At the end of their long estrangement as brothers, Jacob and Esau met again. Genesis 33 tells us that Jacob saw Esau approaching from the distance with 400 men and, afraid that Esau would order his men to attack, arranged his household strategically so that those most precious to him would be the most likely to escape. Most Christian translations say that when Esau met Jacob on the way, he ran and “kissed him on the cheek,” but an accurate Hebrew translation is more sinister and surprising, as well as being upheld by rabbinical teachings and Jewish tradition: The rabbis teach that Esau fell upon Jacob’s neck and bit him, vampire style!

I’ve been interested for a while now in the current American preoccupation with vampires, which began roughly around the time that Anne Rice’s Lestat series became best sellers (1976), and has culminated with the Twilight series in print, and True Blood on HBO. Esau’s legendary role as a would-be vampire would be disconcerting had I not done as much reading and mulling over these brothers as I have; but I keep returning to the New Testament admonishment that spiritual folk should not allow themselves to develop a character like Esau’s, or to let an Esau thrive in their midst. “See to it,” Paul wrote, “that there be no immoral or godless person like Esau among you, who sold his own birthright for a bowl of soup.”

What is a vampire, if not a person whose birthright–his experience of being fully human–has been lost? What is a vampire, if not a once living person who succumbs to another blood sucker and must forever after live off the literal lifeblood of others, having no true life of his own? Isn’t this the perfect metaphor for our somnambulent American culture with its reality TV, true crime best sellers, celebrity tabloids and gossip magazines, thinly-disguised Facebook and MySpace voyeurism, and constant inane tweets where meaning must be communicated in 140 characters or less?

Recently I’ve been in several different social settings in which I noticed people sitting together eating, at the theater, and even at sporting events while texting or tweeting furiously, or otherwise engaged with their cell phones. This behavior amuses and appals me at the same time. I wonder if people are conscious to what they’re doing? And what are we doing, if we are not trying to infuse ourselves with life from others when we text message and update our Facebook status in the midst of crowds, at restaurants where we’ve met friends for dinner, while watching a DVD with friends or family? We have this great treasure of human spirit in these temporal bodies, such wondrous possibilities of becoming and being, but so many squander it by living in the shallows. Even in the midst of other people, many will seek to escape life in the moment, with the people who are present.

Anne Rice has said that she wrote her vampire series during a time in her life when she was without God, alone in a universe of fellow dead, and that the anguished cry of her spirit was given voice through her vampire series. That her work resonated with millions of Americans–her books have sold over 100 million copies–does not surprise me. We are a generation of people to whom God is dead, from whose major religions all numinous symbols have been removed, for whom “mental health” simply means being undiagnosable and well-adjusted to a culture that is spiritually and psychologically ill.

I’m reading Volume 9i  of Carl Jung’s Collected Works for my Jungian certification and ran across this today, which relates in part to some of my recent musings about Facebook and other social networking technology:

I put it to the enlightened rationalist: has his rational reduction led to the beneficial control of matter and spirit? He will point proudly to the advances in physics and medicine, to the freeing of the mind from medieval stupidity and–as a well-meaning Christian–to our deliverance from the fear of demons. But we continue to ask: what have all our other cultural achievements led to? The fearful answer is there before our eyes: man has been delivered from no fear, a hideous nightmare lies upon the world. So far reason has failed lamentably, and the very thing that everybody wanted to avoid rolls on in ghastly progression. Man has achieved a wealth of useful gadgets but, to offset that, he has torn open the abyss, and what will become of him now–where can he make a halt?

After the last World War we hoped for reason: we go on hoping. But already we are fascinated by the possibilities of atomic fission and promise ourselves a Golden Age–the surest guarantee that the abomination of desolation will grow to limitless dimensions. And who or what is it that causes all this? It is none other than that harmless (!), ingenious, inventive, and sweetly reasonable human spirit who unfortunately is abysmally unconscious of the demonism that still clings to him. Worse, this spirit does everything to avoid looking himself in the face, and we all help him like mad. Only, heaven preserve us from psychology–that depravity might lead to self-knowledge! [. . .]

It seems to me, frankly, that former ages did not exaggerate, that the spirit has not sloughed off its demonisms, and that mankind, because of its scientific and technological development, has in increasing measure delivered itself over to the danger of possession. True, the archetype of the spirit is capable of working for good as well as for evil, but it depends upon man’s free–i.e., conscious–decision whether the good also will be perverted into something satanic. Man’s worst sin is unconsciousness, but it is indulged in with the greatest piety even by those who should serve mankind as teachers and examples.

When shall we stop taking man for granted in this barbarous manner and in all seriousness seek ways and means to exorcise him, to rescue him from possession and unconsciousness, and make this the most vital task of civilization? Can we not understand that all the outward tinkerings and improvements do not touch man’s inner nature, and that everything ultimately depends upon whether the man who wields the science and the technology is capable of responsibility or not? Christianity has shown us the way, but, as the facts bear witness, it has not penetrated deeply enough below the surface. What depths of despair are still needed to open the eyes of the world’s responsible leaders, so that at least they can refrain from leading themselves into temptation? (para. 454-455)

what are you doing?

In depth psychology, we refer to the Wise Old Man as an archetypal figure who is often encountered by the Hero in folk and fairy tales, symbolizing our wiser, self-reflecting selves that have the key to the way out of the problems we get ourselves into. The Wise Old Man often asks questions, because questions are tools for the self-reflective function of the psyche.

“What are you doing?” and “Why are you doing this?” are two of my favorite questions. In the passage of Jung quoted here, Jung is asking the rational man, the scientific and technological man, “What are you doing? What is the result of all your ‘progress?’” and I think these are wonderful questions. Jung shows here that we either use technology or it uses (i.e., ‘possesses’) us. I doubt there is anyone who hasn’t been lured into a deep dive into unconsciousness by the television, the interwebs, the DVR, and realized only later due to the sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that there were better things we might or should have done with our time.

In this way we are no different from our most primitive ancestors who believed in absolute possession by evil spirits. We who are too sophisticated for the idea of possession can’t understand the lure of Facebook, Twitter, or whatever other technologies we use as treatment programs or substances to dull the anxiety of being alive, the tension of the opposites and conflicts we contain, and our terror of the unknown. By looking down on the primitive impulse to fear possession, we overlook our own proneness to it.

Being human, I understand why we are overcome by inertia through our technological temptations. Being also divine, I look at myself with dismay.

What I am writing about, among other things, is grief. It’s about the grief of standing alone, of being left, of your gift not being good enough, of not being valued, of being an object or a means to an end to another person. All are experiences that may–and for many people, do–hearken back to an earlier time when the ones pushing us away were our parents, when the one who left was a mother or father, when the human mirrors surrounding our hatchling selves reflected mere shadows and sighs and pushed us into gray, marginal, provisional identities; yet we knew our wings shimmered with a billion, trillion lights.

Even when grief has no tincture of retrospective in it, it is still painful. There are no two ways around it: to love, to relate to others, to commit, to strike deals are all risky. We risk that every pint of blood we donated will be wasted and the patient will still die. The patient may well be me, if I give too much. Is this the risk I want to take, the risk of having my own brother cheat me out of our father’s blessing? Is this the risk I want to take, that I will have to leave my country, my parents, my own twin, all my friends and all that is familiar to me, only to travel to a foreign land and be cheated myself for the next decade or two? Really?

striving with god

These are the risks these brothers took. I doubt they were conscious when they made their choices. Still, one brother was the sort who valued what truly is of value, while the other remained a temporal, carnal man. These are the psychological facts of the story of Jacob and Esau. Esau wasn’t willing to struggle for anything that he couldn’t hunt down and kill by midday. One New Testament writer calls Esau a “wicked, godless man,” the Greek word for godless being profane: outside the temple. Our English word for “profane” comes from the Latin profanus, meaning “uninitiated,” but has the same root meanings as the Greek. One gets the idea of the unwashed, uninitiated one standing outside the cathedral. Inside, they are washing believers in the baptismal font.

Jacob was an initiated man who ultimately earned his name, Israel, meaning He has striven with God. Unlike Esau, Jacob was willing to struggle for years, to fight for his life, to wrestle with the Angel of God. Jacob had the moral character and the endurance to press forward to right goals. Esau lacked these and, though he ended up a wealthy man, he is not remembered well or fondly and left no lasting legacy.

While thinking about being cheated and how I thought and felt about it, and its aftermath, I rather synchronistically have been reading James Hollis’s book, On This Journey We Call Our Life:Living the Questions. In it, I ran across a passage about Jacob’s encounter with the angel:

Recall the Biblical struggle of Jacob with the Angel of Darkness (Gen. 32:26-32). Though his limb was wrenched from its socket, Jacob would not let go until the Angel blessed him. The Angel did so “because you have been strong against God,” by giving Jacob a new name: Israel.

So we are asked to confront our sufferings, to wrestle with them though that brings us even more pain, in order to know what they want of us. Just as we might interrogate a frightening figure in our dreams to learn why it has so come to us, so must we ask of our lives what task of growth is demanded. As Jung says, [. . .] we are asked a question by life, and our life is a question. What does it want of us? What is demanded that we may live more fully? (2003, Toronto: Inner City Books, pp. 122-123).

flight of icarus

The deal we struck with our partners was different from other deals we’ve struck because great gains and losses were possible and we were as conscious as could be about the decisions we made. We were like the guy who goes to Vegas and puts all he has on lucky number 13. The payout for a win would be unbelievable; the losses sobering and long-lived. What kinds of fools would risk this? This is a question with implications to which we were fully conscious. You might say that our decision to go ahead all those years ago was the single most conscious, alive, real, risky, and frightening decision we have ever made in our lives. I do not know many who would have done it. And so like Icarus we flew to the sun. With the same result.

Of course, I am smiling at us now.

I’m smiling because in the myth, Icarus plummeted into the sea, which is just exactly where we fell. We dove into our respective unconscious lives, revisited old wounds, asked others to examine us, re-chose our choosings, then finally looked at one another and said, “Well done.” I would not change what we did except to do it even better. I do not regret our choices, but I will always be sorry that our partners done us wrong and that they are the sorts of characters who list more to the Esau than the Jacob side.

Our partners listed to that side, as we thought they probably would, because they’re wounded souls. I can’t say that we didn’t see the possibility coming, though naturally we hoped it wouldn’t and offered enough insights and warnings that another path was certainly possible. Even so, it’s not realistic to imagine that anyone who has been cheated themselves will not grow up to be a cheater. One must often be an Esau before he can consider becoming a Jacob. My advice to others is to be leery of striking deals with people who have been cheated in profound ways, for they will need to revisit their pain by inflicting it on you. Maybe remorse will teach them humility and give them a sense of respect. Maybe one day they’ll choose a Jacob path.

Even Jacob had his problems, as we have seen–nothing that 14-20 years of servitude did not solve. Still, 20 or 40 years of servitude for Esau would not have been enough. This is it in a nutshell: Jacob finally responded to suffering by growing a character, and Esau never did.

“See to it,” the writer of Hebrews admonished, “that there be no profane, uninitiated person among you with a spirit like Esau’s, who can’t see the blessing, inheritance, and privilege given him, but who turns up his nose at it and trades it for something that will only temporarily satisfy your sensual need.” Instead, he’s saying, be like Jacob: A man with a vision.

I’ve been writing about the story of Esau and Jacob, their traded inheritance, and the blessing obtained through fraud. It is a story about human nature, one I’ve thought about for the better part of this year as my husband and I found ourselves cheated and idea of the spirit of Esau came up during the course of our suffering.

This story about Jacob and Esau is, on the face of it, troubling. Those of us familiar with it have groused over the apparent unfairness of the Most High God, who, if Biblical authors are to be believed, chose Jacob as the promise-carrier from the womb and rejected Esau.

The story of Esau and Jacob is a story about what we long for when we don’t have it, and what we struggle to live up to when we do: Inheritance, blessing. It’s about what is of value in a person and what’s merely to be expected, predictable, prosaic. Those who mean to wrestle with God and prevail require the most rigorous training, the fruits of which do not come without great sacrifice. This is an ancient story that appeals to us even today.

higher nature, lower nature

Genesis tells us that Esau was a skillful hunter, but Jacob a “peaceful man, living in tents.” Though we’re not given much information about these brothers, what we are given says volumes. Everything about Esau portrays the earthy, instinctive nature of man, whereas Jacob’s energy is that of the spiritual man, able to till the ground and wait for its produce, pursuing a greater blessing than those gained in the immediacy of the moment. These two are much like Cain, the hunter, and Abel the tiller of soil. Vegetarians and other non-violent protesters against our lower natures may find ready support in the Bible (as they do in Buddhism), for hunters are not the ones most often rewarded in these ancient stories. Violence begets violence; those who live by the sword shall die by the sword: these are the principles we see in the thread running through these old tales.

Still, there’s a place and a time for violence, for hunting, for calling the hounds and pursuing prey. “To everything there is a time,” Ecclesiastes says, “and a season for every event under heaven.” If we fundamentalize and isolate the differences between Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, we are sure to provoke the same type of violence their differences provoked. We will have gun-toting Republicans from Arkansas on the one hand, and New York Times Review of Books-wielding Democrats on the other. We’ll be fooled into thinking this is about either-or, right-wrong, good-bad, and we won’t see that Esau and Jacob are twins inside a common womb, that our lower and higher natures tend to fight and separate from each other just as these brothers did. We will fail to recall that God became man in the flesh, experiencing every temptation, “yet without sin.” We’ll forget who we are, how whole we are in our cores, and we’ll choose one side over the other. That’s not what this is about.

learning through suffering

Among the major differences between Esau and Jacob, Cain and Abel is the ability to delay gratification, to value the right things, to patiently endure. It is the ability to see something beyond what is immediately gratifying, the ability to do the right thing even if it hurts. To be sure, we don’t see this sort of virtue in Jacob early on. This is why, I think, Jacob had to leave his home and family and find a wife among his relatives far away, only to be cheated out of his true love and given the wrong wife. Jacob’s higher man wasn’t always a higher man in practice. Jacob needed training, and so Jacob was cheated more than once by his father-in-law, Laban, and had to work for almost two decades to redeem both wives and grandchildren and finally leave that foreign land and return home. By that time, Jacob had suffered enough to know fear. Jacob knew he had limits, then.

Even Christ learned obedience through the things he suffered. Buddha said, “Life is suffering.” We do not pass Go and collect our $200 until we have suffered. Jung suggested that neurotic suffering is a type of suffering designed to keep us from real suffering. Real suffering contains opposites. Real suffering is when I see I am cheater and cheated, hunter and farmer, civilized and Wild Thing, Democrat and Republican, conservative and liberal. I firmly believe that the more vociferous a person’s arguments against “the other side,” the more certain it is that he is unconscious to his own other-sideness. I have never met a conservative who was not liberal with himself, nor a liberal who was not conservative with his own stuff. We are such hypocrites.

we have seen the enemy, and he is us

But to see that we contain and even practice what we most abhor is to suffer. To see that we had a calling, but missed it and are living stupid lives, is suffering. To see that we have been the sort of people who had treasures and inheritances of profound value in our hands, but squandered them or traded them for a bowl of soup is suffering. Knowing that we are cheaters willing to break another person’s heart and leave them standing there helplessly is suffering. Knowing that we stand there helplessly is suffering.

Only when I am conscious to my own real suffering as well as the suffering I cause others am I ready to move on to the next step toward becoming a real person. In the aftermath of our victimhood, my husband and I suffered a lot, but some of our suffering wasn’t real. We flailed around in anger because we didn’t want to writhe in grief. We had already lost a child; we didn’t want to face up to losing what we lost when the deal we struck was broken, for the broken deal felt exactly like a death even though no death occurred. We didn’t want to be alive to that grief again, for that kind of grief is a black hole. You go in and you don’t know when or if you will come back out. Though it is as big as space, it can be carried around in a human body. It is an ineffable grief, and its ineffability indicates that it is, in part, unconscious. And becoming conscious to the unconscious parts was to suffer.