “wish for it until it happens to you.”

And why do we hold such an earnest regard for our personalities, even if we do not subscribe to this self-esteem movement? The possessive! It is all in the “my” of “my personality.” It is why we do not have trouble condemning a trait in someone else that quite obviously exists in our own personality, but resent the implication when it is directed at us. The possible solutions to this conundrum would be to criticize from some platform we hold more dear than our personality, perhaps our reason or our spouse, or to remove the attachment we have to our personality. After all, isn’t any affection we have for attributes of our own that are not pleasing to God simply pride? Isn’t that actually a pretty concise definition?

There is something about myself I like which God does not. This is me placing my evaluation over God’s, rather than submitting to his will. Plain and simple insubordination the same as that which motivated Lucifer.

We are for the most part conspicuously lacking in pure wickedness as a race. It is our attachments we fight every day. Very few people do cruel things for the pleasure they will derive from other’s pain. Many will achieve a slight pleasure for themselves at the expense of a greater pleasure for someone else. Will drive aggressively, endangering everyone around them, because they can’t stand to hear what the boss will say if they are late again.

It is when we are trying to secure a little pleasure for ourselves, our own little place in the world, which we feel we humbly deserve. We are only acting according to what’s fair, what’s only right, what I ought to deserve.

It reminds me of what some onlookers will say when a seemingly bad person falls into misfortune, “Well, they certainly deserved it at any rate.” Aye, I guarantee they did. As did anyone who said so. If we all got what we deserved, well, I'd prefer to not consider that kind of suffering.

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I remember hearing a sermon with a similar idea, about undergoing many small deaths every day, from Fr. Bob Bissot when I was in elementary school. Funny the things that stick with you.