Journey To The Center Of Our Ego, Part 6

Shawn Tedrow

Axel discovers the answer while fanning himself with the text. Afraid of what the Professor might do with this knowledge, he decides to keep the secret hidden from Professor Lidenbrock.

After two days without food he cannot stand the hunger anymore and reveals the secret to his uncle. (Remember, the Professor had locked everyone in the house to go without food until they cracked the code).

Professor Lidenbrock is a man of astonishing impatience, and departs for Iceland immediately, taking his reluctant nephew with him. Axel, who, in comparison, is cowardly and anti-adventurous, repeatedly tries to reason with him, explaining his fears of descending into a volcano and putting forward various scientific theories as to why the journey is impossible, but Professor Lidenbrock repeatedly keeps himself blinded against Axel's point of view.
~ from A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne ~

What I will be sharing here is a sensitive subject to tread on, and very difficult to articulate. It is regarding our subconscious inner motivations to why we believe what we believe.

Principles to this understanding can be found by looking deeper, underneath the words, of Axel’s scientific theories and beliefs on why he thought they shouldn’t attempt to journey to the center of the earth.

To begin, let’s start off by imagining we are with Axel listening to him explaining his scientific ideology to the Professor. Let’s call these statements of scientific assertions by Axel, beliefs and philosophies. Axel is giving his philosophical reasons to determine why and how they should proceed in life, or in this case, why they shouldn’t proceed. But is this proclaimed formulation of doctrine from Axel just innocent reasoning of objective theory or were these reasons prompted by the undermining manipulations of Axel’s subconscious? What gave birth to the true motivation and genesis of Axel’s belief?

If we look closer into this story, we can observe that Axel kept this secret knowledge that he realized hidden from the professor because he was afraid of what it meant to his uncle and what it possibly would lead to. You can clearly see that Axel’s crafty tactfulness to hide this from his uncle was motivated out of fear. The state of his emotional demeanor, being fear-based, was dictating what he thought, said, and how he acted.

It then says that Axel couldn’t stand the pain of hunger any longer and because of that pain, he decides to come forward, face the truth of the situation, and let the professor know what he has discovered. This symbolizes how sometimes the pain and suffering of life becomes more painful than facing the implied consequences of the truth. Sometimes life's situations pressure and force us into becoming truthful with ourselves. It becomes less painful to face the truth than to deal with the pain of continuing to live a lie.

Unfortunately, many of us humans figure out how to live with our pain of living a lie, and do not transcend and evolve in life. We might even circumvent these “teaching moments” that Life brings into play, by applying philosophical Tao-Novocain on our pain, and numbingly convince ourselves that “All is well”.

It goes on to say that Axel is cowardly and anti-adventurous. Who knows exactly why Alex’s ego-identity consisted of these psychological attributes, but they did. If we knew more about Axel’s life history, we might be able to understand why this is, and even feel love and sympathy towards him.

It is from this state of mind of Axel’s emotional characteristics that gives birth to his philosophical reasoning. His philosophy is not objective, but is tainted and influenced by his subconscious. Even though he might be explaining to the Professor scientific facts, he is using these truths to sustain and preserve his ego-identity in a status quo condition.

He doesn’t want to experience and venture out into anything that will challenge and disrupt his character and possibly create change. He lives a life that is a destination; it is tethered and controlled by shielding himself through philosophy and scientific theories.

Axel doesn’t want to have anything to do with transformation and alchemy, and attempts to hold that experience at bay through his philosophy. He surely does not want to face his fears and go through a process of metamorphism.

We must remember that the journey to the center of the earth represents a journey through our unconscious, with discovery of deeper and deeper archetypes. This includes our deep-seated emotions. Axel did not want to go there within himself and see his subconscious behavior. It is by entering into the volcano of “little self”, how we transform and integrate into unity with Big-Self (Tao).

Our philosophy and behavior are direct byproducts of our subconscious. We must allow our words and actions to be penetrated with the light of consciousness, all the way to its roots. It is through allowing the center and root of our ego to be exposed, when we experience the freedom from its dream’s claims and chains. When you see it, it will then be slain.

I was once told by a Zen teacher that psychology precedes philosophy. He looked right through my philosophies and urged me to see what I was hiding behind. I was taken aback by this because, without consciously being aware, I thought that my philosophical knowledge was the proof that showed how spiritual I was. But he was suggesting that my proclamation of what light and spirituality are was loaded with personal baggage.

That was a tough message for me to swallow because, to be honest with you, I found identity in myself through my spiritually-obtained knowledge. It was who I am, I thought, and I felt that image of myself being threatened.

But what he was saying to me went even deeper than that. Could it be that my thinking that we each have our own paths was initiated and motivated by the fact that I didn’t want anyone to question the path that I was on? Could it be that my philosophical thinking -- that there is no such thing or way to know objective truth and reality -- was really just a cover for me to not allow the truth and reality of consciousness to penetrate into my self’s core-center and create real change?

This questioning of myself and my philosophy continually battered me around, as I was trying to find some kind of footing of solid ground to stand on, but it wasn’t to be found. All of my philosophical thinking could be trailed to craftily hidden, defensive tactics that was protecting my ego-identity from real change taking place.

This truly was a pivotal moment to my spiritual walk in life. I had not a clue that I was using philosophies to justify and sustain my egoic state of being. I am so thankful for this “teaching moment” that came my way.

We unconsciously have built a garrison around ego-self to ward off alchemy. We each need -- with gut wrenching sincerity -- to face our philosophical garrison head-on and remove its defensive mask of “self”-preservation, through “self”-deception.

This is a part of the metamorphic process of spiritual transformation. This is an essential staging-moment of self-discovery and journey to the center of our ego. As Carl Jung once said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”

You can check out Shawn's other musings here.