A friend of mine who had attended Twelve-Step meeting for years was telling me about the moment she realized the extent of her willfulness. She had working with the famous Twelve-Step injunction to “let go and let God,” and been asking her “higher Power” to bring her a life partner, but no sooner than she had put in the request than she began worrying that God would bring her the wrong guy. In her words to me, “What if He brings me an overweight accountant?” Now, nothing against either accountants here or those of us who are carrying some extra poundage; the point is, this was a kind of shorthand in her mind, a metaphor that summed up “the wrong guy.” On having this thought, her willfulness upped the ante with another: If that happens, then I’m not going to let go!” So, it turned out, even before anything happened, even before giving God (or life or the universe or Higher Power, or whatever works for you) a little time to respond, she already had embarked on a path of not letting go at all.

What we let go of, in this sense, is our will. All conditions, even—or especially—those that matter to us most, are released in the faith that something greater than our will has our back, and this implies a whole philosophical stance toward life in which we’re not just a cosmic accident, tossed here by random stardust, to fend for ourselves. The catch that can trip up hubris is that this letting go has to be unconditional. Nothing less makes sense, or at the end of the day, counts a letting go at all. The sentence, “I’ll delegate this to you as long as you do this and this and that, and I’ll be watching, and if you fail to do this my way, then you’ll be relieved of any further involvement,” confesses that no delegating really has taken place. One can think of it in terms of giving, as in the giving of a gift. Letting go means giving, and where giving is genuine, there is no taking back, for what we give is not ours to take back. Furthermore, when we’re talking about such things as giving control of our life to something greater, humility reminds us of the paradoxical nature of the gesture, for we’re giving up something we never had. Subtracting the paradox: We’re realizing that we never had any control to give up. In these terms, we’re giving up an illusion, perhaps long held, that we ever had control—of our life, of outcomes, of timing, of other people, of conclusions about what should happen and how and when, of our fate. We become disillusioned, come home to the truth, and enter that sweet state of liberation that Socrates called “recollection,” a term that refers to coming home to the truth within oneself that the gods are in charge and always have been, a truth that sets us free from hubris and the self-strangling hold of willfulness.

Letting go without conditions means really getting that we’re not in charge. Once we do get this, there are no conditions that can qualify as holdouts, no exemptions. We can’t say to the gods, “I’ll surrender my will if you do this, by the end of the week,” and so on. What we surrender isn’t ours to take back, and in the case of surrendering what we never had, what would “taking back” even mean other than going back to sleep and resuming a nightmare of frustration, disappointment, and suffering?

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The advancement of culture, if it can be called either, has taken us to a point where we may have a harder time than ever understanding why the cultivation and rehabilitation of our character has become critically important at every level—individual, family, community, national, and global. Socrates offers us a map, however, in the Phaedrus, a map that points the way back to character and to a friendly relation to the gods and to fate. In that dialogue, Socrates draws a philosophical line between love, eventually defined as “divine madness,” and seduction, which includes the cool-headed and often cold-hearted pursuit of some strategic advantage or gratification, even at another’s expense. In his depiction of love as a kind of madness, Socrates makes the point that not all madness is bad. Indeed, he says, there are four forms of madness given as gifts from the divine that confer upon humanity its greatest blessings: the gift of prophetic vision, the granting of sudden relief and consolation to those who perform mystic rites of purification, poetic inspiration, and love. Each of these forms of madness is associated with a divine personality (Apollo, Dionysus, the Muses, and Aphrodite, respectively). As the dialogue proceeds, it becomes clear that the chief difference between divinely dispensed states of “good madness” and seduction has to do with “possession,” for in all forms of divine madness, the self is possessed by something greater, whereas in seduction, the self is possessed by its own desires to the extent that it disregards all else and all others and loses sight of what is good or true or beautiful. Thus, seduction leads one to be narrow, petty, manipulative, and selfish while love makes it possible for one to offer oneself for the sake of something greater than oneself.

Another obvious difference is that seduction is about taking and getting, while love is about expressing and giving. Furthermore, seduction regards the other as a commodity, a resource to be used and used up, while love sees the divine in the other and finds itself moved nearly to a point of worship. Finally, we note that in love, we live from the inside out, in keeping with the authority of the divine madness that has, in love, possessed us, while seduction lives from the outside in, strategizing and scheming and trying to manage and control in perpetual reaction to the world and to events.

The cultivation or rehabilitation of character depend upon a recognition of and coming into relation to something greater than oneself. Thus, without character, there is no seeing ahead, no relief or consolation, no inspiration, no love—and no future. To live from the outside in is to be “too much with the world” in a way that forsakes our divine origins and responsibilities and opens the door to tragedy. Character connects us to the divine, to what is true and good and beautiful, and all expressions of character move toward the ideal for its own sake rather than for the sake of some contrived advantage or worldly gain. To return to character is to come home, to become available to the gods, to live from the inside out, and to discover the great sanity of divine madness.

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There is a prevalent form of hubris that involves projecting anxieties, concerns, or problems into the future, usually in some scenario of doom or worst outcomes. It is almost as though the willful mind wants to anticipate worrisome possibilities in order to be prepared for them, but we suspect that there’s more to it than this, for the willful mind thrives on resistance, and take vicarious satisfaction from either “conquering hero” or “suffering hero” imaginings, both of which involve a world set against us. Whether such projections fall into the vanquishing or vanquished variety, they are in league in summoning a story in which our salvation, if it can be had at all, comes through our will. There is no peace in either fantasy because there is no humility. Hubris needs conflict, thrives on it—and the more dramatic, the better.

We can use this observation, of course, in a kind of retroactive self-examination, for if we find that we are given over during the day to projecting conflict into the future, we may infer from this that we are in a state of willfulness. Innocence, one of the five points of fate practice, reminds us that, in these terms, we don’t know enough to worry. All we have is the present, and under the hand of the gods, the present can change in the blink of an eye. To carry present conclusions into the future the way one carries forward a sum when adding numbers, is to undertake a mathematics for which we are not equipped. The future must work itself out through the intricate and mysterious network of chaotic unfoldings, which no man or woman can see or anticipate. Only hubris would rather embrace a disaster than remain suspended in innocence, and so it pretends to know what it does not know, forsakes the saving ignorance that was the foundation of Socratic wisdom, and unwittingly submits its request for calamity to the gods.

The temporality of humility is the present. We have this moment, in which things are as they are, but we cannot say what the next moment will bring. Humility does draw conclusions, because it understands that the work of the gods is ongoing, and that there are no conclusions. Things become what they are only to become something else. On the path of humility, we can take comfort from this in any situation that we find troubling. We can trust the gods, trust the dialectical current moving through events, trust the truth—and these things allow us to endure. Excellence endures and abides in the here and now, and for the humble person, this is so much more than enough.

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The Twelve-Step program advises us to “let go and let God,” a reminder to steer clear of willfulness, which that model holds to be the root of addiction. In fate practice, we might revise this to “let go and let the gods,” as a similar reminder, but the fate model is not religious, and by “the gods,” we do not mean what religious people mean by “God.” In our terms, “the gods” refers to the dialectical unfolding of chaotic factors. It is not a person (or Person) but neither is it blindly impersonal. Without anthropomorphizing these factors, we recognize that their unfolding is influenced by the fundamental choice we make in each situation to respond from a place of humility or a place of hubris. So free will operates as a determining factor in our fate to an extent that we cannot map or predict.

When we “let go and let the gods,” then we are essentially trusting the process through which the truth comes to light, hubris undoes itself, and situations naturally find their own resolution. We are trusting the dialectic. Such trust imbues one with natural patience, and suggests the difference between blind and enlightened faith. It also frees us from the role of prosecutor when we witness things that we recognize are unfair or otherwise wrong. This is no small favor, for the prosecution of the wrongs of others itself is a form of hubris. Rather than taking up causes that extend far beyond our vision and understanding, we can “let go and let the gods,” knowing that in time, the truth will emerge. Thus, we are freed from resentment and criticism of others, knowing that, as Elbert Hubbard says, “We are punished by our sins, not for them.”

Patience is the unfailing mark of the man or woman who follows the gods on the path of humility. This patience is not the patience of waiting for something to happen, but of leaving off all waiting in the confidence that all things are in good hands, and that these hands never fail. In time, the dialectic sees things through to resolution, for it is the way of things, and what goes against the way, as Lao tze tells us, “comes to an early end.” As we learn to let go and let the gods, we get out of the way of the dialectic, and find that it operates in our lives with the abiding efficiency of the truth.

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As Socrates admonishes us, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the laments of those who find themselves in what appears to be a recurring pattern of suffering. The woman who keeps marrying abusive, adolescent, or otherwise emotionally unavailable men; the fellow who never seems to get a break financially, the person whom experience has shown to be “accident prone”—these are examples of lives sorely in need of self-examination, as only the willingness to face the truth of our assumptions, beliefs, and choices can free us from hubris and its inevitably unhappy consequences.

Self-examination is essential because change of the sort we’re talking about here does not come easy. It requires diligence, courage, and a love for the truth, which is why philosophy as Socrates taught and lived it is not for the lazy or timid. The more willful we are, the less teachable, and the less teachable, the more our hubris condemns us to replay our painful past.

This principle is so reliable, that it is not going too far to say that either we are actively involved in self-work or we are unwittingly setting up conditions to reenact past consequences. A dialectical current runs through such restagings, such that the tacit instruction gets harder and harder to ignore. Eventually, our will may be overtaken by suffering, and we may awaken from the unexamined life, realize that in the recurring story of our misfortune, we are the common denominator, and take refuge in the safe haven of humility.

Examining one’s life means calling into question those things that seem to us so evidently true, that it hardly occurs to us that there might be a question hiding there. We are asleep, and dreaming that we are awake. How to wake up then? And here is where even our suffering can be embraced, because if we’re suffering, especially chronically or repeatedly, if our suffering seems like a movie in which we keep finding ourselves, then that suffering is letting us know that we need to look at something differently than we have been. Met with willingness, our suffering can become our teacher and even our liberator. Bringing even a little humility to the moment, one will not have to look far—no delving or complicated self-analysis. The truth that can set us free will be hidden in plain view, in the very events we’re suffering. If we put our hand in fire, then the fire, being what is, will burn us. It is not the fire’s fault, nor is the matter complicated. Sometimes the fire is subtle, hiding in justifications, denials, and a stubborn clinging to old ways that we may fear changing. Nevertheless, fire burns, and hubris burns as well, in its way. Once we examine our role in our own suffering, once we become aware that we’re placing our hand in the fire, we can withdraw it. We just need to be willing to see things in a different light.

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At the end of the day, the choices we make about who we are and how to conduct ourselves along this walk through the forest of mortal life, determine our fate. We may have had a terrible upbringing, we may have walked a gauntlet of disappointments and setbacks, we may feel that life has never given us a break—and even so, beneath all this drama, we are making a choice to be a victim or to transcend, to hate adversity or be made stronger by it, to trust in and call upon the better angels of our nature or give in to despair.

All of this, of course, concerns character—that orchestration of qualities that define a person and secretly spin, measure, and cut the thread of his or her fate. All good so far. The plot thickens, however, when we recognize that the challenges that step forward to meet us are just that. They test us to our marrow, less offering us the opportunity to improve than demanding it. When we have been complacent for too long, the gods arrange to bring us what Florence Scovel Shinn calls “a big situation,” or crisis, for it is in the fire of crisis that character is forged and tempered. If we would only accept the instruction implicit in our predicament rather than madly trying to banish it, we might shorten the curriculum and be graduated in the blink of an eye.

In the film, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, Dustin Hoffman’s character, Mr. Magorium, senses his impending death, and breaks the news to Natalie Portman’s character, whom he has grown to love as a daughter. She becomes distressed, not wanting him to go, as she loves him in return. His parting words to her, meant to help her overcome the self-doubt that has plagued her up to that point, are simply: “Your life is an occasion. Rise to it.” Setting out on the path of excellence means that we recognize that we have no more important work in the world than the cultivation of our character through the five points of fate practice. Doing the best we can, each day, to walk the path of humility places our feet firmly on the path of excellence. It gives us all we need to rise to the uniquely wonderful occasion that is our life.

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God created man because He loves stories. – Elie Wiesel

As a writer of fiction, I’ve often played with the idea that life is a story in which each of us is the protagonist. I’ve wondered what might happen if a character in a novel suddenly chose not to cooperate with the plot, how our lives would change if we began regarding ourselves as characters in a great narrative with the option at any point to cooperate or resist, how we might use our experiences to work through the arc and resolution of our life, and how all of this might affect the denouement of our time in this world.

The whole idea of life as a story presumes an audience, someone to whom the story is being told, which implies an eternal point of view—the vantage of the gods. Storytelling is, of course, one of the oldest art forms, and one in which the Greeks excelled, as they did in so many things. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, for example, were memorized and recited for centuries before they were written, and no stories were more riveting than those told in the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. In the works of these great narrators, a person’s life could take on epic meaning as he battled mythical creatures, escaped magic spells at the last moment, or conversed with shapeshifting gods, and in all of these larger-than-life events, audiences could be reminded of the greatness that lies within each of us when we choose to cooperate with the story of our life. In this sense, perhaps our life story is not something we choose as much as something that chooses us.

The book sits on the desk, a finished work. As a reader, I can skip ahead, even peek at the ending and ruin the experience—but the characters in the book have no such option. The pages are for them as the days are for us, and they can only live each one as it comes to life in the reading of it. Their destiny lies some hundreds of pages ahead, at the end of the book, but they must face their choices with no idea of how things will turn out. And so must we.

Good characters cooperate, playing their part in the tale willingly, but as any novelist will tell you, there are no guarantees. The best writing is more a matter of taking dictation from the daimon than of “making up” this or that, and to this extent, the writer hardly is in charge. Imagine a character showing up who refused to play his cards, who sat down somewhere on the page and would not budge. Such an act of defiance hardly would be pleasing to the author. It is, after all, a great satisfaction for the creator of the work when the characters accept their lot and move along the arc of literary experience to the resolution of conflict and the story’s fulfillment in a surge of meaning that touches our hearts, inspires us, even changes us for the better in some way. Perhaps the gods also appreciate our willingness to be here, to live our life fully, to show up, to honor and participate in our story with as much excellence as we can find in ourselves. Even if the end of our story is in some sense already written, even if that ending is inevitable, we cannot see ahead to the story’s end, and so must live each moment as though it held within itself the secret of an outcome. And if we choose to play our role well, with humility, do we not have reason to expect that our choice will be pleasing to the gods, who all our life, write and rewrite us?

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Creativity belongs to the realm of the daimon, the divine spirit that speaks within us to guide us along the path of our days. This is why the most gifted artists—Picasso, for example—talk so much about inspiration and muses and such. They recognize that the creative spark is ignited by something in us but not of us. The Romans called it the “genius,” which subsequently has been mistaken to be a quality we possess rather than one that possesses us.* But any artist worth his salt must come to terms with the insecurity of recognizing that the great novel, the irresistible painting, the stirring choreography—all took shape under a hand that the artist could not predict or control. And as this is the truth of artistic creation, so the artist has no guarantee that he will be able to follow his own act, for the artwork that wins him so much praise and admiration has come through him, not from him, and he cannot be certain that the magic will offer itself again.

But creativity does not belong exclusively to artists. In all areas of life, we are called upon to respond creatively to situations, to meet them on new terms, to discover ingenious solutions to problems of every sort. To the extent that we live creatively, open to divine inspiration, we demonstrate phronesis or “practical wisdom,” and our life becomes like a work of art—beautiful, inspired and inspiring expression of what the Greeks called eudaimonia, best translated as “human flourishing.”

In practice, we see that when we operate through our will, when our actions and responses do not take the divine into account, we cut ourselves off from inspiration. Closed to anything beyond our own preconceptions, conclusions, judgments, and assumptions, we become frustrated and react by applying more force. A vicious cycle commences that wraps itself around our spirit like the deadly coils of a constrictor. The daimon is telling us the way out, even as we slip further into resistance and willfulness, but we are not listening. The project, the conversation, the moment has become ugly, for we have turned our back on inspiration and that excellence that is available to us as long as we remain open to receiving it.

To inspire is to fill with breath, and breath is life. When the daimon inspires us, it fills us with life, but it will never inspire us against our will. We must give it right of way. In this sense, humility is the path of life; hubris, of death, for our will kills us by degrees until we learn, if we do, that we have an unfailing ally to whom we can turn at any and every moment, an artist who stands ready to make our life a beautiful and inspired work. Even if we learn this the hard way, through pushing our will to the edge, there is the saving grace that our will itself, pushed far enough, will lead us, through exhaustion, to humility and to the unfailing genius of the divine.

*For a wonderful talk on creative genius by author Elizabeth Gilbert, click here. Thanks to Jimi Millikan for the link. Also highly recommended: Jimi’s extraordinary essay, The Golden Chalice: Secrets of Time and Creativity

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The festivities began a bit early this year. as young people (of whatever age) began setting off the inevitable noisemakers in the street, and the fizzling sound of sky rockets, toy cannons, and sundry other fireworks took over the neighborhood, leaving the mothers and fathers of sleeping babies, the babies themselves, young children, and easily startled elders to deal with the into-the-night disruptions of a truly American celebration.

All of this got me to thinking about Independence Day, about the throwing off of tyranny, and the much lauded “freedom” prized so highly in these United States that we regard it as sacred and even send our children off to dubious wars to die (in war’s many ways) in its name. “Freedom” is a such a funny word. One notices that it never stands alone, as a virtue like, say honesty or humility or diligence, but only in relation to something else, and so freedom is always “freedom from—” or “freedom to—.” One can be “free from” or “free of” something, or “free to” engage in this or that pursuit, but taken in isolation, freedom becomes a cipher, a glittering generality—in a word, meaningless. On 04 July, we Americans wave our flags, light our sparklers, and sing the praises of freedom largely in the sense of “freedom from.” Historically this was freedom from British rule, but by extension, also freedom from tyranny and oppression of any sort, though apparently this does not include the tyranny of usurious credit card company practices or the oppression of having to choose, year after year, between health care and paying the mortgage. We are, in this sense, free to run up as much debt as we can stand. One can always declare bankruptcy, go back to sleep, and resume the American Dream—and if one is a company, this freedom is even subsidized by massive government bailouts that have to be subsidized by taxing the unborn—those whose parents and grandparents not so freely lost their home equity and the hard earned family wealth to “our way of life,” a way that has become increasingly defined by shameless Wall Street bonuses and a state sanctioned freedom to purse the quick buck by any and all means. All in all, as a nation, we have much to make noise about.

In practical terms, the “freedom to” part of the equation seems far less clear, apart from the freedom to wake up babies and startle old people when summer starts. Defenders of this preposition usually revert to talking about freedom from—pointing out how much worse it is in countries ruled by totalitarian regimes, and in this, of course, they’re right. People who are merely struggling, whom the government has forgotten, who can’t make ends meet, who have lost their homes or can’t find work or afford to take their child to the doctor are not being arbitrarily arrested, like the outspoken mayor in Listvyanka, Tatyana Kazakova, and certainly they are at least this much better off, but this is not really “freedom to,” and one begins to wonder if all freedom doesn’t amount to “freedom from.” Some suggest that we are, for example, free to practice the religion of our choosing without the danger of governmental intrusion, but this comes down once again to a “freedom from,” for even those living under the fist of a dictatorship are free to practice their religion, whatever it may be—they just had better think twice before practicing it openly, for the freedom they lack is not the freedom to practice, but the freedom from dire consequences for doing so.

This may appear at first blush to be a matter of semantics, but there is more to it. Freedom, ultimately (and one doesn’t have to examine the matter for long to get to this) is Socratic. I mean by this that, while we may be aware of the many things from which we wish to be free—such as oppression, cruelty, an egregiously unfair distribution of the national wealth, taxation without representation, debt, and so on—it is something else to state clearly what “freedom to” covers. Just as Socrates could help others become clear that what they had thought was true indeed was not true, but could not himself provide any truth beyond the truth of ignorance, so we may find that we are at a loss to understand freedom beyond negation, beyond “freedom from.”

This is no accident. “Freedom to” remains elusive, and continues to succumb to the gravitational pull of “freedom from” for the simplest of reasons: We are not “free to” at all. On this day more than others, we are in a position to recognize that freedom is independence, and that as mortals, we are utterly dependent. Our physiology, our health, our life span, the spinning of our planet and its relative immunity from lethal asteroids, whether fortune will follow us or fail us—these are just a few of countless factors continually being juggled by the gods, on whom we must depend each moment at every turn.

There is, however, a choice we are free to make, and that is the choice between humility and hubris. If we choose hubris, we ignore our dependence and the suffering commences. Choosing humility, on the other hand, means choosing to be truthful, to show up and stay innocent, to be diligent, to give ourselves in dialogue to the continuing arrival of truth in our lives—in short, to live within the awareness of our dependence on something greater.

We Americans seem ever infatuated with the loud, the big, and the flashy, with being the “greatest,” the “best,” and the first. It’s our national style, but it walks the line of hubris too closely. Humility doesn’t wave flags much. It tends to be soft spoken rather than loud, slow to react rather than boisterous, watchful and mindful of how little it knows rather than judgmental or complacent. It really isn’t very American, but perhaps it could catch on as we continue to learn the hard way the price of believing in the myth of independence.

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Within the context of fate practice, there is a subtle hubris involved in thinking that we know we want a specific thing in the world. This is by no means apparent, for we take it for granted that we know what we want in the simple act of wanting it. But there is no escaping the net of chaos theory that holds us all, and it is inevitable that, in wanting a particular thing, we are ignorant of many factors that will become relevant sooner or later—sometimes immediately—that will have a profound, perhaps defining impact on our wanting. Desire, being near-sighted, does not and cannot take these unforeseen factors into account. The inevitability of change, the surfacing of hidden conditions, the fact that we often cannot distinguish between what we know and what we think we know, and the unpredictability of chaotic forces have inspired the oft quoted proverb, “Be careful what you ask for, as you may get it,” such stories as “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W.W. Jacobs, which cautions us to take care with magic wishes lest they be granted, and a statement attributed to both Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, “There are two tragedies in life; one is not getting your heart’s desire, the other is getting it.”

Once I was sitting with a young man talking about recent developments in his life, when a beautiful young woman walked by our table. “Wow,” he said, “I’d love to be with her.” I replied, “Would you? Even though you don’t know anything about her? You might hate it.” I suspect that the difference in our responses had something to do with the difference in our ages, for as we get older we see again and again how something we wanted deeply, passionately, and without the slightest hesitation turned out to be more curse than blessing. The experience is humbling, and leads to that way of being that learns to trust the inner voice more than even the fiercest appetite. Like Socrates, we come to know that we don’t know. Often, the thing that has captivated our attention proves to be nothing at all like what we wanted; it only looked like it was. Plato’s whole philosophy hangs on this distinction between reality and appearance, and we can understand Socrates’s mission as an imperative to expose the reality of ignorance underlying the appearance of knowledge in those who mistakenly believed themselves to be in possession of truth.

Realizing that we’re poor judges at best of whether something or someone will live up to our desires or expectations, we notice two things: first, that all we can truly say about what we want must be said in general terms—a sense of purpose, a romantic partner, to help others, and so on—and second, that on the path of fate practice we must take up the same sort of ironic relationship toward our desires that Socrates did toward knowing, for just as Socrates was unable to give people knowledge but ever able to point out to them their ignorance, so we may be able to identify what we don’t want, but be unable to know with any certainty whether or not a given situation will turn out to be what our desire would like it to be. We can’t point to anything in the world and know, “This is right for me; this is my good.” It remains to be seen, and this must always be true, since tomorrow, the next hour, even the next moment can change everything.

To take up an ironic relationship with our desire means that we’re truthful about what we want and diligent in doing our part to see the desire through to fulfillment, but with the awareness that we really don’t know whether a particular “this” is indeed what we’d like it to be, and therefore whether the granting of our wish will bring us a desirable outcome or something else, The wise course, then, before we act, is to consult the inner oracle, the daimon, to see if it endorses our moving forward or not, for to allow our desires to trick us into thinking we know something that we don’t know, to assume that something is so just because we want it to be so, is to make the mistake that Socrates spent his life correcting. It is the mistake of hubris and willfulness, and it leads to suffering. On the other hand, if the daimon has no objections, we may proceed confidently, even knowing that we don’t know, aware that we are dealing with educated guesswork and that our guesses may be in for more educating. As long as desire and diligence are willing to yield to whatever truth comes to light, even if that truth is disappointing, our feet will stay safely on the path of humility, and however things turn out, fate will be on our side.

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