Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.
— Mark Twain
The title I have given this post — “Sustaining Conversion” — is ambiguous, as my post-titles for this blog often are: Is conversion what is doing the sustaining, or is it what is being sustained? I mean it in both senses at once.
I have also addressed the topic of conversion more than once before in my posts. Conversion keeps calling out to me to return to it. Thus, conversion, and most especially sustaining it, sustains my interest.
Indeed, what is of most interest to me about conversion, with regard to this present post, is how conversion, while being itself sustaining, also needs itself to be sustained. That conversion, in order truly to “take,” as it were, must be carefully sustained, is what will occupy me here.
That same insight — that conversion, once it occurs, must be carefully sustained — is actually the truth underlying Mark Twain’s joke above. Any addict, whether to nicotine, alcohol, heroin, sexual acting-out, or whatever else, it makes no difference, can attest to that.
With any “habit,” whether an addiction or not, it is not enough to want to stop habitually practicing it, or even actually to stop for a time. The problem is always to find a way to stay stopped. To do that, one must change one’s habit, which can itself only be done by putting on a new one, as it were. In that regard habits are like dresses or other clothing (which is actually one usage of the word, as when one speaks of the outfit that monastics wear).
Habits wear us as much, if not more, than we wear them.
* * *
Convert comes from Latin con-, “with, together” plus vertere, “to turn.” To become converted means precisely to be altogether turned around.
That always takes outside help, if only the help of chance and circumstances.
However, what truly requires help, as well as one’s own continuing effort, is to stay turned once one’s been turned in the first place. One’s old orientation continues to pull on one, enticing one to turn back again, back in the old direction. One must learn not to yield to that pull.
Old ways, as the old saying goes, die hard.
* * *
In his famous allegory of the cave at the beginning of Book VII of his Republic, Plato depicts philosophy itself as a process of sustained conversion of the human soul. Philosophy, by his account, is the educator who not only effects that conversion initially, but also sustains it thereafter.
Indeed, for Plato, philosophy is not just an educator. It is the educator. There is no true education, save by philosophy.
Philosophy begins to educate the soul by picking it up and turning it completely around. Thus, first and above all philosophical education (a redundant expression, by Plato’s account) is a matter of a radical change of direction. The human soul, facing one direction, is suddenly picked up and turned completely around so that it now faces in exactly the opposite direction. The soul is thereby entirely reoriented.
* * *
Philosophy, when it begins thus to educate the human being by such radical reorientation, changes that being as a whole. However, that being, though changed as a whole, is not thereby wholly changed.
After being turned completely around, much in the soul still longs to return to its previous orientation. That, after all, is the orientation the soul is used to, and as such it tempts the soul with the offer of a renewed sense of security. Resisting that temptation is no less arduous than it is for a heavy smoker who is trying to quit to resist the temptation to light up again. It requires sustained effort.
* * *
Conversion is just that way: someone who is con-verted will inevitably re-vert if the conversion is not carefully sustained.
Even if, as is often the case, conversion is accomplished in the blink of an eye like the flash of a lightning-bolt, it must be lived out day after day after day for the rest of one’s lifetime if it is to realize its full meaning.
Getting converted is one thing, staying converted is something else altogether.
