Psychology

The Machine Will Never Triumph, part twenty-three

Escape

When we get out of the glass bottles of our own ego,
and when we escape like squirrels from turning in the cages of our
    personality
and get into the forest again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don’t know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.¹

The principles Lawrence writes of in the poem are very powerful and, potentially, life-changing. We have already laid out numerous problems with the attachment to the ego, but Lawrence goes farther here and gives us the very welcome news that if we can get out of our heads, we can start living, whether that living happens again or for the very first time. To escape the cage of our personality allows us to get back in touch with all of nature. It is a frightening thing when it happens, but it has beautiful consequences. When the death-dealing ego is surrendered, we will abound in life, a beautiful life of the soul, and when that happens we will change and we will no longer need systems and machines. When that happens, all of modernity will crumble, and the house will come down, praise be to the Gods. Lawrence and Kierkegaard would have seen eye to eye on this:

[I]t may very well be that the best responses to technology will not come from tracts seeking to “overcome” its threat but, rather, from those that cultivate a different way of thinking about and participating in reality. Put in concrete terms, having a conversation, taking a walk in the woods, or spending time in prayer may very well be more important in this area than any particular philosophical or sociological retort.²

Subtle changes within one person can create more real change in the world than major wars and revolutions. To attain an understanding of the Machine, and to know it as pure evil, is to already have claimed a major victory. We can only escape from the systems of mass-slavery that dominate us by understanding their diabolical nature. Schuon writes:

[W]hoever understands the real nature of machinery will at the same time escape from psychological enslavement to machines, and this is already a great gain. We say this without any optimism and without losing sight of the fact that the present world is a necessary evil whose metaphysical root lies in the last analysis in the infinity of Divine Possibility.³