© 1995 Earl Jabay
© 1995 The Brotherhood of Man Library
Condensed from the Kingdom of Self by Earl Jabay. (Logos International, New Jersey)
Earl Jabay is an ordained minister with an extensive grounding in modern psychiatry. While working on the staff of the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute at Princeton, he had a personal revelation that, for all of his life, he had been god-playing. He discovered that there is a vast difference between a petition to God for help and the “You take over” prayer that signals our submission to the will of God. In the first, God is asked to be the co-pilot, in the second, the Pilot.
When he began his work as a mental hospital chaplain, Jabay was accustomed to commence the day with a prayer that God would go with him and help him to do his work. In doing so, he was the occupant of the throne in the “Kingdom of Self.” Contact with members of Alcoholics Anonymous changed all that. He learned from them how to place God on the throne, to ask God to take charge of his life. Now he understands that when he enters the hospital ward, God is already there. His learning experiences are detailed in his book, and are excerpted or summarized in what follows.
The authority issue—we might call it the “god-problem”—is a core problem in human life. It is almost insultingly simple. It seeks to answer the question: “Who is Number One?” The candidates are only two, God or self. For much of our lives, all humans nominate themselves.
Right from the very beginning, most of the precious time in our lives is devoted to the resolution of the difficult yet fascinating problem of who is in charge. The first thing a baby does when it comes into the world is to seek to establish its kingdom. It is hungry. It cries. A weary mother hears, understands, and responds. At a later time, the baby will feel uncomfortable in its nether regions. Again it will cry. Each time the king cries, it is obeyed. Roughly nine times each day, it cries to be fed or have its diaper changed. Each occasion tests the authority of its kingdom. And after each victory, the king will conclude there is none in the world higher than itself. The king is number one. The king is a god.
By all means they try to hold me secure who love me in this world. But it is otherwise with thy love which is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free.
Lest I forget them they never venture to leave me alone. But day passes by after day and thou art not seen.
If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart, thy love for me still waits for my love.
Gitanjali
Not too far into the future, its authority will be challenged. Mostly the problem is mother. Over matters such as toilet training. The king is furious about lack of consultation. The enemies are recognized. The battle begins. Every parent can testify to the unbelievable strength and persistence of a young child’s will. The tragedy is, of course, that when a young child wins the contest of wills, it loses. The battle continues throughout childhood into adulthood, with individuals all the time learning increasingly sophisticated strategies to get their own way. A great deal of time is spent on learning divide and conquer tactics. When firstly parents and later, other authorities, are divided, it is possible to go through the breach. The holy crusade graduates from the home to the schools, the streets, and the community.
Are there instances when an individual relates to authority with a healthy obedience? There are many but they are episodical. The security and peace experienced under authority is short lived. The demands of being king incessantly drive a person back to a conflict with any and all outside authority— parents, teachers, employers, police, God.
There is a diabolical way to make this maturation period peaceful. Peace will prevail if the authorities default in the use of their authority. A pseudo-tranquility will reign if those authorities, out of their own egoistic needs, never say no, never counter. There appears to be a cruel, retributive justice in this world that ordains that if the appropriate authorities do not do their job, a child will rise up to destroy parents, other authorities if it can, and then itself. The survivors grow up to be adults who carry the legacy of their childhood.
As the self comes into the fullness of physical maturity, our goddish style of life is more openly disclosed. Unstated and unrecognized convictions take deep root. Among these are a conviction of power, the desire to be always right, to be the sole source of ultimate truth, to evade the reality of the present, to have messianic aspirations, to be the law, to be perfect. Other symptoms are: Desire to be leader, winner, special, chosen, superior, see your name/photo in print, expectations of gratitude from others, being judgmental, grabbing the center-stage, fear of losing, harboring resentment, self-pity, victimhood, lust for power, fault-finding, condescension, perfectionism, retaliation, and many others. A problem with being god is that we have to be so busy, to carry so much responsibility. It is a staggering task to run the universe. No wonder that Jesus said, “Blessed are the humble.”
One of the saddest and most painful expressions of adult egoism is loneliness. We egoists often tend to isolate ourselves from our fellows. The reason for this is simple. We can’t stand people and they can’t stand us. We may recede from people and, enthroned and alone, we begin to suspect that people are against us. Baffled and weary, we may choose to leave the battlefield to live by and unto ourselves, excusing our behavior by labeling it as self-reliance or independence. Life at the center of one’s world is the loneliest spot in the universe. It is a place that God alone should occupy. Displacing God and taking his place, we egoists are liable to withdraw from people. We are too proud to ask favors in case of refusal, to ask questions because someone might laugh, or to express an opinion in case someone might criticize. It surely is lonely at the top.
Though we might be kings in our kingdom, we are all in bondage to something. Our bondages may include anger, fear, guilt, hatred of authority, an attraction to violence, or to material goods, words, sex, drugs, even ideologies. Or we may become hooked on being a protester no matter what the issue. All these are expressions of our egoism, our bondage to self.
Bondage may be of a type from which, try as we may, we are unable to break free. It is like being seated on a toboggan in the snow at the top of a hill. A little push and we start to slide. We are free, out of bondage. But when we want to stop there are no brakes or steering apparatus. And so, though wanting to stop, we are unable to do so, we are trapped in our bondage. This is the problem of the addict, those unfortunates enslaved by alcohol, tobacco, drugs, etc. But it also the problem of all humanity, for we all commence our lives plagued with the universal addiction of nominating ourselves as being the focal point of the kingdom of self.
God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like flaming from shook foil,
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Prushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod,
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
An all for this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness, deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went,
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.Gerard Manley Hopkin
Earl Jabay found release after many distressing failures in his ministry, failures that brought him to the point of wanting to resign as a chaplain and get into something more useful. His release came through association with recovering alcoholics from Alcoholics Anonymous. He had even written a paper against these people before he discovered that they were what he himself needed. On meeting them, he found they were new people. Their whole style of life was changed. They were quiet inside— something they called serenity. They were also joyful. Best of all, they were free, free from their alcoholic prisons and a number of other prisons besides.
At first he felt anger and jealousy towards them. As an ordained minister with qualifications in psychiatry, he felt he had faithfully served God in seeking to serve those whom he felt should benefit from his expertise. The secret turned out to be that these alcoholics knew God in a way quite foreign to himself. They spoke of God as a higher power, a person who was alive, as one to whom they had chosen to give authority over their lives. They had resigned from the throne of self, and had granted God his kingship. Quite suddenly, Jabay realized his folly. He had plenty of religion and plenty of psychiatry, but he had no real God. Though not an alcoholic, he buried his pride and asked his newly found friends to help him through the twelve steps of their program, because he knew that he, too, had an addiction. These steps are:
Jesus never prayed as a religious duty. To him, prayer was a transcendental surrender of will. (UB 196:0.10)
When God’s will is your law, you are noble slave subjects; but when you believe in the new gospel of divine sonship, my Father’s will becomes your will, and you are elevated to the high position of the free children of God, liberated sons of the kingdom. (UB 141:2.2)
Jabay says that these steps work, not only with alcoholics, but with mixed-up ministers. God became real to him for the first time in his life, and so, ten years after his ordination, he vacated the throne and stumbled into the kingdom.
The basic problem with man, Jabay says, is not that he is an immature child but rather that he is an egocentric godplayer. Granted that we may feel the opposite—small, weak, and victimized—but we act like gods. We can prove this to ourselves by remembering how we have judged and punished others, or how we have tried to do the work of two, or how we have bucked authority. Man, in relation to God, tries to displace Him, compete with him, forget Him, even destroy Him. Each of us wants to be ultimate. (Oxford Dictionary: ultimate, (a), beyond which no other exists).
To explain our dilemma, the most constant themes in the psychological literature are the evil effects of the parents upon their children and the evil effect of institutions upon adults. If parents and institutions can be faulted for one’s problems, the individual is relieved of all responsibility. Jabay says he can no longer buy that, and that he has gone back to the ancient answer—his own willfulness. This is an accurate description for many of our emotional illnesses. We are not weak people as far as our wills are concerned. Our feelings may be raw, our minds may be playing strange tricks on us, and our nervous systems may be overloaded, but our wills are as strong as iron and set in the firm concrete of our egocentric lives. To this, there is but one answer—vacate your throne and yield your will and the throne irreversibly and irrevocably to its only legitimate claimant, the living God.
Although apparently signaling capitulation, a cry for divine help is inappropriate. Almost invariably, it is a disguised plea to aid us to regain the driver’s seat, to reclaim the throne. That is not the prayer that God is waiting to hear. What He awaits is our word of obedient surrender. Strange though it may seem, therein there is true freedom and liberty.