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In 1959, twenty years after he wrote The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis penned a sequel titled Screwtape Proposes a Toast. In his opening remarks to the graduating class of junior tempters, Screwtape calls attention to the trend in the decline of the quality of souls being absorbed into Hell as evidenced by the insipid feast he is presiding over. However, this state of affairs, he hastens to assure his audience, is “a change for the better,” lower quality being offset by the increase in the quantity of souls being captured. 
 
The great (and toothsome) sinners are made out of the very same material as those horrible phenomena, the great Saints. The virtual disappearance of such material may mean insipid meals for us. But is it not utter frustration and famine for the Enemy? The Enemy did not create the humans — did not become one of them and die among them by torture — in order to produce candidates for Limbo, “failed” humans. The Enemy wanted to make them Saints; gods; beings like Himself. Is the dullness of your present fare not a very small price to pay for the delicious knowledge that the whole great experiment is petering out? But not only that. As the great sinners grow fewer, and the majority lose all individuality, the great sinners become far more effective agents for us. Every dictator or even demagogue — almost every film star or crooner — can now draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him. They give themselves — what there is of them — to him; in him, to us. There may come a time when we shall have no need to bother about individual temptation at all, except for the few. Catch the bellwether, and his whole flock comes after him.
 
Further in the letter, Screwtape attributes this loss of individuality to the diabolical takeover of the principle of democracy through the subversion of the notion of equality. (Read the Toast for more details on the devil’s strategy.) The hoped for result?
 
For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (in its diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great people, a nation mainly of sub-literates, morally flaccid from lack of discipline in youth, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, blustering or whimpering if rebuked. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be.
 
Seventy years later, given the current events unfolding on the world stage, it is tempting to conclude that Screwtape and his minions have hit upon a winning strategy, one that is successfully eclipsing “The Enemy.” But where would such a conclusion leave a spiritual practitioner? If it causes us to doubt the relevance of an individual’s quest for the Unconditional, then we would be succumbing to another tempter’s tactic to perpetuate “the delusion that the fate of nations is in itself more important than that of individual souls.” 
 
The importance of a focus on inner peace, especially when egocentricity appears to be in ascendence, is articulated by Screwtape, from his point of view of course! 
 
Screwtape: For only individuals can be saved or damned, can become children of the Enemy or food for us. The ultimate value, for us, of any revolution, war, or famine lies in the individual anguish, treachery, hatred, rage, and despair which it may produce.
 
We may wonder why Goodness, posited to be the superior force, fails to flex its power and intercede on its own behalf in this battle between good and evil. Why does “The Enemy” continue to rely on the individual to fight its battles. Sadly, C.S. Lewis did not write The Enemy Speaks Out, but if he had, he would have pointed to an important spiritual truth: Persistence in relying on something or someone “out there” to save us perpetuates the very delusion that we are attempting to transcend—that there is Goodness independent of “me.” As a text from another tradition proclaims:
 
One is one’s own refuge.
How can another be a refuge to one?
One reaches salvation by purifying one’s own mind;
— The Dhammapada
 
At the moment of Siddhartha’s enlightenment, the story goes, Mara, an Asian colleague of Screwtape, having failed to lure the Buddha-to-be to the dark side through desire and terror, tried to defeat him through doubt. Mara challenged the Buddha’s worthiness to claim a seat among the enlightened. Instead of conversing with the demon, the Buddha reached down and touched the earth, symbolically asserting that the way one defeats an illusion is to cease believing its reality. 
 
This is why Practice repeatedly encourages us to stop listening to and believing the voices of egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate. It is by taking a stand as Awareness that we prove to ourselves that “All formations are transient. All things are without a self.”
 
As awareness practitioners, we are interested in studying the ego-self, to paraphrase Dogen, in order to forget it, and in forgetting the self to be actualized by myriad things. So, this year, in addition to offering insights into egocentricity from The Screwtape Letters, Musings curates the writings of the Awakened to support deepening the practice of transcending the ego.
 
This brief preview is an example:
 
Screwtape: Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things.
 
There is no magic in the world when we see through the lens of thinking. But if Intelligence is always experiencing itself, what would be the experience?
 
D.T. Suzuki: The idea of Zen is to catch life as it flows. There is nothing extraordinary or mysterious about Zen. I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of the desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring wood — in all these I am practicing Zen, I am living Zen. No wordy discussion is necessary, nor any explanation.”
 
Stay tuned.
 
Gasshō
ashwini