Submission does not mean being weak or passive. It leads to neither fatalism nor capitulation. Just the opposite. True power resides in submission – a power that comes from within. Those who submit to the divine essence of life will live in unperturbed tranquility and peace even when the whole wide world goes through turbulence after turbulence.
For the enlightened mind, submission sounds like an insult and a humiliation. It would immediately oppose and say: I will never submit to anyone. I will never acknowledge a superior power above me.
Immanuel Kant has proclaimed the motto of enlightenment: "Have courage to use your own understanding!" And further on: “t is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. … The officer says, Do not argue, drill! The tax man says, Do not argue, pay! The pastor says, Do not argue, believe! (Only one ruler in the World says, Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!) In this we have examples of pervasive restrictions on freedom.”
Who uses his own understanding, does not need anyone above him, he is free. He designs his own guidelines and values and follows them. He only does what fits them and fights anything what opposes them. This requires courage, because an authority one trusts in also grants security and shelter. The modern man of personalistic consciousness is left to himself and feels only responsible for himself. In the dusk, after having brought order to the world, he sets out riding towards the setting sun (or settles down in front of a keyboard and writes his blogs.)
This is the ideal image of the independent person of modern time, free of the chains of medieval thinking and social boundaries. The reality is different from this ideal in many areas. Permanently we have to compromise with other people and restrict our plans and ideas. In a world of growing complexity, mutual dependencies become stronger and more complex and less transparent and understandable.
Amidst the busy social networks the question arises what of this headstrong understanding we ought to use is left over. Is it more than a thought processor filtering incoming information and producing permanently changing constructions about itself and about the world? Is there something like an archimedic point behind all these production which holds the world together, like a “I think so I am”? Is this I, the anchor point of the modern man, after all the catastrophes and revolutions leading up to the age of postmodernism, still a relevant factor or nothing more than a cumbersomely mended construct? Do we hold on to our I so desperately as the medieval people did with a split from the cross of Jesus?
Our consciousness is made up of different layers. Not one of them can claim a priority over the others. Yet we proceed in our exploration when we dare a general overview and acknowledge that we are sometimes steered by the oldest level of mankind and sometimes by a yet hardly to grasp realm of a universalistic consciousness. Sometimes we use our understanding with more or less success, sometimes we move in this world without our I, sometime we function in submission to systems which we neither can nor want to influence.
Growth in consciousness means then to perceive on which level of consciousness we are right at the moment. This helps us to see which alternatives of perception and action are at our disposal in moments, when we do not know how to move on.
The masters of wisdom show us the world of the widest and freest consciousness possible to man and also show us ways how to get there. In this aspect, we also have to revise the concept of submission. We leave the hierarchical imprints of dominance and subordination behind and resolve all our issues with it. We enlarge our view beyond human attempts to erect a decent social order. This way, we reach the life power which is active behind, under and in all these attempts. It is stronger that our individual and collective efforts and transcend the understanding capacity of our minds.
We can explain as much as we are able to explain, and this is what we should do: Make explainable what yet cannot be explained. For this we use the mind. And we can accept its limitations. There are areas of our consciousness which are beyond and needless of explanation as they are immediately evident but cannot be put into words.
Part of this is the area which we enter when we connect to inner peace. This place exists, and we can find it for instance at the end of a deeply relaxing exhale, lost in a piece of music or in watching nature. There, tranquillity and equanimity reside, far from the chaos of our outer worlds. Here we surrender totally to the greater entity which carries us and cares for us. So we honour what lets us live, from moment to moment.
The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com
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