Eshu's cap

I’ve been thinking about the current health care debate, Obama’s push for bi-partisanship and unity, and Eshu’s cap. I’m frustrated and saddened by the hostility and lying but I’m not in favor of papering over differences either. I wonder if Eshu has a hand in all of the turmoil.

Eshu’s black and red cap symbolizes the crossroads. It also reminds us that there is more then one side to any issue, that truth is a matter of perspective. Which side of the road you stand on determines what you see. The first step toward learning Eshu’s lesson is the recognition that we rarely occupy neutral ground, and that our perspective usually prevents us from seeing the whole picture. We have to be willing to move, to cross the road.

But there is a deeper message in this story and Eshu’s action. Eshu teaches us that agreement begins with the recognition of difference. The two friends had an illusion of unity. But we humans are not one being with one heart and mind, with one set of eyes and a common perspective. As the story shows, that kind of unity is a delusion that is easily punctured by the appearance of a contradiction or a mystery, and leads to fighting and greater confusion.

The two friends understood their situation when they saw that the cap was both black and red. What unified them in the end was the experience of being caught up in their respective truths, and the appearance of the solution (seeing both sides of Eshu’s cap) that rendered them both “right” and also wrong. Agreement is not a matter of convincing someone that black is red or red is black. Agreement, unity, springs from a third option that encompasses both views. This often seems impossible and I don’t envy Obama the task. But the black cap and the red cap were, after all, two sides of one hat.