Right Now

"The problem is that most of us are not mature enough to have reached the point where we want to take (...) radical responsibility for ourselves. And because we don’t want to, we have convinced ourselves that for various reasons we can’t. The ego is very invested in always having a problem, like a wounded soldier who is not quite ready to go out onto the battlefield of life. Most of us are playing the same game, and of course there are many professionals—therapists and spiritual teachers and so on—who will conspire with us in that worldview. But it’s not actually true. Unless we are severely mentally damaged, the problem is not that we are incapable of exercising the power of free agency in order to transform ourselves—the problem is that we don’t want to.

This, in a nutshell, is the moral and spiritual dilemma for the postmodern narcissist: we don’t want to make the effort to change. And it is a moral dilemma, not just a personal psychological problem. We have to get to that point where we realize we no longer have a right to wait on the sidelines while others are fighting the battle of life. Any one of us who comes to this level of maturity, this absolute reckoning with life, will find the resources to make whatever effort is necessary to give up being a victim. I’m not in any way denying the emotional, psychological, and physical wounds, traumas, and shadows we all have. But when we reach that point of maturity where our own ego becomes a moral issue in relationship to the evolution of the human species rather than a personal psychological problem, we will find the soul strength to take responsibility for all of it, right now."

Andrew Cohen