Ensure Failure

“We cannot break the Ten Commandments. We can only break ourselves against them.”

So says Cecil B. DeMille, famed Hollywood filmmaker. There are two ways to read this. First let’s unpack Cecil’s take. His quote continues: “—or else, by keeping them, rise through them to the fulness of freedom under God. God means us to be free. With divine daring, he gave us the power of choice.”

The message he’s advocating is clear. Salvation (i.e. success) comes from following the rules. The law is there to help you become saved. While it is true the law is there to help you, it’s not in the way he means. He means you better follow the rules or else you’ll only experience suffering because trying to do it without following the rules will never work. God is eternal, so are his laws. And don’t forget, whatever God commands, man can obey. This is what he means with the part about being given the power of choice. Thanks to the freedom of choice that we all have, we are all equally responsible for our mistakes. So the calculation is simple enough - use all of your willpower to follow God’s law and you’ll always win.

This mentality shouldn’t be dismissed outright. Really, It’s pretty motivating. “This is a winnable game, here are the rules, to the victor goes the spoils.” This is essentially the pep talk of every western mythic story. And it works, as far as it goes. Many people have won the game since it’s inception only to find themselves not winning what they expected. It doesn’t last. It fades and you’re still you. The most common response to the tragedy of winning is to choose a different treadmill to get on. It takes a few times, following all the rules; winning; realizing it doesn’t work; repeat.

Here’s the other way to interpret the quote: The commandments are not there to help you win; they’re there to ensure failure. Why have rules that can’t be followed? Because winning is not actually the objective. Everybody needs to lose. Life comes after death. Failing to realize an ideal again and again and again is the only way to practice failure until you get it right. It’s only through losing so consistently that we learn the lesson that happiness can never be derived from an object, achievement, experience or relationship.

It takes striving with all your might to live up to the law for the subsequent results to reveal themselves to be insufficient, or we would not accept the deeper call. We have to be pressured to go deeper because nothing in us wants to believe that the culturally invented markers of success that we have put so much energy into aren't true. We don’t see it because we do not want to see it. We don’t want to embark on a journey that feels like we’re throwing things out, especially when we have invested so much into acquiring. If we seek enlightenment ourselves, without the requisite suffering, there would not really be any change at all, just bogus self-improvement on our own terms. Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. We will see only what we have already decided to look for, and we cannot see what we are not ready to look for.

Failure and humiliation force us to look where we never would otherwise—inward. The most pervasive yet seductive delusion is that we can find something “out there”—some person, some religion, some community, some career, some external validation—that will make our lives work for us. Suffering as a result of desperately trying to meet our cultural standards reveals that the constant problem we have is ourselves, and opens up a new space to learn that the solution is also within. Our lives, even when overwhelmed with outer difficulties, are always harmed from within. None of us are pleased to encounter the self-delusions in which we invest, until we can no longer believe them. We will enter a deepened dialogue with ourselves only when exhaustion and failure is no longer deniable. Nothing less than unsolicited suffering can break down our false self and open us up to a new worldview. As Richard Rohr says:

“Until the truth sets you free, it’s going to make you miserable.”

This experience can’t be known by simply thinking about it. Only by putting ourselves out there by trying to win and being led down into scary places first-hand can we know that it leads to a better place, but only after the fact. We can’t imagine it to be true until we have gone through the “down” ourselves and come “up” again on the other side, this time in larger form. So the commandments have to be presented as if they would “work.” It’s by thoroughly believing and acting on them that we learn the lesson they’re really teaching.

As we break ourselves against the commandments, an ever-expanding realization develops within us until finally, the mind breaks the bounds of that manufactured self or ego to an identification with the consciousness that is not literally any thing. We glimpse the unification of everything and everyone: We are nature, our eyes are the eyes of the universe, and our voice is the voice of the earth. We find a way of experiencing the world that, as Joseph Campbell says, “will open to us the transcendent that informs it, and at the same time form ourselves within it.” In the end (although the end is just another beginning), we do not so much reclaim what we have lost, but discover a significantly new self, more capable at handling new meanings and beliefs. This is how the commandments save us, they make us fail (die) so we can grow (be reborn).