Living in a Box

Can you imagine what it feels like to be trapped in a sound-proof box? You’ll scream and you’ll bang and you’ll kick for days but nobody will hear you.  Eventually your throat will get so sore that you won’t be able to speak. Now you’ve got no choice but to accept it:  “You’re never gonna get out of this box.”

Of course “life” in a box isn’t so pleasant so you’re better off forgetting that you’re there. You don’t know that you’re a prisoner and that you’ve been barred from life. It’s better to think that you’re still on the outside like everybody else. You learn to be careful to never think about the box you’re in or what it means to be there.

Life continues on but it’s not your life – you only think it is – it’s a substitute life, a prisoner’s life. And as you unknowingly become more hidden from yourself and others you just want to die; but you don’t know that you want to die because in the box you don’t know what you feel. There are no real feelings in the box.

The worst part of living in the box, not knowing what you feel, what you like, what you hate or what you stand for is that you haven’t any goals; you haven’t any purpose; you have no idea what makes you happy; you have no self!

Who is this person in the box?  Why is he there? What actually is the box? And, if he doesn’t know he’s a prisoner how can we ever get him out of there?

A tyrannical and imperious young man appears supremely confident and successful. He is rich, powerful,  and brilliant. He shows no signs of doubt in himself whatsoever. His goals for himself are clear and he has achieved almost everything that he has set out to accomplish in his life. He has his own business, is an ordained Rabbi, lives in a nice home, his children attend the best schools, his wife is attractive and well educated — it appears that he hasn’t a worry in the world but appearances can be very deceiving…

His supreme confidence isn’t real, it’s a pretense to forget that he is living in a box. His achievements mean nothing to him because they didn’t come from the real longings and aspirations of his heart which are locked in the box. His true aspirations and ideals have never been able to grow because nothing grows in the box. A pseudo life cannot satisfy him no matter how many things he acquires. There is no life or satisfaction in the box.

His dreams at night reveal a glimpse of the life he’s “living” on the inside of the box.  Nightly he awakens in a cold sweat from giants who are chasing him; of being mute and not being able to scream for help; of not having any hands, of feeling utterly helpless and powerless to do anything; of being the slave of a brutal and sadistic master who chains him down and tortures him in unspeakable ways.  This is the “life” he needs to keep walled up inside the box. It’s a life of unspeakable horror, terror and violence; it’s a life where he feels small, frightened, powerless, helpless and worst of all alone.

So who is the person in the box? The answer is that he’s a person who locked himself up to forget how incapable and frightened he is of dealing with life on life’s terms, of dealing with all of his feelings of being a small, vulnerable and helpless creature in a world of cruel, heartless giants. He is a person who erected an image of himself as invincible and omnipotent in order to feel safe. He is a victim, a person who of necessity cannot see the pain that he is causing to others and to himself. He is someone who must never sympathize with others or care about them in any real way because to do so would create an opening into the nightmarish world inside the box. On the outside he can forget how small and vulnerable he feels, how fearful, and weak, and inadequate. He can forget how much he needs to be loved.

What in the world possesses an intelligent person to lock himself up in a box?  Well, you might imagine that he didn’t crawl into that box willingly and certainly not all at once. It was a process that began when his mother deserted him leaving him to be raised by his pompous, detached and self-centered father. As his needs for love, understanding, guidance and support kept going unmet, he fortified the walls surrounding him to be more impenetrable. He took away the pain of not having what he needed by pretending he didn’t need anything from anybody. 

The third question is: what is the box, actually? The answer to that is that the box is actually a barrier that blinds him to the idealized and idolized image of himself that he MUST live up to in order to survive. The box also shields him from knowing the terrible price that he pays for worshiping this graven image – an image that robs him of a true connection to G-d, to himself and to other people.  The box is his true oppressor, the evil inclination who blinds him to the truth and convinces him that he must sell his soul in order to be “happy.”

And finally, we come to the question of how we can save him. How can we rescue someone who thinks that he is the master and not the slave; who feels so prideful and superior to others; who doesn’t realize that he has substituted real growth and real goals for the “goal” of just creating a more perfected graven image?

The first part of the answer is to be patient and pray and know that G-d will certainly send windows of opportunity. The opportunities will come in two basic forms: either he will get a compelling vision of a better way of life or he will realize the price he is paying by serving his idealized, idolized image. In either case, once he’s ready for help, he can be led out of the world of the idealized, idolized image and back into the world of reality. He can be lead to discover his real strengths that have been locked away in that box all along. He will begin to see that he is not the slave but the master and the giant of his dreams and that he can be a friendly giant who can master his fears without needing to push people around to get his needs met. He’ll discover his powerful hands which were only invisible to him in his dream, in the box.    But now with his connection to G-d and to Torah he won’t be afraid to use his hands for good and to enjoy the fruitful and pleasurable work of his hands.

Before he can have these blessings of freedom, though, he’ll need to know that he was captured and imprisoned. He will need to understand that G-d deemed it necessary that he be put into a family that required him to live in a box. He needs to know that he had no choice about that – that it was a test – but that now he can pass that test if he chooses to.  If he gets this far he will possess the wisdom to know that his misery was the only way that he could be freed to be absolutely everything that he was created to be. He will come to know that he was put into that box by G-d for good reasons that were impossible to feel while he was there.

In order to pass the test, he must realize that he has been in the box for too long; that the original conditions that necessitated his imprisonment no longer exist and it’s time to come out. He must know that it is safe now to believe in G-d, in G-d’s messengers and in his real self. He will see that his real self has been sealed away all this time and disguised by the scary monsters in the box and that G-d put the cure into the box even before the illness. He will need a lot of love, patience, understanding and support; and he’ll also need to be confronted, challenged, frustrated and denied. All in all, with G-d’s help he will learn to live more mindfully in the present in the real world outside the box. A free person with a life of his own.