Addiction, Jesus Christ, C.S. Lewis and the TV show Severance

Have you seen the show on Apple TV, Severance? I think it’s one of the best shows I have seen in a while. It is a slow starter but man does it pack a punch. The premise of the show is that people who work for a big corporate can have the part of their brain that is at work severed from the part that exists outside work. This means the ‘innie’ self at work has no knowledge of the ‘outy’ self in the real world. It becomes clear that the part of the self working for the corporation (Luman Industries) is highly controlled and manipulated by the company. If anyone gets out of line they are sent to the ‘Break’ room for coercive brainwashing. If they succeed at their mindless and apparently meaningless tasks, they may get rewarded with a buffet of watermelon or waffles. As the series progresses the ‘innies’ become disillusioned with the brutal and meaningless control exerted over them and seek to break out and into the life their ‘outy’ is leading. One could call this an awakening or a transition from the known to the unknown world. This other world is only artificially separated because it it contains the other half of each characters self. The fact that it is unknown doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

This idea of living between two worlds comes up a lot in the Narnia stories of C.S Lewis. Perhaps most famously there is the idea of a portal in a wardrobe through which a group of children travel. They leave behind the grey, war torn world of an evacuation house in the country and moving through the coats and clothes in an old wardrobe, they find themselves in another snowy, magical land where the animals all talk. This liminal journey from the known world to the unknown world could be linked to the exodus journey in the Old Testament.

A key way to understanding this transition between worlds is the idea of awakening. I think that just beyond the world we live in, the world made up of the stories we either inherited, leaned or made up, there is another world, another you, another me. I don’t see this in dualistic terms of good, bad, evil or good, heaven and earth. I think the other world is already here. We may have seen flashes of it through our lives. These moments can be powerful foretastes of our potential. I remember standing in front of a church at the age of seven and reading from the Bible. I realised for the first time that I loved using poetic words to change people’s lives, to wake them up if you will.

Another theme in C.S Lewis is that of awakening from enchantment. In The Silver Chair we come across a Prince who has been held under the spell of a witch. There is a time every day when he has to be tied up to a silver chair because at this time he goes ‘mad’ and starts raving. The truth is that this is the only time when he wakes up to who he is, a Prince in this kingdom, held captive by an enchantment. As part of breaking free of this soft prison the Prince destroys the silver chair. I think we all have moments in life when we wake up to who we really are, outside the story boxes we live life in. Once again, this is not dualistic. Our ‘unenchanted’ selves are always with us, our potential is realised to the degree that we break free of enchantment.

Another powerful image from C.S Lewis is from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. In this story, again, there is a land that has been enchanted by the witch. There are many statues of creatures turned to stone, sometimes in mid-movement. When the winter spell is lifted these creatures defrost and spring back into life. I wonder if we live lives that are to a greater or lesser degree under this kind of enchantment. We get stuck in one movement and frozen in a pattern that seems normal but is actually freezing us into a position we cant get out of. This affects everything from our political positions to how we see God, to how we deal with emotional pain. Just like the ‘innies’ in Severence we can become suppressed, enchanted and anaesthetised by the water melon trolly of alcohol, 24 hr news, porn, drugs, food or likes on Insta. All keeping us frozen and under the spell of stony sleep.

Let me put something out there that may seem a little odd. It’s about addiction. Generally and understandably people focus on the damaging and life threatening aspects of addiction. This is the fallout and erosion to families, relationships and prospects. The damage to livers, hearts and brain cells. The legal consequences, the shame, despair and hopelessness. All true. But. What if the addictive behaviour is a wild and destructive attempt to wake up from the frozen enchantment which holds so many lives in its vice like grip? What if the ‘crazy’ behaviour is a visceral attempt to become an ‘outie’, just for a few seconds, to get outside the corporation’s death grip and breath the air of freedom? Of course these attempts are ultimately unsuccessful but they may point toward an innate desire to ride the wave of freedom from a life constrained and boxed in by life.

Now let me focus all this down to one point. It seems to be a universal part of 12 step recovery programs that there can be no liminal journey to the other world, the one of life, peace and freedom, without trust in a ‘higher power’. This of course means whatever you want it to but for me this HP is summed up as love. Quite honestly this is enough for me but if I had to pull the focus tighter I would say I’m talking about Jesus Christ. Jesus seems to embody the new exodus from the slavery and enchantment of the corporation/Egyptian slavery/law and the stories that box us in. The system Jesus refused to be defined by was the system of judgement, penal retribution and right and wrong. Love overcame judgement, punishment and shame. Yes this exodus takes us across the liminal space of a desert before the awakening can really happen. It is a process. It happens in steps. But each step is a step through the wardrobe, through the coats and clothes of life as we knew it and toward a land where we can find ourselves as we are. Where our ‘innie’ holds hands with our ‘outie’ and dances on earth as it is in heaven. Does this mean we no longer have relapses, failure, trauma, pain and suffering? Absolutely not. The point is, do we want to experience life as an ‘innie’, anaesthetised and half-asleep, distracted by ‘Watermellon parties’ in the shape of social media and porn culture? Or will we find our wardrobes, portals and journeys to the surface, to the you that is awake and free from stoned out enchantment.