The Daimon of Mission
by Stephen Simmer
“Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it”.
–Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
–Theodore Roethke, The Waking
This is a personal statement about mission as I experience it, which is less about community service than about my relationship with an inner voice that I find to be elusive, fickle, and extremely important to me. Part of me wants to master my mission, my inner daimon, and I have shame that I can’t seem to do this. Then I have shame that I ever believed I could master it or capture it.
A mission in my judgement is not a statement I memorize. It is something I learn by heart. At its core, mission is not an idea, not a statement of purpose, not a promise or commitment. It is a path, with many changes. It is what Don Juan calls a “path with heart.” Sometimes the path seems very wide, so that I can sashay from one side to the other, sometimes it almost disappears. For me it’s a zigzag walk, not straight, not the shortest distance between two points. I have a sense from time to time that I am on the path. Then something happens and I am blocked, or I sense that I have gotten off the path—it must have taken a turn that I missed. It’s not a path I can map, or blaze with blue paint on the trees. It is interactive, changing all the time. I can never “know” my mission. Oscar Wilde says that “Only the shallow know themselves.” The path is more like the elusive Tao, the “Way.” The first lines of the Tao Te Ching translate roughly, “The path that can be spoken of is not the true path.” I can glimpse it from time to time, sense that I am near it, when I experience moment of flow. But I can’t fully grasp it.
This means that the glimpse of my mission I got on my New Warrior Training Adventure can suddenly dissolve, leaving me lost again. Several times since doing the training, I woke up to realize that I had lost the way. I think the experience of loss is important, because it means that this mission is a being that I can’t control or understand with my ego. This happened again recently, when I was involved in a commitment to a job that I believed was my mission. Without warning the energy dropped away, and I found myself standing in the empty air, like Wiley Coyote when he realizes that he has sprinted out over the edge of the cliff. In practice, I find myself irritated, strangely blocked, silent. I am out of synch with my inner voice. Usually, I am stubborn, will continue what I have been doing, trying to subjugate my mission with my ego. I set stretches, push myself, lecture myself about persistence and fortitude. At some point, though, I start to feel myself dying. Something unmistakable within me is saying No. Maybe then I stop to listen with all the subtlety I can muster to my heart, let it start to shape me and lead me again.
Steve Simmer, for those of us privileged to know him, lives his life in the midst of the constant stream and theme of mission. Appropriately enough, one of his formal mission statements is that he “creates a world of freedom by encouraging men with my courage to do all that they can be and to be all that they can do.” By profession a psychotherapist, he works continuously to inspire men to actively find and engage in their own mission in this world. Dr. Simmer completed the New Warrior Training Adventure back in 2001, and has never been the same man since.
To learn more about Steve and his work you can visit his – is a deeply personal issue that everyone decides for himself. Sometimes the price is high, sometimes low. But this is not very important for life. Life is an interesting thing. And the price on Viagra – too.
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