The Truth of Doubt

Norse Mythology: Odin's Eye

‘One drink.  With a drink from your well, Mimir, I will be wise.  Name your price.’

‘Your eye is my price,’ said Mimir.  ‘Your eye in the pool.’

The cost of wisdom is an eye.  I love that.  It resonates.  The hardest thing I have ever had to sacrifice on the quest for more meaning and magic is my perception.  My sight.  My beliefs.  My point-of-view.  My eye!

But how can you un-see something that you have seen.  Especially something that might feel dangerous and wrong to question.  To let go of something that brings so much belonging, security and love.  To risk being rejected for an eternity.  It’s impossible. 

A wounding is needed.  A humbling.  A blinding. 

And like Odin, for me, the blinding is always prompted by an encounter with another God.  That is to say, something ‘Other’.  Not another projection of my ego.  Not another image on which to project all my deepest fears, insecurities and fantasies.  Not another message inherited from my tribe, family-of-origin or culture.  Something truly ‘Other’. 

For me, this ‘God’, or this ‘Other’, tends to appear in the form of another person – a friend, colleague, partner or child.  Something I can’t control.  Someone that sees through my bullshit.  Someone that calls me out in some way.  Someone that sees beyond my sophisticated defence strategies.  It’s awful.  It’s humiliating.  And it’s not as gloriously heroic as gauging out an actual eye with a knife.  Although I imagine that’s quite sore too!

But the reward of course is worth it.  The sacrifice, although demanding, allows for genuine growth, relationship and insight. 

‘After he had done what was needful, he placed his eye carefully in the pool.  It stared up at him through the water.  Odin filled the Gjallerhorn with water from Mimir’s pool, and he lifted it to his lips.  The water was cool.  He drained it down.  Wisdom flooded into him.  He saw farther and more clearly with his one eye than he ever had with two.’

‘Odin’s eye’ has come to symbolise for me all of the beliefs, images and perceptions I have had to hold up to the blinding light of reason and the dark clouds of unknowing; beliefs, images and perceptions that may have, once upon a time, served me well in feeling safe, secure and loved.  Some of these beliefs are very specific to my family-of-origin and religious tribe.  But some of them are more universal:  the belief that the world is too big for me to show up in.  The belief that I can’t trust myself.  The belief that I can’t trust my body.  The belief that I’m not acceptable.  The belief that I am right.  The belief that life is fair.  The belief that I am in control.  The belief that I won’t really die.  The belief that it’s too dangerous to risk being myself in front of others.  The belief that other people should understand me.  The belief that I need other people to understand me.  The belief that I need other people’s approval to accept myself.  The belief that success is status, money and fame.  The belief that I should be able to avoid pain.  The belief that I am not ultimately responsible.  The belief that it’s all my fault.  The belief that if I do or believe x, y or z everything will be alright in the end….

The cost of holding onto these beliefs is not just ignorance (which really isn’t bliss, in the long term).  These beliefs have psychological consequences.  They’re not just false – they can be toxic.  They can lead to an angry, anxious and despairing disposition.  So many of my destructive emotions, and subsequent self-sabotaging behaviours, can be traced to an overly-rigid belief or narrative.  But what if I’m wrong?  What if that’s not true?  Perhaps I don’t know what’s really going on here?  Each question is a cut in the eye of certainty.  And the consequent emotions that follow will feel a little less tight.  A bit more fuzzy.  Less 3-D-Imax-cinema-with-surround-sound.  More slightly-smudged-and-softened-charcoal-drawing. 

When the Oracle of Delphi declared Socrates the wisest person in Athens, he supposed it was because he realised how little he knew.  And the various philosophical schools that followed Socrates – the Stoics, Cynics and Sceptics – all understood there is a connection between our beliefs and our mental wellbeing.  The same idea is at the heart of most psychotherapies: let’s hold up to the light of consciousness our most hidden, unexamined and charged ideas.  Let’s look at them.  Hold a knife to them.  Dissect them.  Are they true?

‘Your eye is my price,’ said Mimir.  ‘Your eye in the pool.’

I wonder whether we have two eyes for some symbolic purpose (forgive me scientists, I know not what I am doing).  Ego eye and soul eye.  The ego eye demands certainty, clarity and control.  But the wiser, truer and more expansive eye, the soul eye, feeds off mystery, doubt and unknowing.  The ego eye must be cut out, for the soul eye to strengthen in power.  Perhaps this is why Jesus said to the overly certain and legalistic Pharisees (who could symbolise our own self-righteous and zealous selves, whatever ‘isms’ we identify with): ‘I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.’  How strange so many of his followers just replaced the same legalism and dogmatism with a different brand-name, but the same message:  we’re right, we have the truth, we’re the way… in Jesus name, Amen!

So… ‘Give me a knife,’ as Odin once said.  I want to see, with my soul eye, ‘farther and more clearly’ than ever before.